Gender, Education, and the Carceral State

Catalog description

The purpose of this course is to provide undergraduate students with an introduction to the topic of gender, education, and carcerality within the United States. Globally, thousands of young women and girls are held in carceral systems and at varying pre-trial detention, conviction, and sentenced stages, with the largest percentage of this population in the U.S. In this course students will learn about historical underpinnings of the carceral state and how said underpinnings shape carceral systems to the present. Students will unpack connections between gender (and disproportionality by factors such as race and class), prisons, and the U.S. education system - known in educational research as the school-to-prison/detention pipeline. Students will learn about the negative effects, overall, that the carceral state has on young women, girls, and gendered bodies. Finally, students will examine a range of interventions into the carceral state. This course adopts a critical pedagogical, interdisciplinary, and intersectional feminist reading of connections between gender, education, and carcerality. Overall, this course supports the development of criticality regarding the historic and contemporary reliance of the federal government and states on an imprisonment and punishment regime as the primary mechanism for addressing social problems - as opposed to a sustainable, human rights-centered framework.