Deconstructing the Police
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General
Course Long Title
Deconstructing the Police
Subject Code
CCST
Course Number
532
School(s)
Academic Level
GR - Graduate
Description
Deconstructing the Police
This seminar examines the origins, evolution and ideas about policing. We consider theories, perspectives and critiques of policing including those that consider policing to be disciplinary power, as an apparatus of class rule, a white supremacist instrument, as democratic institution etc. We ask where do the police come from? What do they do?? Whose interests do they serve? Why do they dress like that? How are they or might they be legitimized? Why might they be necessary? Why might they be abolished? What is the relationship between the "extrajudicial," the lynch mob and the police? What accounts for the apparent tension between policing, gender, race and class? Is policing an inherently anti-Black institution? We will look at struggles against police power and confinement, the writings of police critics such as Louis Althusser, Michael Foucault, Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Black Panther Party members and Mark Neocleous, as well as consider editorials, film, and political tracts from the late nineteenth century, and Black music and literature in an attempt to (theoretically) deconstruct the police.
This seminar examines the origins, evolution and ideas about policing. We consider theories, perspectives and critiques of policing including those that consider policing to be disciplinary power, as an apparatus of class rule, a white supremacist instrument, as democratic institution etc. We ask where do the police come from? What do they do?? Whose interests do they serve? Why do they dress like that? How are they or might they be legitimized? Why might they be necessary? Why might they be abolished? What is the relationship between the "extrajudicial," the lynch mob and the police? What accounts for the apparent tension between policing, gender, race and class? Is policing an inherently anti-Black institution? We will look at struggles against police power and confinement, the writings of police critics such as Louis Althusser, Michael Foucault, Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Black Panther Party members and Mark Neocleous, as well as consider editorials, film, and political tracts from the late nineteenth century, and Black music and literature in an attempt to (theoretically) deconstruct the police.