I curate a teaching space as a site to commune, gather, and edify one another in respect to Black life. I work to transgress attempts to sanitize the study of intersectional vulnerabilities, criminal-legal system, and violence by centralizing the complexities of abolition, freedom, and liberty. I ground my pedagogy in love, equity, and rigor. This is a commitment to students and myself to be intentional around assignments, readings, and expectations that critically engage our own movements through uncomfortable conversations, painful experiences, and sustaining a curious mind in the name of Black life and to reimagine a world outside of naturalized logics of white supremacy. During times of online learning, it is of utmost importance to cultivate a learning space for us to contend with, think through, and capacity-build. The status quo has always been unbearable and we are at a time of transformative possibilities that we could not have predicted before. Let us journey, learn, dream, and resist together.
In this class, we will explore the relationship between policing, marginalized communities, and dynamics of power. Informed by historical, political, and social trends, we will examine how changes in legal regimes shape conditions in marginalized populations. Specifically, we will interrogate the institutionalization of the convict lease system, Jim Crow, and the War on Drugs to examine its impact on informal and formal policing practices. Using an intersectional framework, we will explore how policing reforms affect groups who are historically criminalized, surveilled, and incarcerated. We will conclude with how people resist and reimagine alternate forms of justice.
In this class, we will inquire, rupture, and cultivate an interdisciplinary understanding of Black girlhood in the context of the United States. We will theoretically build a grammar around how the coming of age experience of Black girls, starting in the 19th century, is central to how structural violence, exclusion, and neglect shape the lives of Black children. We will study age as a social construct within institutions of care, schooling, and incarceration. We will also consider the different creative mediums of knowledge production to elucidate themes of girlhood in poetry, non-fiction, social science, and creative memoir.