The U.S./Mexico border is not only a geographical boundary, but a complex mapping project, where governments and corporations project their visions of the landscape into policies and boundaries, only to run afoul of people, terrain, and climate. Therefore, this course served two interrelated functions: 1) to explore borderlands as a concept and spatial relations, particularly at the U.S./Mexico border 2) to use digital tools to tell spatial stories about the border. While the current location of the border is often naturalized as an ahistorical and timeless dividing line between the United States and Mexico, this course acquainted students with a long historical approach and competing perspectives on issues arising from the presence of the U.S./Mexico border/lands. Using monographs, first-hand accounts, film, and music, we traced the recent history, politics, and culture of the borderlands, exploring topics like racialization, immigration, gender, place-making, and cultural exchange. At the same time, we examined and applied digital methods that complemented our understanding of the U.S./Mexico border.

Monuments, museums, historic sites, archives, burial grounds, genealogical societies, and films have all contributed to the contested legacy of slavery in America.

This course examines the history of policing in the United States, beginning with its 19th-century origins, modeled after the practices in England, and continuing to the contemporary moment. We shall investigate the theory and practice of policing in a number of domains and from different perspectives. These include examining the origins of the surveillance state and the creation of the FBI, the militarization of police forces, the role and experiences of Black police officers, and the complex relation of policing to social movements and issues of racial justice. The class concludes with a discussion of the Federal Government’s response, in the form of commissions to the systemic issues surrounding policing. (Photo copyright: Philipp Baer)

This course examines the changing place of guns in U.S. society, from the colonial era through to the present day. Readings and discussions consider guns both as material objects involved in specific ways of life and as symbols and sites of contested meaning in American culture. Projects explore how guns have been, and remain, intimately involved with questions of race, gender, class, labor, capital, war, resistance, repression, vigilantism and ideas of freedom and self-defense. Special emphasis is placed on student research in local archives and museums in the Connecticut River Valley, the nation’s historical gun manufacturing center.