Courses – Page 2 – Carceral Connecticut Project

Citizens, Judges, Juries: Who Decides in Democracy? 

Post author:mhasib
Post published:July 26, 2024
Post category:Courses Fall 2022 Spring 2024

The tensions between rule by the people, rule by elites, and rule of law are at the core of democratic theory. What is the proper balance among the three? Under what circumstances is one group of decision makers better than another? What happens when they come into conflict? We focus on the following topics: the role of voting in liberal democracies, the Athenian jury system, deliberative democracy, referendum and initiatives, civil disobedience, and the role of juries in the U.S. criminal justice system.

Reenacting Justice: Guns in America

Post author:mhasib
Post published:July 26, 2024
Post category:Courses Spring 2024

Combining oral history, visual storytelling methods, and documentary performance in a workshop format, this course will reenact court transcripts and contemporary and historic testimonies related to guns and gun violence in America. These reenactments are based on testimonies and documents collected that interpolate the legal issues around guns in the U.S. and the impact of guns on American society, especially on women, children, and communities of color.

Guns and Society

Post author:mhasib
Post published:July 26, 2024
Post category:Courses Fall 2022 Fall 2023

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.

Visualizing the Past: Contesting Space with Digital Mapping

Post author:mhasib
Post published:July 25, 2024
Post category:Courses Spring 2023

This course gave students the skills to challenge common narratives and reconceptualize spaces through the practice of digital mapping. Students surveyed the latest in spatial and digital scholarship while also learning how to produce community-engaged mapping projects. This course addressed foundational questions and themes in public humanities related to recovery, repair, co-creation, and community engagement. Course work included reviewing existing digital projects, identifying community partners for a collaborative mapping project, learning data and mapping methods, and exhibiting a mapping project.

Carceral Connecticut

Post author:mhasib
Post published:July 17, 2024
Post category:Courses

Through engagement with rich state and local archives, this course will use several case studies to examine how Connecticut’s carceral practices have made and re-made the state’s legacy of slavery and policed the borders of accepted gender and sexuality in this place nicknamed “the land of steady habits.” The Middlesex County Historical Society’s rich collection of late-19th and early-20th-century Middletown police logs, county jail records, and police court proceedings will enable students to analyze on-the-ground carceral practices in Connecticut. The Connecticut State Archives’ extensive state penitentiary records, pardon petitions, and other state-level records will enrich and contextualize the local picture in Middletown.