ENV 622b/SOCY 340 () / 2024-2025

Carcerality and the Environment

Credits: 3 Spring 2025: Time and location TBA

Mass incarceration is one of the most pressing social problems of the 21st century and it has become well understood that prisons perpetuate injustices for those that are detained within them and for those who live in the communities that surround them. What is less understood are how the  principles of carcerality are manifested in spaces outside of prisons and jails. As it currently stands caging, detention, punishment, surveillance, labor/resource extraction, and restriction of movement are a few of the fundamental aspects of incarceration, but what this course will explore is how these themes appear in non-traditional contexts such as agriculture, animal agriculture, and  the environmental movement. Carceral logics have a disproportionate impact on working-class people, poor people, communities of color and the more-than human world. This course aims to define carcerality, explore why carceral logics exist, address how carceral logics are manifested in non-traditional spaces and imagines a world without the carceral system. Throughout the course, we will expand our understanding of the carceral system through an intersectional lens that addresses anti-violence movements, animal rights, prison abolition, environmental justice, disability rights and grassroots organizing. This course aims to reimagine what is meant by “mass incarceration” and through this reimagining we are able to address what a deeply radical and intersectional decarceration movement might look like.