How does social control operate in the modern world?

Chris Wildeman, Professor, Sociology

Introduction to the study of mass incarceration in the United States, with emphasis on: defining mass incarceration (very high and very unequally distributed rates of prison and jail incarceration); figuring out what social, political, and economic forces brought it to be; understanding what life in prisons and jails is like; and testing how mass incarceration has reshaped life in the United States.

Justin Leroy, Assistant Professor, History and African and African American Studies

For two and a half centuries, slavery was central to American politics, law, culture, and economic development. And even though it was abolished at the end of the Civil War, disagreements about how—or even whether—slavery continues to affect U.S. society are often at the heart of today’s culture wars on topics like policing, housing, and income inequality. In this course you’ll get an introduction to historical research methods as you learn about the history and legacies of slavery. You’ll also have the chance to “do” history yourself by diving into the Rubenstein Library archives and investigating a topic related to how the afterlives of slavery continue to haunt our present. Over the course of the semester, you’ll get a sense of what hands-on research in the social sciences/humanities is like and develop your own ideas about how the past shapes the world around us.

Cross-list: AAAS 1XXCN

Nicole Schramm-Sapyta, Associate Professor of the Practice, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences 

This course explores the intersection between mental illness, substance use disorders, and incarceration. We will examine the causes and consequences of the elevated presence of mental illness in the incarcerated population from individual, family, societal, and justice system perspectives. We will examine the overlap between criminogenic risk and mental illness, current strategies to support incarcerated people with mental illness, and societal attitudes toward punishment vs. rehabilitation.

Cross-list: PSY 178CNS

Adriane Stewart Fresh, Assistant Research Professor, Social Sciences Research Institute

This course considers policing and prisons through the lens of political science with a focus on the contemporary United States. Topics include the behavior of the police, the participatory consequences of carceral contact, and the geographic distribution of prison populations and their affect on democratic representation. Students acquire factual knowledge about policing and prisons, analytic skills to understand and evaluate political explanations for police and prison phenomena, and general knowledge of frameworks about democratic participation, accountability, bureaucratic performance, representation and policy feedback.

 

Garrett Baker, Postdoctoral Associate, Sociology

Much scholarship has focused on adults in prisons and jails. Yet there are many institutions of social control that American families and children are exposed to. This course begins with an overview of the school-to-prison pipeline and an examination of the overlap between the education and criminal justice systems, before branching out to consider the interlocking roles of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems in surveilling and punishing youth and their families.

Maria Tackett, Associate Professor of the Practice, Statistical Science

This course introduces students to data-informed approaches for examining the social, structural, and institutional factors that shape the experiences and outcomes of individuals who have been incarcerated. Students will learn how data is used to understand patterns related to incarceration, as they critically engage with quantitative research and produce statistical results from real-world data. Topics in the course include exploratory data analysis, data visualization, statistical inference, and regression modeling using the R computing language. The course also emphasizes data ethics and communicating data-informed results to diverse audiences. No statistics or computing background is necessary.

Ben Hojem, Instructor, Thompson Writing Program

From Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” to South Park and The Daily Show, we take it for granted that comedy is a form of resistance, resistance against hypocrisy, corruption, and oppressive forces in our politics and culture. But is this true? Does comedy stoke our rebellious natures, or is it more like a release valve that encourages us to capitulate to the status quo? This course will explore this question through the perspectives of cultural critics, academic theorists, and the comedians themselves.

Hannah Taylor, Senior Lecturer, Thompson Writing Program
The landscape of reproductive politics is an example of the complex interaction between belief, culture, law, and embodiment. The past year, in particular, has seen seismic shifts in the way that the United States approaches reproductive rights. But reproductive justice and politics are about more than just abortion. This course will encourage us to think of the many facets of reproductive justice– menstruation, reproductive technologies, IVF, birth justice, and chronic reproductive illness– and how they are written about in a variety of discourses.

This course will discuss through writings – both scholarly and popular – how we got to this moment in reproductive politics, and what we can do to change it. Using lenses from rhetorics of health and medicine, disability studies, and reproductive justice, this course will ask students to consider how writing has shaped the discourses of reproductive health and politics. Throughout the course, students will be asked to complete weekly reading responses and be expected to share writing via discussion posts regularly. The course will include two longer writing assignments.

The first, an analysis of the ways that an aspect of reproductive health has been discussed across mediums, will be between 1,000 and 1,250 words. The final project will be a 1,500-2,000 word research paper on a controversy relevant to the course. Students will also produce a public-facing, advocacy document based on a reproductive health issue of their choice.

Description forthcoming.