Women,Gender,Sexuality Studies 395J - S- Imagining Justice

This course will be conducted inside the Hampshire County Jail and House of Corrections in Northampton and will enroll an equal number of students from UMass and students who are incarcerated in the facility. As a member of this course, you will be joining an international community of educators and students who are committed to dialogue and scholarly learning inside prisons and jails. This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the critical, aspirational, artistic, and creative forms that Justice takes in literature and the humanities more broadly. What sorts of ethical, social, and political questions are animated by writers and thinkers who seek to imagine and build a different world? What are the tangled roots of inequality and the legacies of sexual, racial, economic, and ecological injustice? How do writers, poets, artists, and "freedom dreamers," as Robin D.G. Kelley so memorably called them, labor to expose injustice and re-invent our universe? Ursula Le Guin has written, "We will not know our own injustice if we cannot imagine justice. We will not be free if we do not imagine freedom. We cannot demand that anyone try to attain justice and freedom who has not had a chance to imagine them as attainable." Taking Le Guin's focus on the radical imagination as a starting point, this course explores the relationship between literature, the arts, and a wide range of social justice projects. Topics will include: Afrofuturism; utopian and dystopian fiction; art, politics and social justice; bioethics and literature; antebellum slave narratives and fictions of restorative and transformative justice; mass incarceration and prison literature; diaspora studies and literary and artistic representations of movement, forced migration and displacement.

This course was designed to be conducted inside the Hampshire County Jail and House of Corrections in Northampton, enrolling an equal number of students from UMass and students who are incarcerated in the facility. Due to the ongoing health concerns both inside the jail and in the UMass community, however, the course has been changed to a fully remote format and may include incarcerated students only if the jail is able to accommodate distance learning this semester.