Justice Studies Courses.
Justice Studies is a thriving part of the Columbia University curriculum. Below, browse recent courses covering mass incarceration and the expansion of carceral governance, as well as racial and social justice responses to these crises.
Many Columbia faculty members are actively involved in the Justice-in-Education Initiative and share the goal of changing the way we talk about justice, one class at a time.
Courses at Columbia
African American and African Diaspora Studies
This course provides an introduction to historical and contemporary concepts and issues in the U.S. criminal justice system, including state violence; the evolution of modern policing; inequality and criminal justice policy; drug policy as urban policy; and the development of mass incarceration and the “carceral continuum.” The writing component to this course is a 20-25 page research paper on a topic to be developed in consultation with the instructor.
Instructor: Samuel Roberts
Last taught: Spring 2017 at Columbia
GU4080
This course examines the relationship between race and the criminal justice system in the United States. We will explore the origins and consequences of racial inequality, vis a vis the law, as they inform the various institutions that comprise the criminal justice system (i.e. police departments, courts, prisons, etc), as well as the set of contemporary debates about mass incarceration and movements to reform and reimagine criminal justice in the twenty-first century.
Instructor: Ayanna Sorett
Last taught: Spring 2022 at Columbia
This course will explore the major writings of Angela Davis. We will also be reading other black women intellectuals and activists in relation to Davis’s work. The focus will not only be on Davis’s thought but the way in which her work fits into a broader lineage of black women intellectuals. Major themes to be explored will include the intersectionality of race, gender, and class in the formation of social relations; the prison abolition movement; and, the role of women of color in social justice movements.
Instructor: Kevin Fellezs
Last taught: Sprint 2024 at Columbia
This course will introduce students to Black geographies as a spatial expression of Black studies. Black scholars have long recognized the complex spatialities of Black life, developing theories of diaspora, racial capitalism, and anti-/post-colonialism that are inherently geographical. In this course, we will think about space, place, landscape, and ecology through a Black geographic framework, paying attention to how scholars, activists, and artists engage the poetics and materiality of Black life to explore ideas about repair, inequality, resistance, and liberation. We will cover such topics as Black method(s), racial capitalism, regional geographies, carceral geographies, and Black home and infrastructure.
Instructor Brandi T. Summers
Last taught: Spring 2025 at Columbia
American Studies
UN3931
This course will examine the influence of race and poverty in the American system of confronting the challenge of crime. Students will explore some history, including the various purposes of having an organized criminal justice system within a community; the principles behind the manner in which crimes are defined; and the utility of punishment. Our focus will be on the social, political and economic effects of the administration of our criminal justice system, with emphatic examination of the role of conscious and unconscious racism, as well as community biases against the poor.
Instructor: Cathleen Price
Last taught: Spring 2025 at Columbia
Anthropology
UN2017
Regimes of various shapes and sizes tend to criminalize associations, organizations, and social relations that these ruling powers see as anathema to the social order on which their power depends: witches, officers of toppled political orders, alleged conspirators (rebels, traitors, terrorists, and dissidents), gangsters and mafiosi, or corrupt officers and magnates. Our main goal will be to understand how and under what conditions do those with the power to do so define, investigate, criminalize and prosecute those kinds of social relations that are cast as enemies of public order.
Instructor: Naor Ben-Yehoyada
Last taught: Fall 2025
GU4196
This practicum is an exercise in engaged pedagogy. The academic work we do will be conducted for the benefit of the cause of Mexico’s now over 110,000 disappeared persons. Students will be engaged in a sustained research effort to develop a “context analysis” of disappearances in the state of Zacatecas (Mexico)– an exercise in social study that focuses on the economic, political, social, and criminological context in which disappearances occur.
Instructor: Claudio Lomnitz
Last taught: Fall 2025
Art History
UN2425
How has visual culture played a role within the social movements of the last several decades, such as #BlackLivesMatter and Extinction Rebellion? How, we might ask, is activism made visible; how does it erupt (or disappear) with collective fields of vision? Drawing upon Black South African queer photographer Zanele Muholi’s term “visual activism” as a flexible rubric that encompasses both formal practices and political strategies, this lecture class interrogates contemporary visual cultures of dissent, resistance, and protest as they span a range of ideological positions.
Instructor: Julia Bryan-Wilson
Last taught: Spring 2025
GU4646
Michel Foucault was a great historian and critic who helped change the ways research and criticism are done today – a new ‘archivist’. At the same time, he was a philosopher. His research and criticism formed part of an attempt to work out a new picture of what it is to think, and think critically, in relation to Knowledge, Power, and Processes of Subjectivization. What was this picture of thought? How did the arts, in particular the visual arts, figure in it? How might they in turn give a new image of Foucault’s kind of critical thinking for us today?
Instructor: John Rajchman
Last taught: Fall 2024
Comparative Literature and Society
UN3980
This course will explore the social justice road to punitive abolition—to the abolition of capital punishment and the dominant punitive punishment paradigm in the United States. It will investigate how abolition of the death penalty might be achieved in this country, but also what it might mean to imagine abolition in the context of policing, of the prison, and also of punishment more broadly.
Instructor: Bernard Harcourt and Alexis Hoag
Last taught: Fall 2020 at Columbia
GU4325
This course is built on the premise that a socially just practice of medicine is a bioethical imperative. Such a practice cannot be achieved, however, without examining medicine’s histories of racism, as well as learning from and building upon histories of anti-racist health practice.
Instructor: Sayantani T. Dasgupta
Last taught: Fall 2025 at Columbia
UN3511
This course explores the concepts of isolation and incarceration along the axis of discourses of health—the health of the citizen and the health of society, as it unfolds in two phases: first an introduction to ethnographic methodology in order to produce ethnographic material on the experience of double segregation: incarceration through the criminal justice system and then isolation through the public health system.
Instructor: Neni K. Panourgia
Last taught: Fall 2020 at Columbia
UN3800
This course examines the meaning of justice by exploring theoretical questions, ideas, and debates associated with contemporary movements that have shaped political discourse in the United States over the past decade. The course begins with John Rawls’s seminal work A Theory of Justice and a set of critiques from feminist and communitarian philosophers that direct our attention to specific contexts and identities that are relevant to any attempt to envision a just society. From there, the course turns to a study of social justice in three areas: economics, the environment, and race, with a corresponding focus on such contemporary movements as democratic socialism, environmentalism, and Black Lives Matter.
Instructor: Larry Jackson
Last taught: Fall 2025
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER)
UN3490
Since September 11, 2001, there has been an avalanche of immigration enforcement policies and initiatives proposed or implemented under the guise of national security. This course will analyze the domino effect of the Patriot Act, the Absconder Initiative, Special Registration, the Real I.D. Act, border security including the building of the 700-mile fence along the U.S./Mexico border, Secured Communities Act-that requires the cooperation of state and local authorities in immigration enforcement, the challenge to birthright citizenship, and now the congressional hearings on Islamic radicalization.
Instructor: Elizabeth Ouyang
Last taught: Fall 2025
GU4005
For more than a century, scientists, policy makers, law enforcement, and government agencies have collected, curated and analyzed data about people in order to make impactful decisions. This practice has exploded along with the computational power available to these agents. Those who design and deploy data collection, predictive analytics, and autonomous and intelligent decision-making systems claim that these technologies will remove problematic biases from consequential decisions. But these dreams and their pursuit through technology are as problematic as they are enticing and throughout American history, data has often been used to oppress minoritized communities, manage populations, and institutionalize, rationalize, and naturalize systems of racial violence.
Instructor: Brian Luna Lucero
Last taught: Spring 2025
GU 4005
This course will follow the idea of abolition as expressed first through the eighteenth and nineteenth-century struggle to end chattel slavery in the Americas, and then as it has come to define the struggle against over-policing and mass-incarceration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Instructor: Matthew Sandler
Last taught: Spring 2025
GU4340
Both medicine and racial justice are acts of speculation; their practices are inextricable from the practice of imagining. By imagining new cures, new discoveries and new futures for human beings in the face of illness, medicine is necessarily always committing acts of speculation. By imagining ourselves into a more racially just future, by simply imagining ourselves any sort of future in the face of racist erasure, social justice activists are similarly involved in creating speculative fictions. This course begins with the premise that racial justice is the bioethical imperative of our time and aims, ultimately, to connect the work of science and speculative fiction with on the ground action and organizing.
Instructor: Sayantani Dasgupta
Last taught: Spring 2025
Creative Writing
UN3017
Over the course of this semester, we will conduct a close reading of literary works that are based on the lives of individuals who have been ostracized, incarcerated, and isolated from their communities.
Instructor: Christopher Wolfe
Last taught: Spring 2022 at Columbia
English and Comparative Literature
GU4975
Using the tools of critical race theory, feminism, and class analysis, this course will explore the forms of cultural expression that have emerged in relationship to the American prison experience.
Instructor: Jean Howard
Last taught: Fall 2022 at Columbia
ENGL UN3814
In this class, we will examine nonfiction accounts of legal events that draw on techniques often associated with literature to convey their meaning. Such “creative” or “literary” nonfiction offers a view of law very different from that to be found in statutes, judicial opinions, or legal doctrines: a view based in face-to-face encounters (in the streets, in police precincts, in courtrooms, in prisons); and in the lived experience of those who come before the law.
Instructor: Julie Stone Peters
Last taught: Spring 2023
This course will explore the historical category of Resistance Literature, its theory and practice, its transnational expansion, and its ongoing relevance today. Originally proposed by Palestinian author and political activist Ghassan Kanafani in 1967, “Resistance Literature” named an activist practice of writing that sought to challenge discriminatory state practices, social policies, power structures and lived injustices, as well as to reshape the ideological frameworks that enabled official political structures of oppression in the institutional forms of colonialism (settler and otherwise), neocolonialism, authoritarianism, apartheid, systemic racisms, ethnonationalisms, gendered exclusions, and religious discrimination.
Instructor: Joey Slaughter
Last Taught: Fall 2024
ENGL GR6793
This course asks a simple question: what kind of action (political, social, instrumental) can a novel take? In the seminar, we will consider the tradition of protest fiction, taking stock of how the novel has embraced the overt aim of creating change. Themes to which these activist works are geared include: slavery and abolition; working conditions; gender and patriarchy; war, peace, and revolution; race and racism; incarceration; and environmental crisis.
Instructor: Sarah Cole
Last taught: Fall 2024
French
GU4082
“Quand on refuse, on dit non”, said Ivorian novelist Ahmadou Kourouma towards the end of his life. Taking this stance as a starting point, this seminar will explore, through the lens of the novel, major political upheavals in the Francophone world during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. We will shed light on the history of decolonization, May 68, the feminist movement, and struggles against racism and injustice by delving into the imaginary worlds of six leading francophone novelists: Marguerite Duras, Ahmadou Kourouma, Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous, George Perec and Édouard Glissant.
Instructor: Emmanuel Kattan
Last taught: Spring 2025
History
GU4083
This course is designed to trace the origins of the modern criminal legislation and practices to the Middle Ages, some of which were jury trial, public persecution, and prisons. How did these practices come about, and under which social conditions? The focus of the course will be on violent crimes, such as murder, robbery, assault and suicide, and some particularly medieval crimes like sorcery, blasphemy and sodomy.
Instructor: Neslihan Senocak
Last taught: Spring 2018 at Columbia
UN3241
This course will examine the deep history of urban segregation, fights for healthy and safe housing, and scholarly and policy debates about the “planet of slums.” The course’s geographic scope is global, using both comparative and transnational approaches, and we will explore the connections between local and global movements and historical processes. Through a historically-oriented but interdisciplinary set of readings, students in this class will become familiar with the terms of debates about the right to shelter as a social, political and legal problem in the modern (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) world.
Instructor: Amy E. Chazkel
Last taught: Spring 2024 at Columbia
UN2523
Students will gain familiarity with a range of historical and social science problems at the intersection of ethnic/racial/sexual formations, technological networks, and health politics since the turn of the twentieth century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, black women’s health organization and care; HIV/AIDS politics, policy, and community response; benign neglect; urban renewal and gentrification; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; and environmental justice.
Instructor: Samuel Kelton Roberts
Last taught: Fall 2024
UN3418
Examination of the development of U.S. carceral systems and logics from the late 18th century through the present. Through course readings and class discussion, students will explore the changes and continuities in technologies of punishment and captivity over time, interrogating how the purpose and political economy of captivity and policing shifted over time, and analyzing the relationship between carceral institutions and constructions of race, gender, and sexuality.
Instructor: Sarah Haley
Last taught: Fall 2025
GU4301
This seminar will use fiction to understand some of the most urgent problems of contemporary Latin American reality. We will read and discuss works of crime fiction from Latin America in the context of the history of crime and justice in the region. It will be an effort to understand those works both in the literary field, as a part of a popular genre of literature, and in their connections with everyday life, often expressed in the media. In other words, the seminar will be an exercise of reading in context, in a historical perspective but also relation to the expectations that readers and critics had about narratives that dealt with violence and the pursuit of justice.
Instructor: Pablo Piccato
Last taught: Fall 2023
GU4933
“American Radicalism in the Archives” is a research seminar examining the multiple ways that radicals and their social movements have left traces in the historical record. Straddling the disciplines of social movement history, public humanities, and critical information studies, the seminar will use the archival collections at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library to trace the history of social movements and to consider the intersections of radical theory and practice with the creation and preservation of archives.
Instructor: Thai Jones
Last taught: Spring 2025
Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
UN3928
This course studies the genealogy of the prison in Arab culture as manifested in memoirs, narratives, and poems.
Instructor: Muhsin Al-Musawi
Last taught: Fall 2025 at Columbia
GU4349
Through case studies of the Spanish-Cuban war, the South African War, the Philippines-American War, the genocide of the Herrero and Nama in Southwest Africa, the Armenian Genocide, and the Holocaust, the course traces the evolution of the concentration camp from a counter-insurgency strategy in wartime to a weapon of mass murder
Instructor: Khatchig Mouradian
Last taught: Spring 2021 at Columbia
Philosophy
W3800
This course will do three things: (1) critically examine the works of philosophers who have argued for justice reform and social change, (2) set this philosophical work next to writings by prominent activists, especially those interested in criminal justice reform, and(3) work with students to do semester-long activist work.
Instructor: Christia Mercer
Last taught: Spring 2022 at Columbia
Political Science
UN3255
This course will introduce students to research on the institutions of the US carceral system, including the police, courts, prisons, and immigration control. We will focus on two questions: how race relates to experiences with the institutions of the carceral state, and how those institutions in turn influence racial politics.
Instructor: Andrew J. McCall
Last taught: Fall 2024 at Columbia
UN3100
An inquiry into the nature and implications of justice in areas ranging from criminal justice to social justice to the circumstances of war and peace, considering issues such as abortion, the criminalization of behavior, the death penalty, climate change, global poverty, civil disobedience, and international conflict.
Instructor: David Johnston
Last taught: Spring 2025
Psychology
GU4612
Frontiers of Justice is designed to encourage students and equip them with the skills to become active and effective “Change Agents” within their academic institutions and larger communities. Oriented by the question, What does justice look like?, this course aims to raise political and social awareness and engagement with the challenges facing New York City and strengthen ties between Columbia University, disadvantaged communities, and city government agencies and community organizations.
Instructor: Peter Dixon
Last taught Spring 2025
GU4885
Philanthropy & Just Societies will enable Columbia undergraduate students to learn about the history of philanthropy, to understand best practices and ethical underpinnings, to debate its potential in making more just societies, and to consider what it means to give and receive aid at different scales. Students will have the opportunity to participate directly in philanthropic work.
Instructors; Geraldine Downey, Lisa Rosen-Metsch
Last taught: Spring 2025
GU4890
The course will provide the rigorous data science training and core content knowledge students need to use data science to effect meaningful policy change in the direction of a more just society. The focus will be on collaborating with community and government organizations to propose research-and-data-informed solutions that center problem-solving on those most impacted by the problem.
Instructor: Benjamin Silver
Last taught: Fall 2025
Religion
GU4509
Explores ethical, cultural, and political dimensions of Jewish criminal punishment from the Bible through modernity, with focus on death penalty and running reference to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish.
Instructor: N/A
Last taught: Summer 2021 at Columbia
Sociology
UN2500
This course for undergraduate students provides a sociological perspective on mass incarceration and examines alternative politics and policies for reform. Through seminar discussions and presentations, students will engage with key lines of scholarship examining the emergence and consequences of historically large prison populations in the United States and review current policy debates.
Instructor: Bruce Western and Vivian D. Nixon
Last taught: Fall 2022 at Columbia
In this course, students will study the origins and developments of mass incarceration, as well as the political struggles that have been waged against it. By examining the rise of the carceral state in this way, students will gain a critical lens on longstanding concerns in the American imaginary: race and racism, justice and injustice, community and reparation, liberation and abolition.
Instructor: David Knight
Last taught: Spring 2025
UN3914
This is an undergraduate seminar in social stratification. The course focuses on the current American experience with socioeconomic inequality and mobility. The goals of the course are to understand how inequality is conceptualized and measured in the social sciences, to understand the structure of inequality in the contemporary U.S. to learn the principal theories and evidence for long term trends in inequality, to understand the persistence of poverty and the impact of social policies on American rates of poverty, and to understand the forces that both produce and inhibit intergenerational social mobility in the U.S.
Instructor: Thomas DiPrete
Last taught: Fall 2025
UN3983
This course will introduce students to the literature on crime and policing. The first half will focus on the problems of crime and violence in urban environments. We will review classic and modern ideas and theories explaining crime and violence, and we will look at the evidence describing patterns and trends in crime in recent history. The second half of the course will focus on the approaches to confront crime and violence, with a strong emphasis on policing. We will review the literature on the relationship between crime and policing, and we will learn about the impact that policing practices have on individuals and their communities.
Instructor: Gerard Torrats-Espinosa
Last taught: Fall 2025
GU4125
The Carcerality, Law, and Punishment Workshop is a forum for students interested in social science research on the carceral system broadly construed and related institutions, processes, and practices. The CLP workshop invites leading scholars and brings together students and faculty for a deeper and more focused dialogue about new directions in the field.
Instructor: David Knight
Last taught: Spring 2025
GU4193
Many of us are drawn to sociology, because–at least at some level–we care about making the world more just. The irony, however, is that sociology traditionally has had very little to say about the processes by which individuals and groups come together to address the kinds of inequalities that sociology is so good at identifying. This class focuses on the theory and practice of organizing, defined most simply as the process by which individuals enable others to come together around shared values and common interests in such a way that enhances their power.
Instructor: Adam Reich
Last taught: Fall 2025
GU4336
This graduate seminar mixes sociological and historical accounts in order to explore the social determinants and consequences of the U.S. criminal justice system. The class casts a wide net – exploring classical texts as well as contemporary scholarship from a range of sociological traditions.
Instructor: Adam Reich
Last taught: Spring 2024
Women’s and Gender Studies
Historical Approaches to Feminist Questions
SUN3514
This course will provide students with a comparative perspective on gender, race, and sexuality by illuminating historically specific and culturally distinct conditions in which these systems of power have operated. We will engage research by historians of sexuality, gender, and capitalism to critically reflect on the relationship between critical studies of the past and debates about reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and gay and lesbian rights in our contemporary moment.
Instructor: Sarah Haley
Last taught: Spring 2025
GU4555
This seminar is a deep study of the feminist history, theory, and practice of criminal punishment abolition from the 19th century through the present. It explores key conceptual frameworks, political conundrums, and genealogies of abolition, especially in relation to Black, Native, women of color, queer, and Marxist feminisms. We will explore linkages and divergences from movements to abolish slavery.
Instructor: Sarah Haley
Last taught: Spring 2022 at Columbia
Human Rights Studies – Columbia GSAS
GU4930
This seminar will cover various issues, debates, and concepts in the international law of armed conflict (known as international humanitarian law), particularly as it relates to the protection of noncombatants (civilians and prisoners of war). In doing so, we will examine how international humanitarian law and human rights law intersect.
Instructor: Bruce Cronin
Last taught: Spring 2019 at Columbia
Courses at Barnard
American Studies
BC 1510
Through film, literary criticism, history, ethnography and philosophy, this course will examine how race manifests as an economic relationship. We will focus on the legacies of chattel slavery, the interconnections of race and property, and ongoing struggles for racial justice.
Instructor: Manu M Vimalassery
Last taught: Fall 2017
BC1040
This course focuses on the structures and processes that led the U.S. to build the largest carceral regime on the planet in the post-1970s United States. Through readings, lectures, and original research, students will develop analyses of how this growth coincided with a shift in the racial composition of prisons from majority white to almost seventy percent people of color.
Instructor: Jordan Camp
Last taught: Fall 2018
Anthropology
ANTH UN2052
Municipal jails are one of the most impactful institutions of criminal justice in the United States; and yet many Americans do not even know the difference between a prison and a jail. This course will investigate the conditions of mass incarceration in America by centering the municipal jail.Because we are in New York City, we will pay particular attention throughout the semester to Rikers Island and the city’s proposed Borough-Based Jails Plan.
Instructor: Kaya Williams
Last taught: Summer 2025
ANTH BC3808
What is punishment, and what might attention to punitive practices teach us about the cultures in which they are used? Modern American culture is so saturated with punishment that it is difficult to know where to begin such an investigation. In many cases, punishment is the thread that connects allegedly disparate institutions and produces allegedly unforeseen forms of violence. In this course we will question both the practice and its prevalence, combining a genealogy of the concept with case studies in its modern use.
Instructor: Kaya Williams
Last taught: Fall 2023
Architecture
GU4300
Urbanization is inherently unequal, inscribing social, economic, environmental, and political unevenness into the spatial fabric of the city. But the distribution of such inequality is not inevitable. Urbanization is a product of the collective decisions we make (or choose not to make) in response to the shared challenges we face in our cities. And, thus, the patterns of urbanization can be changed. This is the task of urban planning and the starting point for this advanced seminar, which asks how we can reshape our cities to be more just—to alleviate inequality rather than compound it.
Instructor: Nick Smith
Last taught: Spring 2025
GU4305
This seminar introduces students to architectural and environmental histories of abolition through constructed environments, spatial practices, and texts from the eighteenth century to the present. The course locates abolition in social movements and historical discourses, examining the roles that both reform and radical refusal have played in struggles for spatial justice by considering debates around enslavement, prisons, and borders.
Instructor: Anooradha Siddiqi
Last taught: Fall 2025
Economics
BC2075 and BC3063
Introduce students to problems of economic justice under capitalism. Course has three goals: (1) expose students to debates between economics and philosophers about the meaning and nature of justice, (2) explore conflict between efficiency and justice, (3) examine implications of justice for gender equality, intergenerational equity and climate change.
Instructor: Belinda Archibong
Last taught: Fall 2021
BC3214
The purpose of the course is to think about public policy issues through an economic lens. We will explore the basic economic foundations of individual decision-making and discuss the ways in which economists hypothesize that individuals respond to the incentives embedded within public policies. We will pay particular attention to the nature and detail of existing public policies, and use economic analysis to predict how these policies might influence behavior.
Instructor: Elizabeth Ananat
Last taught: Fall 2025
Education
BC3033
Using sociological and ethnographic texts as our foundation, this course will explore the way experiences of confinement and constraint show up in the lives of young people, particularly as they move through educational institutions – and how youth work to resist those forms of subordination.
Instructor: Nora Gross
Last taught: Fall 2025
BC3043
This course will look at the ways people power has pushed for change in the United States educational landscape. We will study historical and current social political education movements to answer questions such as: What does education/teacher activism look like? Who engages in educational social activism, and why? What do different models for organizing look like, past to present? We will learn from the examples of the Freedom Schools, the Chicago Teachers Union, the Tucson Unified School District fight for ethnics studies, BLM at Schools, Teacher Activist Groups and more.
Instructor: Fawziah Qadir
Last taught: Fall 2024
English
BC3214
This course encompasses themes of race, ethnicity, mass incarceration, and immigration in the modern United States, with special attention to the stories of Latinx people. We will consider the roles of journalistic writing, documentaries, and personal narratives in shaping public policy and attitudes towards lives behind bars.
Instructor: Maria Hinojosa
Last taught: Fall 2025
UN3808
Global capitalism inspired novelists to explore the ways in which money, or the lack of it, forms or deforms our characters. It also inspired the writings of Karl Marx, the great theorist of economic justice. In this seminar we will read three early novels – Behn’s Orinooko, Godwin’s Caleb Williams, Austen’s Persuasion alongside Marxist theory, and then examine a cluster of twentieth century global novels in English. We will pay special attention to Marxist notions of materialism; alienation and human flourishing; capital and labor; classes; and ideology.
Instructor: Ross Hamilton
Last taught: Summer 2025
History
BC3670
This seminar explores the roots of and responses to the contemporary refugee crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. We examine the historical factors that are propelling people, including families and unaccompanied minors, to flee the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala); the law and politics of asylum that those seeking refuge must negotiate in the U.S.; and the burgeoning system of immigration incarceration that detains ever-greater numbers of non-citizens.
Instructor: Nara Milanich
Last taught: Spring 2023
BC2401
This course will examine the historical development of crime and the criminal justice system in the United States since the Civil War. The course will give particular focus to the interactions between conceptions of crime, normalcy and deviance, and the broader social and political context of policy making.
Instructor: Matthew Vaz
Last taught: Fall 2025
BC2477
The objectives of this course are: to gain familiarity with the major themes of New York History since 1898, to learn to think historically, and to learn to think and write critically about arguments that underlie historical interpretation. We will also examine and analyze the systems and structures–of race and class–that have shaped life in New York, while seeking to understand how social groups have pursued change inside and outside of such structures.
Instructor: Matthew Vaz
Last taught: Spring 2025
Human Rights
BC3931
This class is intended to complement and enhance the internship experience for students working in internships that relate to social justice and human rights during the Fall 2025 semester. This course will meet bi-weekly to provide an academic framing of the issues that students are working on and to provide an opportunity for students to analyze their internship experience.
Instructor: Widney Brown
Last taught: Fall 2025
Political Science
BC3202
Why is racism so prevalent in hospitals and other health care settings? What unique challenges do trans and gender-diverse youth face as a result of recent transphobic laws and policies? How are community organizers advocating for the end of medical neglect, abuse, and torture in prisons and migrant detention facilities? How do efforts to decolonize museums connect with grassroots struggles for environmental justice? In a (largely) seminar format, we will explore these questions and many others.
Instructor: Roberto Sirvent
Last taught: Summer 2024
BC3054
When is violence used against noncombatants in conflicts and what is the impact of such violence? This course focuses on violence against civilians by armed organizations, whether states or non-state actors. We will examine a variety of explanations for such violence, including rationalist, psychological/emotion-based, and organizational approaches. We will also discuss the impact of political violence.
Instructor: Marjorie Castle
Last taught: Spring 2025
BC3315
Why do we punish? How do we justify it? Is punishment, ultimately, good? In this course, we will examine a range of philosophical treatments of punishment, texts in political theory and contemporary case studies (involving issues like corporal punishment, symbolic punishment, outgroup alienation) in order to better triangulate the very function of punishment in society. Instructor: Jonathan Keller
Last taught: Spring 2025
Sociology
BC3249
This class will examine the social phenomenon of exclusion. Attempts to understand the social behavior of creating insiders and outsiders is a hallmark in Sociology. How does it happen? What purpose does it serve? Who decides who is in and who is out? While some forms of social closure, like segregation, are more well known, there are numerous mechanisms of social exclusion people and groups employ in the social world.
Instructor: Dominic Walker
Last taught: Fall 2025
UN3721
This course will create an opportunity for active engagement between students doing sociology and a local organization working for social change by organizing immigrant communities, Make the Road New York.
Instructor: Deborah Becher
Last taught: Spring 2025
BC3956
Surveillance has become a ubiquitous term that either conjures images of George Orwell’s 1984, the popular series Black Mirror, or is dismissed as an inconvenience and a concern of only those who engage in criminal activity or have something to hide. Using sociological theories of power, biopower, racialization, and identity formation, Surveillance explores the various ways we are monitored by state authorities and corporations and our role in perpetuating the system (un)wittingly.
Instructor: Randa Serhan
Last taught: Fall 2025
BC3959
One of the glaring forms of inequalities that persists today is the race-based gap in access to health care, quality of care, and health outcomes. This course examines how institutionalized racism and the structure of health care contributes to the neglect and sometimes abuse of racial and ethnic minorities. Quite literally, how does race affect one’s life chances?
Instructor: Domonique Reed
Last taught: Fall 2024
Urban Studies
UN2451
In this course we will explore urban environmental inequalities through the lens of environmental justice. Our course of study invites students to critically analyze environmental justice case studies and to develop an understanding of the complex relationships among urban populations and the social, political, and economic processes that lead to environmental inequality. We will also explore how racism is foundational to environmental exploitation and consider why global struggles for racial justice are crucial for protecting both people and the earth.
Instructor: Maricarmen Hernandez
Last taught: Spring 2025
UN3310
Many people don’t think of themselves as having attended segregated schools. And yet, most of us went to schools attended primarily by people who looked very much like us. In fact, schools have become more segregated over the past 30 years, even as the country becomes increasingly multiracial. In this class, we will use public schools as an example to examine the role race plays in shaping urban spaces and institutions. We will begin by unpacking the concept of racialization, or the process by which a person, place, phenomenon, or characteristic becomes associated with a certain race.
Instructor: Amelia Herbert
Last taught: Fall 2025
SIPA
This course is designed to examine current police practices through the lens of history, race, recent events, and jurisprudence. This class will serve as a laboratory of ideas and recommendations as we analyze police training, disciplinary procedures, use of force guidelines and other practices in an effort to foster and improve community – police relations.
Instructor: Basil Smikle
Last taught: Spring 2025
INAF U6462
“Collaborative social justice” is an innovative program model where practitioners from different homelessness, discrimination, and other destabilizing social conditions. This course explores how policy practitioners can use this interdisciplinary program model to promote social justice.
Instructor: Rose Goldberg
Last taught: Spring 2025
Courses at Union Theological Seminary
ST380
This course explores the influence of race and class on the U.S. criminal justice system. As a multidisciplinary course, we will critically explore the ethical and theological issues raised by mass incarceration with analysis grounded in the current social and political context. We will seek to better understand why the world's largest penal apparatus punishes and controls primarily poor people and people of color.
Instructors: Michelle Alexander and Andrea White
Last taught: Fall 2017
SU190
This course occurs on the anniversary of the Attica Rebellion of 1971 and subsequent massacre. Currently, there are calls for reform measures to change sentencing and parole policies, and eliminate bail. The struggles against the prison system lie at the heart of the call of Black Lives Matter. The instructor, who spent 38 years in prison, draws from her personal experience, along with utilizing readings, videos and discussion. This course aims to challenge the invisibility of women in prison, to examine the dehumanization and daily traumas of imprisonment, and the creative ways that women build community, and programs that address day to day needs and transformative aspirations.
Instructor: Judith Clark
Last taught: Spring 2020
SU190
As a minority religion, Buddhism's contribution to the caregiving fields have yet to be fully developed or realized. This course provides an opportunity to discuss three areas of caregiving (hospital/hospice, campus/collegiate, and incarceration/prison) from the Buddhist perspective.
Instructor: Malik J. M.Walker
Last taught: Fall 2020
School of Professional Studies
NECR PS5170
In this course, we will explore restorative justice and the ideas that form its foundation. As we examine the problems and limitations associated with dominant (punitive) responses to crime and rule violations, we will assess how restorative justice presents an alternative philosophy of justice and seek to understand the costs and benefits associated with attempts to apply that philosophy in different contexts, including criminal justice, schools, families, communities and nations.
Last taught: Spring 2025
Instructor; Dianne Williams
NECR PS5270
In this course, we will draw on an active research project under the leadership of Dr. Peter Dixon and Dr. Geraldine Downey, which is collecting community-based data around the city to answer two questions: how do residents from communities impacted by violence and policing define safety for themselves? And, what makes these grounded definitions more or less relevant for actual public safety policy? Working in three neighborhoods across Manhattan (Harlem), Brooklyn (Bedford-Stuyvesant), and the Bronx (South Bronx), students in this course will work with this community-based data, engaging with municipal decision makers and community members to apply a conflict resolution lens to the rich—and often contradictory—perspectives that city residents bring to the seemingly simple question of what it means to be safe.
Instructor: Peter Dixon
Last taught: Summer 2025
Courses at Mailman School of Public Health
P8903
The course is designed to provide MPH students with not only a thorough background on the development and structure of what I refer to as the "Carceral System" which includes not only those who are incarcerated in prison or jail but an entire realm of correctional control that includes incarceration at federal, state and local levels; juvenile incarceration; civil commitment (post-sentence institutional detention); Indian Country jails; parole; and probation.
Last taught: Spring 2019
The current systems for the delivery of health services in the United States often fall short of addressing the health needs of many people living in the communities they cover and in so doing contribute to health status disparities. The objective of this course is to help students develop a framework to understand the needs of traditionally under-served populations and the challenges facing the delivery systems that handle these groups.
Last taught: Spring 2020
P8214
This course sits at the intersection of public health, policy, and law. The course will explore the full spectrum of causes and costs of mass incarceration as a public health crisis. This course will examine how exposures to different structures of the American criminal punishment apparatus (e.g., law enforcement, jail, prison, or detention centers, community supervision) shape the health of people, families, and society. Observing mass incarceration as an epidemic, this course will adopt a useful public-health model of prevention to contemplate a concerted approach consisting of primary, secondary, and tertiary strategies for unwinding mass human.
Instructor: Hernandez Stroud
Last taught: Fall 2022
Courses at School of International and Public Affairs
Crime narratives have dominated news coverage from the beginning of mass communication. This course examines the prominence and impact of these crime narratives on citizens and public policy. We will explore how reports of crime have been harnessed to advance political, governmental, and ideological objectives for centuries. We will study the power of mass communication and the impact that crime events can have on public policy and crime legislation.
Instructor: Cory Way
Last taught: Fall 2020
Courses at Teachers College
5077
This course provides an examination of the learning of reading and writing by adults who have not achieved full literacy. Populations discussed include students in programs including adult basic education, vocational/ career & technical education, continuing education, and developmental/ remedial education; adults with dyslexia and other learning disabilities; immigrants and others who have limited English language proficiency; students in correctional settings; and participants in adult literacy programs outside of the U.S
Instructor: Dolores Perin
Last taught: Spring 2019