HIS 2305 - Freedom Dreams: U.S. Social Movements

Credits: 3 hrs

In this class, we will examine historical and contemporary movements and critical perspectives on freedom, justice, equality, autonomy, and self-determination. Freedom is the operative word because the movements and activists we consider emerge out of, or struggle against, the conditions of incarceration (Kelley 2008). Incarceration or imprisonment is not limited to the formal jail or prison; we will be looking at the conditions of Southern sharecroppers, the position of women of color under racism and patriarchy, incarcerated activists as political prisoners, indigenous movements, and the struggle against state-sanctioned and/or extralegal violence proscribing hegemonic sexual and gender expressions. We will consider a wide range of movements, including labor, civil/human rights, and environmental justice. Framed through a transdisciplinary approach, this course employs sources from academic texts and articles to autobiography, film, music, and poetry to examine, among other things, how movements were formed and sustained; the social and historical contexts for their emergence and demise; the impact they might have had on power, on participants in the movement, on the community at large, and on people’s vision of a liberated future.