Topics in Legal Studies (376-0-20)
Topic
Policing Protest
Instructors
Abigail Rose Barefoot
847/467-0259
Abigail Barefoot is an Assistant Professor of Instruction at the Center for Legal Studies. Prof. Barefoot’s research explores questions of justice, safety, and accountability through the lens of prison abolition and critical carceral studies Abigail’s current book project Beyond Carceral Responses: Transformative Justice, Prison Abolition, and the Movement to End Sexual Violence examines transformative justice practices for sexual violence. Using an ethnographic approach, Abigail unpacks the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of practicing transformative justice as experienced by survivors, facilitators, and people who cause harm. Her other teaching and research interests include LGBTQ Studies, American social movements, and mass incarceration.
Meeting Info
Frances Searle Building 3220: Mon, Wed 2:00PM - 3:20PM
Overview of class
This course will introduce students to the historical and contemporary relationship between the law, police and protesters within the United States. We will critically examine the diversity of actions, tactics, accounts, and tools of both the police and protesters. While this specific focus will anchor our analysis, the course will address broad and important questions about public order, constitutionality, the role of the courts and the police, democracy and the rule of law, surveillance, and legal guidelines related to public assembly, speech, and protest.
Registration Requirements
no prerequisites
Learning Objectives
• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of social science theories related to the study of social movements and policing with particular attention to sociolegal theoretical approaches.
• Apply an intersectional approach to topics surrounding the larger ecosystem of social movements, protesting, and policing with a particular emphasis on how policing impacts people differently based upon their racial, class, and gender identities.
• Engage with study of protest from an interdisciplinary lens including surveillance studies, political science, critical criminology, sociolegal studies, empirical observations (qualitative and quantitative data), and research methods (social science and humanistic).
• Develop the ability to critique theories, claims, and policies in the social and behavioral sciences through careful evaluation of an argument's major assertions, assumptions, evidential basis, and explanatory utility.
• Reflect upon the way in which theories and research from the social and behavioral sciences help elucidate the factors that led to the development and sustaining of increased policing of social movements and protests as well as potential solutions.
• Craft text-based and verbal analyses of assigned course media—and extend this analysis to individually selected case studies and contexts.
Teaching Method
Lecture and discussion
Evaluation Method
Students will be evaluated through writing assignments and a research paper
Class Materials (Required)
N/A: All course materials will be uploaded to Canvas