Seminar: TUESDAYS 1:15pm-5pm (includes travel time) in the Hampshire County Jail in Northampton (TRANSPORTATION BETWEEN UMASS AND THE JAIL IS PROVIDED)

This is a blended course, enrolling students from UMass & the Five Colleges and students who are incarcerated in the Hampshire County Jail in Northampton. As a member of this course, learning in collaboration with incarcerated students, you will be joining an international community of educators and students who are committed to dialogue and scholarly learning inside prisons and jails.

IMAGINING JUSTICE is an interdisciplinary exploration of the critical, aspirational, artistic, and creative forms that Justice takes in literature and the humanities more broadly. This course will ask: What is the role of the literary and artistic imagination in the world-making labor of social and political change? What are the tangled roots of inequality and the legacies of sexual, racial, and economic (in)justice?  What sorts of ethical, social, and political issues are animated by writers, artists and visionaries who seek to imagine and build a different world? Course topics will include: utopian and dystopian fiction; Afrofuturism; art, politics and social justice; language, literature, and the radical imaginary. Authors may include: Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Kazuo Ishiguro, Claudia Rankine, Mia Mingus, Leslie Marmon Silko, Nicole Fleetwood, Ursula Le Guin, James Baldwin, and adrienne maree brown.

Enrollment in this course is by application only. Permission by Instructor is required. Application for admission to the course is available here: https://forms.gle/7SizJeQsPek2cNSf6. For additional details, contact Professor Laura Ciolkowski, lciolkowski@umass.edu.This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the critical, aspirational, artistic, and creative forms that Justice takes in literature and the humanities more broadly.

Enrollment is limited to a maximum of 10 students and Instructor's permission is required.