UP 160: Race, Social Justice, and Cities

Course Description

Study of the history and politics of American cities as sites of everyday struggles against systemic racialized exclusions rooted in patterns of residential segregation. Frame everyday racial encounters as surface symptoms of submerged and systematic forms of racism rooted in centuries of genocide, land theft, racial slavery and decades of Jim Crow segregation and neoliberal exclusions. Explore everyday racial conflicts in selected cities as expressions of historical struggles for social and spatial justice, across multiple scales. Focus on the governance of routine social practices ranging from policing, to education, to gentrification and memorialization in public places. Final student projects will focus on social struggles against systemic and everyday racisms in a self-selected city of their choice. Credit is not given for UP 160 if UP 199 section -"Race," Social Justice and the City has been taken.