| Credits | 1 |
| Restrictions | No 2028 2027 |
| Pre-Requisites | Students may not take more than 1 CORE Communities course |
| Co-Requisites | |
| Core Area | Communities |
| Area of Inquiry | |
| Liberal Arts Practices |
Introduces students to the critical study of prisons, with a geographical focus on Upstate New York. Prisons contain complex communities and they are places with fraught relationships to other communities.Students engage with ethnographic research, literary and artistic works, prison-based journalism, and documentary films that highlight the lived experiences of incarcerated people, people who work within prisons, and people whose lives are impacted by prisons. In conversation with these perspectives, students consider how studying the prison can help us think about themes relevant to any community, including: belonging and non-belonging, stigma, care, hierarchy, solidarity, violence, and love. Through individual research projects, students further explore a prison-related topic of their interest, drawing on primary texts and artistic works to consider how thinking about prison life can contribute to, and complicate, our understanding of community.