Courses

EDUC 315 Education and Urban Rebellions

A prerequisite for engaging in questions of education, revolution, and rebellion is the problem of violence, and this is where we will begin. We'll distinguish between different forms and categories of violence because, whatever definition we get it, there's no such thing as a "non-violent" revolution (nor is education violence free). Only after examining violences can we begin our collective study of the urban and its relationship to education and social transformation. We'll begin this section with a book on precisely the relations between these three themes, enabling us to refine our understanding of education and pedagogy, grasp the production of space, and examine how educational systems fit within political economic systems and how particular politics relate to specific pedagogies. We next attend to the specific dynamics of urban revolution, discovering how and why the urban is the product of--and produces--radical transformations. If the urban is a site and form of rebellion, it's also a site and form of repression, and in our next section we analyze the political-national economy of the repression of revolutionary movements, populations, organizations, and individuals, culminating in "mass incarceration" (NOT the "new Jim Crow"). Our last section brings together the educational, geographic, national (or racial), and architectural aspects of urbanism through a series of studies of urban rebellions in New York City. We'll see exactly how the urban is produced by--and productive of--revolutionary struggles through this example as well as our own research projects.