HIST 380 - Policing Life: The Criminalization of Dissent in the Americas

This course interrogates the long and contested history of state-sanctioned violence directed at racialized populations, ethnic and gender minorities, Indigenous communities, and organized social movements. Rather than treating policing as a uniquely national or local phenomenon, this course adopts a deliberate comparative and transnational framework. Drawing on historical scholarship from across the Americas, students will examine how policing has functioned not merely as a mechanism of crime control but as an instrument of political domination, racial ordering, and moral discipline. By situating police bodies across history as institutions embedded within broader structures of inequality, the course asks students to consider how law enforcement has historically determined who belongs, who dissents, and whose life is deemed worth protecting.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.