SOC 275 Political Imprisonment

3 hours 

Political Imprisonment asks what forcible confinement means in modern society and what its historical and contemporary forms, such as the prison, the death camp, quarantine, the gulag, the refugee camp, the boarding school, and forced relocation can tell us about the tensions between individual rights and governmental control. The course uses case studies from countries such as the United States, Kenya, Egypt, Australia, Germany, Palestine, and Sudan to examine how states have interned individuals living within their borders and the political, social, and economic conditions that have motivated governments to so radically limit individual freedom. Ultimately this course seeks to disentangle the relationships among confinement, patriarchy, class hierarchies and racism.