Managing the Wretched and Unruly Poor

This course interrogates the strategies employed by the state and state-sanctioned actors, like the police, the courts, teachers, psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers, to manage the raced, criminalized, foreign born and generally “unruly poor” in the United States, and subsequently, how the “unruly” resist those strategies. The sweep of the course is broad and interdisciplinary, covering select readings on plantation life, domestic labor, chain gangs, the sanitarium, ghettos, workhouses, schools, prisons and welfare offices. It asks, how have unruly populations been conceived of and managed across institutional settings? How have those conceptions and practices evolved? What do they tell us about ourselves? How have the unruly mobilized to resist those strategies?