In recent years, we have witnessed heightened attention, visibility, and activism around the joined problems of police violence and prisons. The uprisings of 2020 brought some of the largest mobilizations in U.S. history and amplified demands to #Defundthepolice. Yet while there is increased consensus about the need for change, how do we understand the problems of policing and prisons? What are the “solutions” and “alternatives” we work for? What’s at stake? And what does abolition mean? The joint crises of the COVID-19 pandemic, police violence, and austerity has made these questions—as they relate public health and safety; increased policing, militarism, surveillance; and more generally, whose lives are considered expendable/disposable—even more pressing. Students in this course will address these and other questions through readings, films, field trips, and case studies that explore racial capitalism, colonialism, critical race theory, gender justice, transformative justice, and community organizing. We will work towards two primary goals: 1) tracking carceral logics and forms--beyond the site of prisons and the streets--as they take shape in multiple scales and geographical contexts: from schools to hospitals and homes; from infrastructure to urban design; from not-for-profits to social science, to policy reform, to projects that purport to “help”; and 2) expanding our imaginaries through studying abolitionist projects as political analysis and strategy that works at multiple scales and at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and migration. Students’ research is in dialogue with social justice organizations working to build alternatives that move us “beyond policing.” For fall 2022, this course will partner with Embody Transformation on an organizing initiative focusing on the intersections of reproductive justice, racial capitalism, and the carceral state.