In recent years, we have witnessed heightened attention, visibility, and activism around the joined problems of police violence and prisons. 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 COVID-19 global pandemic has made these questions---as they relate public health and safety; increased policing, militarism, surveillance; austerity measures; and more generally, whose lives are considered expendable/disposable---even more pressing. If, as Arundhati Roy has noted, the pandemic is a portal, what do we make of the current crisis and what abolitionist futures do we fight for? Students in this course will address these and other questions through readings, films, field trips, and case studies that explore racial capitalism, 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 will work in concert with social justice organizations working to build alternatives that move us “beyond policing.” This course was formerly listed as UGLB 3545. Do not take this course if you have previously taken UGLB 3545; it is the same course and cannot be taken twice for credit.”