For students at VCU, the courses below are electives regularly offered by faculty associated with the lab. Courses in yellow are key opportunities for students to get an introduction to the lab and our project-based approach to collaboration, learning and research, and are spaces where students can connect with each other and build community. Courses in blue offer in-depth analysis that supports liberatory practice. And if you’re not at VCU but interested in what we’re doing, checked out the syllabi linked below!
Sociology of Economic Inequalities
This course looks at economic inequality through an intersectional perspective, meaning that other aspects of identity and experience that often influence our ability to make money and improve our material well-being will also be discussed, including gender, race, and disability. The objectives of this course are to give you an informed and critical understanding of how different types of economic stratification organize our society and influence people’s ability to live happy, secure, and productive lives, and how economic inequality must be understood in relation to structures of social power such as settler colonialism, racial capitalism, housing discrimination, and more to be explored. Here is a link to the syllabus.
Another World is Possible
“What is, so to speak, the object of abolition? Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” ― Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
This is an experimental course, and a course about experimentation. The course is about imagining and building towards new and uncharted futures. The world has been an unfolding crisis for many people – maybe for you – in many times and many places. This means we have a living history of past and present experiences to learn from; experiences of people turning towards crisis with confidence, and having the courage to imagine and build towards better worlds.
Understanding Capitalism
The goal of this course is to develop a nuanced understanding of capitalism, the ways it works and the ways it doesn’t work – or who it works for and who it works against. We focus specifically on a critique of racial capitalism in order to center Marxist-feminist, decolonial, and black radical critics of capitalism. These thinkers help us understand the many ways that global capitalism operates through inclusion and exclusion, the production of sameness and the production of difference, the humanizing progress of modernity and the dehumanizing violence of coloniality. Over the course of the term, our investigation will span from the global to the local, from large-scale macro-economic flows of wealth and commodities around the planet to the intimate and mundane realities of everyday working lives; from toxic sacrifice zones where raw materials are extracted and laborers are treated as disposable and dehumanized beings, to suburban landscapes where a complex mix of convenience, disposability, incarceration and debt differentially enables some lives while dehumanizing and destroying others
Here is a link to the graduate syllabus and here is a link to the undergraduate version.
Confronting Climate Crisis
This course seeks to fight against the apathy, nihilism, and fear that pervade discussions of the climate crisis by empowering students with conceptual tools that will help in confronting the root causes of this crisis! We will investigate some of the main axes of debate among political/activist organizations around the world seeking to produce a more just life and planet for humans and nonhumans alike. Although we will discuss the basic scientific parameters of climate change and its connections to food, water, energy, ecology, and urbanism, our primary focus will be to understand strategies for transforming these systems. We pay particular attention to how Black, migrant, Indigenous peoples, and folks in the Global South are leading the world in developing innovative and socially-just solutions to climate change
Digital Feminisms
This course explores how conceptions of and engagements with feminism and social justice emerge in relation to media, culture, and politics. We’ll trace how feminist dialogues– from the “pre-digital” era to present day– inform mediated activism, while looking toward how changing political-economic contexts are intertwined with evolving mediated cultures. By understanding mediated cultures as co-created with social and political power structures, we see not only how race, gender, disability, class, and location differentiate experiences with media, but also how power is harnessed through media. We will explore a variety of texts — such as TV shows, academic scholarship, memes, viral videos, and pop culture writing — to analyze digital feminisms from a number of angles. By looking at how a range of creators, artists, and scholars engage with media, we’ll collaborate on envisioning the creative and activist possibilities of mediated feminist futures. Here is a link to the syllabus.
Billion Worlds Lab 