RELIGION, SURVEILLANCE, AND RACIALIZED BODIES (HR-8490)

In this course students will be introduced to the interconnection between religion and race and the particular ways in which they intersect to racialize a religion's followers in some cases rendering them targets of state violence subject to covert surveillance, discipline, forced displacement, excluded from religious protections, and/or subjects of warfare. Attention will be given to surveillance broadly defined, as the course examines religion and racialized/terrorized bodies at both the center and peripheries historically and in the present globalized security order. An interdisciplinary approach will be taken in order to critically engage and interrogate concepts such as militarism and imperialism, governance, securitization, Islamophobia, racism, policing, COINTELPRO, CVE/surveillance programs, We will analyze and decolonize the normative, prescriptive, and "universal" Western epistemologies, discourses, and frames through which religion and racialized bodies are represented in history, academia, media, law, and foreign/domestic policy. Regular meeting times to be determined during first course meeting, 9/5/23, from 6:10-9pm. This course is taught by PhD student Paula Thompson with a Newhall Award, under the supervision of Munir Jiwa. [Auditors with Faculty Permission]