GRSJ 425B: Special Topics – Decolonizing Disability: Towards the Abolition of Carceral Spaces

Instructor: Dr. Jasbir Puar


Examination in depth of selected topics in gender, race, and sexuality. Consult the Workday Student course schedule for course offerings. May be repeated for credit. Recommended pre-requisites: either all of GRSJ 101, GRSJ 102 or third-year standing.


Term 1

* Please note that students who took GRSJ 425 with Dr. Puar in 2023W are not eligible to take this course as it is the same topic

Description: This advanced undergraduate seminar brings together several literatures to explore connections between disability justice, prison abolition movements, and anti-imperialist transnational organizing. The imperative to understand the relationships between carceral spaces, debility, and disability is greater than ever in the face of the rise of authoritarian governments under the guise of democracy; engulfing forms of disaster capitalism and climate change; the swelling of refugee, migrant, and abandoned populations; unprecedented levels of mass incarceration, policing, and counter terrorism surveillance; the consolidation of post-1971 speculative financial markets and the sustaining of US empire through privatized debt and deficit economies; repression of political protest, freedom of speech, and the right to assembly; the failure of human rights to stem state violence; and finally, the blooming of local, regional, transnational and global modes of abolitionist decolonial resistance, refusal, and revolt. These contemporary forces create disability and debility while concomitantly impacting disabled people disproportionately.

Abolitionist Angela Davis writes that “the abolition movement…cannot simply occur in one country.” Following Davis’ lead, examining the global circuits of infrastructures of incarceration such as prisons, detention centers, migrant and refugee camps requires a transnational approach. “Decarcerating Disability” is a frame developed by disability studies scholar Liat Ben-Moshe to situate histories of institutional incarceration of disability as well to understand the debilitating effects of incarceration. Drawing from Ben-Moshe’s work on “carceral spaces,” we will expand this direction of inquiry beyond prisons to include analyses of the space-time containments of carceral capitalism, logistics as warfare, and infrastructures of containment such as occupation, blockades, militarized zones, checkpoints, border walls, and the non-lethal weapons industry.

In turn we will look at the abolitionist decolonial ideologies, organizing, and forms of resistance to these interconnected technologies of immiseration that are envisioning and demanding futures free of carceral enclosure. The Abolition and Disability Justice Coalition, Deadly Exchange, Sins Invalid, and #StopCarceralAbleism are just some examples of anti-imperialist disability justice movement organizations which are challenging the global networks that incarcerate disabled people, produce mass debilitation, and create impairment.

We will be reading work from abolition studies, critical disability studies, southern disability studies, and critical race studies. The readings for the class have been selected because along with attention to subjectivity, subject formation, and identity they develop analytics for systems and structures that span international scales–legal apparatuses, maiming as global governance, debt as spatial enclosure, the biopolitics of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, the commodification of violence–that critically form and impact relations of gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and nationhood.