Dr Mai Taha STC S206

This course is available on the MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics and MSc in Political Sociology. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Places are allocated based on a written statement, with priority given to students on the MSc in Human Rights, MSc in Human Rights and Politics and MSc in Political Sociology. As demand is typically high, this may mean that not all students who apply will be able to get a place on this course.

This course critically investigates the complexities of lawful violence as manifested in class, gender and racial arrangements through three vignettes. The first vignette looks at spaces of lawful violence: home, work, property, prison, army and border. In this section, we think about the relationship between state, law and violence, focusing on the classical definition of the state as holding the legitimate monopoly over the use of violence within a defined space. As such, we explore how lawful violence seeps into social relations within the home space and the family institution, the factory gates or the workplace more broadly, the prison as a carceral space of confinement and profit, and the liminal space of crossing borders. The second vignette is on the temporalities of lawful violence, exploring how state violence is articulated through technology and temporal regimes. From waiting to cross borders or get status, to waiting for a prison sentence or death row, to waiting for the end of the working day, time here is conceptualized as an essential tool of lawful violence, assembling a precarious life that oscillates within a spectrum of fear and boredom. In this vignette we ask the following questions: how do people experience time under authoritarianism, colonialism and military occupation? How does time and temporality feature in our experience of lawful state violence today? In the third and final vignette, we think about refusal. More specifically, this vignette engages with resistance, abolition, friendship and solidarity to reimagine emancipatory futures free from the chains of capital, security and incarceration that underpin the modern nation-state. Through these three vignettes, students will gain a solid understanding of the structures of lawful violence manifested across space and time, as well as the different forms of resistance to and refusal of state violence today.

This course is delivered through seminars, totalling a minimum of 20 hours in MT. 

Students on this course will have a reading week in Week 6, in line with departmental policy. 

Students will be expected to produce 1 piece of coursework in the MT.

• Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law & Order, (Red Globe Press, 2013).
• Walter Benjamin, ‘A Critique of Violence’ in Marcus Bullok and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. I (1913-1926) (Harvard University Press, 2002).
• Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018).
• Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2010).
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007).
• Adam Elliot-Cooper, Black Resistance to British Policing (Manchester University Press, 2021).
• Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Semiotext(e), 2009).
• Maria Mies and Silvia Federici, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (Zed Books, 2014).
• Franz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom (Bloomsbury, 2015).
• Karl Marx, Capital (Volume I) (Vintage Books, 1977).
• Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019).
• Greg Thomas, ‘Blame it on the Sun: George Jackson and Poetry of Palestinian Resistance’ (2015) Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, Vol. 13, No. 4.

Essay (90%, 4000 words) in the LT.
Class participation (10%) in the MT.

An electronic copy of the assessed essay, to be uploaded to Moodle, no later than 4.00pm on the second Wednesday of Lent Term.

Attendance at all seminars and submission of all set coursework is required.