Visualizing Abolition Studies — Institute of the Arts and Sciences

Home / Education / Academic Programs / Visualizing Abolition Studies

What would it mean to study the problem of incarceration not only from the view of specialists who dominate the narrative—criminologists, sociologists, even historians—but also from the view of artists? How can the arts catalyze thinking and dreaming that both expand our notions of the prison industrial complex and also denaturalize its workings and effects?

Visualizing Abolition Studies (VAST), a certificate program housed in the Humanities Division, offers undergraduate students access to a curriculum in critical studies of incarceration that develops skills in analyzing art and visual culture. With VAST classes offered by faculty in the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts, the program offers an interdisciplinary, cross-departmental frame for examining art and social problems as a response to a critical dynamic: visual materials co-constitute our world, and are often a primary means through which we come to access it. Yet, the roles that art and visual culture take in normalizing or destabilizing our carceral society are often overlooked. VAST will prepare students to challenge the existing criminal legal system and also the means through which we come to study it, developing critical thinking about the social and cultural systems that structure our lives and the tools needed to meaningfully advocate for social justice.

How to Earn the Certificate

A total of fifteen credits are required to complete the certificate
The credits must be earned in courses listed with a VAST course code or courses approved in consultation with the VAST advisers
One class must be “Introduction to Visualizing Abolition”
You can take the courses in any order you choose

Certificate Level Learning Outcomes

As a result of completing the VAST certificate program, students will be able to:

Think beyond the entrenched social dynamics that center on punishment.
Analyze the role played by visual media in constructing past and present social systems.
Create and/or interpret visual art in order to challenge carceral practices and fashion new modes of relationality.
Develop critical skills and workplace experience required to enter multiple post-graduate professions such as (but scarcely limited to): the arts, teaching, legal work, the non-profit sector, and social work.

Winter 2025 courses:

FMST 176/VAST 176: Law, Prisons, and Popular Culture with G ina Dent
This course explores why the proliferation of research on prisons demonstrating economic and racial disparities, as well as negative effects on individuals and communities, has not led to more substantial questioning of public policy that treats imprisonment as a major solution to social problems. The class also immerses students in artistic practices that challenge law and social policy.

FILM 174A: Making an Exoneree with Sharon Daniel
This is an intensive two-quarter advanced workshop in Documentary Filmmaking. Selected Film and Digital Media undergraduate students work in small teams as documentarians, and social justice activists, to create short films, websites, and social media campaigns that make the case for the innocence of a wrongfully convicted person currently in prison. Apply HERE.

Film 171S: Special Topics in Film and Digital Media Production with Chari Glogovac-Smith

Psych 147A: Psychology and Law with Craig Haney

Fall 2024 courses:

FMST 71/VAST 1: Introduction to Visualizing Abolition Studies with Rachel Nelson
This course is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the role visual culture plays in the maintenance of the prison industrial complex and an introduction to artistic practices that challenge law and social policy.

FILM 194S: Special Topics Seminar: Infrastructures of Control and Resistance with Abram Stern
In this seminar, theory and practice are brought to bear on subjects such as undersea cables, emergency media, manhole covers, predictive policing software, and other infrastructural conditions. We examine the work of theorists, artists, and activists who engage these topics through tactical media, sous/counter-surveillance, critical software art, disability justice,[counter-]forensic listening, abolition, maintenance, and care.

Winter 2024 courses:

MUSC 11B: Introduction to Jazz with James Gordon Williams
Designed to provide students with thorough and comprehensive background in history and roots of jazz as a musical style from its African roots to the present. Essential jazz styles and traditions are discussed through lectures, required listening, readings, lecture demonstrations, and film presentations.

PSYC/LGST147A: Psychology & Law with Craig Haney
Current and future relationships between law and psychology, paying special attention to gaps between legal fictions and psychological realities in the legal system. Topics include an introduction to social science and law, the nature of legal and criminal responsibility, the relationship between the social and legal concepts of discrimination, and the nature of legal punishment.

HAVC 191S: Topics in American Art and Visual Culture with Jennifer González
This advanced seminar will focus on U.S. artists, mostly modern and contemporary, who consider the concept of freedom and how it has been depicted. Thematic topics will focus on different media including painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, and public art.

CRES 115: Frantz Fanon: Resistance, Revolution, and Decolonization with Sophia Azeb
Students immerse themselves in the intellectual, political, and critical thought of 20th-century Martiniquan psychoanalyst, writer, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Students closely read several of Fanon’s most noted works. Class also engages contemporary interpretations of Fanon’s transnational, emancipatory thought and practice from scholarly, aesthetic, and political organizing perspectives.

PSYC 150-01: Race, Education, and the Carceral State with Julissa O. Muñiz
Explores the multifaceted and complex relationship between the U.S. public education and juvenile legal systems to examine how these two seemingly disparate systems work together to systematically disadvantage multiply marginalized communities and individuals.

Spring 2024 courses:

ART 175: Taking Art to the Streets with John Jota Leaños

PSYC/LGST147B: Psychology & Law with Craig Haney

PSYC 150-01: Race, Education, and the Carceral State with Julissa O. Muñiz

Affiliated Faculty

Gina Dent (Feminist Studies) (Faculty Lead)
Sophia Azeb (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies)
Jorge Menna Barreto (Art)
Cláudio Bueno (Art)
Sharon Daniel (Film & Digital Media)
Joseph Erb (Film & Digital Media)
Mayanthi Fernando (Anthropology)
Jennifer González (History of Art and Visual Culture)
Craig Haney (Psychology)
Camilla Hawthorne (Sociology)
Isaac Julien (Art)
Caitlin Keliiaa (Feminist Studies)
John Jota Leaños (Film & Digital Media)
Julissa O. Muniz (Psychology)
Laurie Palmer (Art)
Savannah Shange (Anthropology/Critical Race and Ethnic Studies)
James Gordon Williams (Music)
Ronaldo V. Wilson (Literature)

Contact
Advising for the VAST program is administered through the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. For questions, please email vast@ucsc.edu.

Visualizing Abolition is organized by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson, with support from the Mellon Foundation.