Dartmouth to offer course on #BlackLivesMatter movement

Jaleesa Jones | college.usatoday.com

#BlackLivesMatter will soon be more than just a Twitter hashtag for students at Dartmouth College.

The school will offer a course this spring titled "10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter," examining structural violence against communities of color. The lessons in the pilot course will be split into 15 sections that span more than 10 academic departments, including -- but not limited to -- anthropology, history, women’s and gender studies, mathematics and English, according toThe Dartmouth.

Abigail Neely, a Dartmouth geography professor, says the course was inspired by a workshop led by Rev. Starsky Wilson, co-chair of the Ferguson Commission – a community-based think tank created by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon. On Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, Wilson led a two-hour seminar at the school and encouraged faculty to think about ways to integrate the events in Ferguson into an academic setting.

English professor Aimee Bahng says the objective of the course is to contextualize the systemic, extrajudicial killings in Ferguson and around the nation.

“We want to bring this moment into conversation with a historical trajectory,” says Bahng.

Bahng says that the course will also study structural forms of violence – including redlining, housing discrimination and the prison-industrial complex – and how they compound state violence against minorities.



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Neely says the challenge and innovation of the course is its transgression of traditional department boundaries.

“The point really is to use the tools our disciplines offer us," says Neely. "And to sort of offer up different ways of thinking about this really complicated and intractable problem that we’re living through in this moment, and to recognize that no single discipline is enough."

While they will not lead their own sections, Bahng and Neely are working to coordinate the Ferguson Teaching Collective at Dartmouth.

Chelsey Kivland, a postdoctoral fellow in the anthropology department, is a member of that collective.

Kivland says she was contacted to lead a course section since she already teaches an “Ethnography of Violence” class, which spends a week analyzing police brutality and the ways in which various forms of violence – institutional, symbolic and physical – nourish each other.







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“One of the reasons I’m really motivated to teach this course at this time is to continue the conversation,” Kivland says. “I do feel that people are already starting to forget (about Ferguson), but these are really urgent matters that play out in people’s daily lives. Only occasionally are they punctuated by a mass movement.”

Kivland says the upcoming electoral season serves as another impetus to further the dialogue about state-sanctioned violence and potential policy reforms.

And students seem to be curious about the course.

Adria Brown, a senior Native American studies major, says she was excited to hear about the class but is concerned about student enrollment.

“I do wonder who will take the class – whether it’ll be kind of preaching to choir or if they’ll get different points of view," says Brown. "But I still think – no matter what – that it’s worth having the class to really interrogate this topic.”

Brown also says it is inspiring to see contemporary social justice movements being translated to the classroom.

Kevin Gillespie, a senior English and government double major and president of Dartmouth’s NAACP chapter, says he’s hopeful that the interdisciplinary course will facilitate better understanding of racial oppression.

“As a black man, it’s incredibly hard to have this reality,” he says. “It’s something that all of us wake up with every day, so I’m really happy that this course is happening. This is exactly what this college needs.”



Jaleesa Jones is a student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and was a fall 2014 Collegiate Correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.