Jump to: Part 1: Reasoning About Justice | Part 2: Justice and Community | Part 3: Power, Genocide and Justice | Part 4: Music, Movement, and Justice

Part 1: How to Reason/Argue About Justice?

Tuesday, August 29 (Week 1)

• MEET: Hance Auditorium
• READ: Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapters 1 and 4
• REFLECT: Questions 1 -3
• PLENARY: Bentham
  

Thursday, August 29 AM

• READ: Ursula K. LeGuin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas; About Ursula K. Le Guin; Peter singer, Famine, Affluence and Morality (Read carefully pp. 230-235. You can skim the rest)
  
• REFLECT: Reading Questions 1-2 and 1-6
• SECTION: Discuss LeGuin and Singer
  

Thursday, August 29 PM

• MEET: Hance Auditorium
  
• READ: No new reading
• PLENARY: Justice and the Greatest Happiness Principle
  

Tuesday, September 3 (Week 2)

• READ: Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (selections); O’Neill, A simplified account of Kantian ethics (optional); Locke, Second Treatise of Government, chs 2, 5 and 8
• REFLECT: Guide to week 2
• PLENARY: Justice and Contracts/Consent

Thursday, September 5 AM

• WATCH: Notes From the Field (2018)
• PLEANRY: Anna Deveare Smith and Dr. Green, Structured Conversation

Thursday, September 5 PM

• READ: The Tangle Over ‘Twilight’
• WATCH: Notes From the Field (2018)
• SECTION: Documentary Theater and Justice

Tuesday, September 10 (Week 3)

• READ:  Locke, Second Treatise of Government, chs 2, 5 and 8 (review); Rawls, selections from A Theory of Justice (selections)
• REFLECT: Reading Questions and Optional materials
• PLENARY: Justice and Equality, distributive justice, Rawls’ difference principle

Thursday, September 12 AM

• READ: Nozick, selections from Anarchy, State, and Utopia (required up to the “Lockean proviso”)
• REFLECT: Reading Questions and Optional materials
• PLENARY: Justice and desert, is justice giving everyone what they deserve?

Thursday, September 12 PM

• READ or WATCH: Read or watch Mills, Theorizing Racial Justice, (2020 Tanner Lecture on Human Values)
• REFLECT: Reading Questions and Optional materials
• SECTION: Mill, Liberalism and Race
  

Part 2: Justice and the Community

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Tuesday, September 17 (Week 4)

•  READ: Sophocles, Antigone (complete) [Screen Reader version]
• MOODLE: What is Obligation?
• PLENARY: Justice and Obligation

Thursday, September 19 AM

• READ: Antigone (cont.)
• SECTION: The Cost of Justice

Thursday, September 19 PM

• READ: Robert Cover, “The Supreme Courth, 1982 Term–Forward: Nomos and Narrative”
• PLENARY: Justice and Normative Worlds

Friday, September 20 

• WRITE: Draft of Paper 1 due by Friday, September 20, 5pm (final version due Friday, October 4)

Tuesday, September 24 (Week 5)

• READ: Book of Job
• NOT MOODLE: Make sure you bring the Cover outline to class.
• PLENARY:  Justice, Humanity and the Law

Thursday, September 26 AM

• READ: Book of Job (cont.)
• MOODLE: What happens when you throw God into the mix?
• SECTION: How do we distinguish between Law, Justice and Competing Legal Frameworks?

Thursday, September 26 PM

•  READ: Nothing new, it’s an Alpaca Day miracle!
• PLENARY: Mass Death, Genocide and the Law

Part 3: Power, Genocide and Justice

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Tuesday, October 1 (Week 6)

• WATCH:  Dancing: Dance at Court [FILM]
• MOODLE: Dance and the Body
• PLENARY: Dance as Demonstration of Power

Thursday, October 3 AM

• READ: Lepecki, “Choreopolice & Choreograpolitics” 
• SECTION: Choreographing Power

Thursday, October 3 PM

• READ: Percy, “Movement Choirs and the Nazi Olympics“
• SECTION: Sinister Embodiment

Friday, October 4

• WRITE: Final draft of Paper 1 due on Moodle by 5pm, Friday, October 4

Tuesday, October 8 (Week 7)

• PLENARY: Whither the Sentence? Whither the Paragraph?

Thursday, October 10 AM & PM

• FALL BREAK

Tuesday, October 15 (Week 8)

• READ: Overview of the Holocaust from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and Raphael Lemkin, “Genocide,” The American Scholar 15, no. 2 (1946): 227–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41204789. (access through Davidson library)
• PLENARY: Seeking Justice after WWII and Defining the Nazi Holocaust

Thursday, October 17 AM

• READ: Article by historian Michael R. Marrus, “The Nuremberg Trial: Fifty Years After.” The American Scholar 66, no. 4 (1997): 563–70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41212687 (access through Davidson library); and three (very) short articles touching on various aspects of Nuremburg’s legacies, memory, and (ab)uses today (here and hereand here)
• SECTION: From Nuremburg to “Nuremburg”: The Afterlives of the IMT

Thursday, October 17 PM

• READ: Shachar Pinsker, “On Jewish Revenge,” Aeon Magazine, April 2024.
• PLENARY: Power, Trauma, and Vengeance in the Shadow of Genocide

Friday, October 19

• Campus Commentary 1 due

Tuesday, October 22 (Week 9)

• READ: Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
• MOODLE: The Banality of Evil
• PLENARY: Theaters of Justice

Thursday, October 24 AM

• READ: Kafka’s “Before the Law”/ The Trial
• PLENARY: Ideologies of Justice

Thursday, October 24 PM

• READ: Kafka’s “Before the Law”/ The Trial
• SECTION: Unwritten Laws

Tuesday, October 29 (Week 10)

• WATCH: Long Night’s Journey Into Day
• PLENARY: Apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa

Thursday, October 31 AM

• MOODLE: Diary Entry
• SECTION: 

Interlude: Case #1

Thursday, October 31  PM

• READ: Orin Kerr, “How to Read a Supreme Court Opinion;” McGirt v. Oklahoma (pp. 1-45)
• PLENARY: Justice and Sovereignty 

Part 4: Music, Movement, and Justice

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Tuesday, November 5 (Week 11)

• ELECTION DAY

Thursday, November 7 AM

• READ: William Cheng, “Jordan Russell Davis,” in Loving Music Till it Hurts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 173–226.
  
• PLENARY: Injustice and Musical Myths

Thursday, November 7 PM

• READ: W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” and “The Sorrow Songs” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), 37–44, 185–194.
• SECTION: Music and Social Justice

Friday, November 8

• WRITE: Difficult Passage Paper Draft, Friday, November 8 by 5pm

Tuesday, November 12 (Week 12)

• READ: Tammy Kernodle, “‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free’: Nina Simone and the Redefining of the Freedom Song of the 1960s,” Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 3 (2008): 295–317.
• LISTEN: Billie Holiday–“God Bless the Child”; Nina Simone–“Mississippi Goddam;” “Images;” “Four Women”
• PLENARY: Sonic Activism: Billie Holiday and Nina Simone

Thursday, November 14 AM

• SECTION: Navigating Identity

• READ: Marlon Riggs, Ethnic Notions

• MOODLE: Cultural Creations: Confronting Stereotypes

Thursday, November 14 PM

• PLENARY: Staging Identities/Reading a Dance

• READ: David Krasner, “Rewriting the Body: Aida Overton Walker and the Social Formation of Cakewalking”

Tuesday, November 19 (Week 13)

• READ: Barbara Browning, “Headspin: Capoeira’s Ironic Inversions”
• SECTION: Identity in Practice
• MOODLE: Maybe you have to be willing not to know…

Thursday, November 21 AM

• READ: Imani Kai, “Dark Matter and Diaspora”
• PLENARY: Understanding the Cypher

Thursday, November 21 PM

• READ: Imani Kai, “Battling in the Bronx”
• SECTION: Commodifying the Beat

Friday, November 22

• WRITE: Difficult Passage Paper Final Version, Friday, November 22 by 5pm

WEEK 14–Thanksgiving Break

Interlude: Case #2

Tuesday, December 3  (Week 15)

• READ: Haaland v. Brackeen
• PLENARY: Justice into the Future

Thursday, December 5 AM 

• PLENARY: Epes Lecturer Visit
• READ: Ravit Reichman, “Law’s Affective Thickets“

Thursday, December 5 PM

• SECTION: Portfolio Work

Thursday, December 5 PM

• EPES LECTURE: Ravit Reichman

Tuesday December 10 AM (Thurs Schedule)

• PLENARY: Digital Learning Team

Tuesday December 10 PM (Thurs Schedule)

• SECTION: Portfolio Work

Submit Portfolio URL