DAVID CORREIA | ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR | AMERICAN STUDIES
Undergraduate COURSES
I teach undergraduate courses that focus on environmental and social justice, state violence and law and society. Through these courses I help students think critically about environmental politics and law and violence. Other than AMST 182, which is a large lecture course, my classes are typically organized as small, seminar courses focused around discussion and based on a close, critical read of scholarly writing.
graduate COURSES
My seminars start with the same basic questions that give momentum to scholarly projects. We read broadly in a particular area and, through active and critical discussion, generate new ideas and intellectual connections.
SPRING 2016
Undergraduate
AMST 285 American Life & Thought: Critical Perspectives on Law [syllabus]
Mondays & Wednesdays 4 PM to 5:15 PM
This course examines the world that law has created. Law claims to make sense of the world by reducing all of its complexity to discrete juridical categories and objects of interest. Making the world legible (and “orderly”) is both a central imperative of law and, seemingly, its effect. The idea that law objectively transforms the messiness and complexity of social life into an imagined ordered legibility is perhaps law’s most important accomplishment. The world in this sense is made legible to, and by, the state, courts and socio-legal institutions of society. But the world is unruly and law’s ability to resolve this unruliness is more mirage than real. This class examines the claims and contradictions of law. We will examine law’s relation to violence and order/disorder. We will consider law’s role in producing space and policing difference.
Graduate
AMST 521 Law’s Violence [syllabus]
Wednesdays 10 AM to 12:30 PM
The law, legal scholar Robert Cover famously wrote, is “staked in blood.” The violence to which Cover refers is made legitimate by law and the liberal state: mass incarceration, torture, everyday police violence and the death penalty, among many others. Whether by the lethal injection of an executioner's syringe or by the blow of a police officer's truncheon, law is never far from violence and always operates, as Cover argues, “in a field of pain and death.” This seminar is designed as an interdisciplinary approach to the study of law and its relation to violence. We are interested in the freedoms promised and brought to life by law and liberalism, and the ways that these freedoms always require or include organized violence in their first instance. Law's freedoms are always paired with forms of unfreedom. Individual liberty based on mass incarceration, security and peace accompanied by war and repression, the promise of social justice amid historic and ongoing injustice.
Fall 2015
Undergraduate
AMST 320 Geographies of Border Town Violence
Mondays & Wednesdays 4 PM to 5:15 PM
This class examines the social and spatial patterns of Native life on and off reservations. Much of off-reservation life for Native people in North America can be found in border towns, the largely Anglo-dominated settlements that ring reservations. This class will examine ideological and material production of border towns, where persistent patterns of economic exploitation, violence, discrimination, and criminalization directed at Native people define everyday life.
We will examine border town violence as a contemporary pattern and practice rooted in histories of settler colonialism and Native dispossession, with a focus on North America. By the end of the semester students will have studied histories of settler colonialism, and the contemporary social and spatial patterns of violence against Native people in reservation border towns. Students will gain basic knowledge of key concepts in Native and Indigenous studies as well as geography and urban studies and learn how to apply them to everyday experiences, critical thinking, and writing. Students will develop their research and writing skills through a series of readings, assignments, and intensive group work. The complex nature of the material we will cover demands of all students an ability to think critically, read thoroughly, and participate collaboratively in an intellectual community.
Undergraduate
FLC 622 Dead West: Militarized Ecology in New Mexico
M, W, F 12 PM to 1:50 PM
Wendell Berry writes that there is no such thing as unsacred land; only sacred and desecrated land. This is a concept New Mexicans understand all-to-well. Nature in New Mexico takes the form of a militarized nature, given over both to permanent environmental damage due to resource extraction, nuclear testing, and future “exploration.” Bees become sentinel species engineered to serve a military logic, while the bones and flesh of Elk serve as the living laboratories for nuclear and environmental scientists. In this FLC, we examine the environmental legacy and the political implications for these transformations; then, using multimodal tools and journalistic techniques (interviewing, researching), we will report on these issues from multiple angles and through a variety of publishing platforms. We aim to develop, in short, a writing and reporting community focused on environmental politics and issues of representation, resulting in real-world experience and a deeper understanding of ecological disasters, policies and conflicts that affect New Mexico and beyond.
Spring 2015
Graduate
AMST 523 Environmentalism of the Poor [syllabus]
Wednesdays 10 AM to 12:30 PM
In this course we are interested in how colonial and neoliberal knowledge formations construct, and ruthlessly defend normative categories of the human (on both a social and biological level), and of nature (both as an object and as a relation), as a means through which power is exercised and violence is practiced. We focus on the taken-for-granted categories of personhood and nature as the routes though which a biopolitics of colonial and neoliberal power and authority travel. We are interested in the forms that resistance to these arrangements takes. Are there alternative ways of knowing that resist and refuse these normative categories? And how do we participate in the construction of methodologies and ways of knowing that both undermine forms of domination and also contribute to liberatory social movements. We begin by exploring the production of colonial world-making and the politics of personhood and move on to consider how biopolitics, and particularly categories such as the non-human, figure into political and environmental dispossession—but also how they’ve come to offer alternative categories and experimental methodologies for decolonization projects. The texts in this course take colonial and neoliberal power relations seriously. They trace the way those social relations get produced and what they do once unleashed; how they are imposed and become contested; and what forms of resistance they provoke.
Undergraduate
AMST 310:002 Police Violence and Social Control [syllabus]
Tuesday & Thursday 2-3:15PM
Course Description:
This course examines the practices of state authority and, in particular, the histories and ongoing patterns of police violence in the United States. We focus on the practice of police violence as a particular expression and exercise in state power and form of social control. We explore police-society relations broadly, and the legal context of policing and efforts to impose community oversight in particular, in order to understand both the persistence of police violence and popular efforts to organize against it. We will focus our attention on police-society relations in Albuquerque and, in particular, on the last five years, a period in which APD has killed 27 people, many of whom were unarmed. The Department of Justice concluded most of those killings were unjustified and that APD engages in a pattern of unconstitutional policing the routine use of unjustified force.
Course Objectives
Students will understand the particular histories of police violence in Albuquerque, become familiar with efforts to interrupt patterns of police violence, and consider what race, gender, sexuality and class have to do with police violence. Students will develop their research and writing skills through a series of readings, assignments and intensive group work. The complex nature of the material we will cover demands of all students an ability to think critically, read thoroughly, and participate collaboratively in an intellectual community.
SPRING 2014
Graduate Courses
AMST 500 Marxism & Nature [syllabus]
Wednesdays 10 AM to 12:30 PM
This class begins with Marx and moves out into path-breaking interdisciplinary work in Marxist nature-society theory and method. The various texts for the course have been selected because of the way they draw on Marxist social theory and innovative methods to examine nature (broadly conceived) as a contested site of social struggle. In particular, the course will focus on the broad acceptance and extension of capitalist social relations in contemporary society to show how, as these texts demonstrate, nature has been remade in the image of capital: nature as an assemblage of commodities with broad consequences, experienced unevenly, for human and non-human life. The class will begin by examining the origins of the contemporary mode of capitalist social relations in contemporary society (the nature of capitalism) as a way to consider how these relations have given rise to particular kinds of political subjectivities and forms of resistance. The last two-thirds of the course will take up the question of nature and its representation in capitalism. What becomes nature and what becomes of nature when it is understood as a commodity that operates within a private property regime and circulates in a global capitalist market in which value arises only through exchange.
Additional Undergraduate Courses
AMST 321 Science, Nature and Anxiety in the Zombie Films of George Romero
This course will examine the social commentary of George Romero’s zombie films. We will consider how Romero’s zombies serve as a vehicle to examine social anxieties regarding science, technology, nature, race, class and consumerism. Zombies, in the Romero oeuvre, are usually the result of science gone awry, technology out of control, or a frightful consequence of transformed nature-society relations. The zombie threat reorganizes society in ways that reveal deeply buried racial anxieties, class conflict, and social alienation. This is a compressed, one-week course. In each class, we will screen one of Romero’s films and read critical commentaries as a way to explore how Romero uses zombies to complicate established social relations, destabilize social categories such as race and class, and undermine ideas such as progress and nature.
2012 ARTS & SCIENCES AWARD FOR TEACHING EXCELLENCE
Faculty nominees were evaluated on the basis of the breadth and quality of their instructional contributions. Preference was given to those who have demonstrated instructional excellence at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, through both classroom instruction and supervision of student research, who have integrated their research and scholarship into their teaching, and who developed particularly thoughtful teaching portfolios. Professor Correia stood out from the rest of the nominees based on the quality of his teaching portfolio, which will be soon posted as an example for new A&S faculty. His portfolio included a reflection on how he teaches, why he gives particular assignments, and ample positive feedback.