Course Section | Columbia Law School

Section Description Provided by Instructor

Admission is by instructor permission only. To apply for admission, send to Rosa Isabel Arenas (rarena@law.columbia.edu) your CV and a statement detailing your interest in the topic and any background coursework, experience or personal interest you have in affirmative action or other race or gender conscious remedies, and/or some background or research interest global discourses pertaining to equality related to the specific countries or regions we will be discussing (see course description, below). As part of this seminar, field research in Brazil or Colombia may be possible. Please indicate your interest in taking part. Note that field research is neither a class requirement nor is the option guaranteed.

This comparative CRT seminar will address the legal and social apparatuses of racialization in the global North and South. A primary focus will be the development of group-based remedies such as affirmative action, positive action, and other identity-conscious strategies, and the legal, social and theoretical challenges such policies have engendered. Comparative examples will be drawn from post-slave societies, (Brazil, US, Colombia); post-colonial societies (South Africa, India); and neo-Imperial societies (France, Germany and the UK). A central focus of the seminar will be to interrogate the various tensions around the role of group identity in the social subordination of marginalized people, and the wide variety of critiques that frame the remedial use of group identity as inconsistent with national ideologies such as colorblindness, non-racialism, racial democracy and civic republicism. Beyond these nationalist discourses, we will also place debates over multiculturalism in conversation with demands arising from newer voices in the global debate including so-called migrant communities in Europe, Afro-descendants in Latin America, and Dalits in South Asia.

Students in this seminar will undertake comparative research projects related to racialization and resistance contestations over affirmative action in selected countries. Field research trips to Brazil and/or Colombia may be offered during Spring Break 2013.