#BlackLivesMatter will be more than just a hashtag on social media. An ivy league school, Dartmouth College, will be turning it into a course.
The “10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter” course will focus on “race, structural inequality and violence in both a historical and modern context,” according to their school newspaper, The Dartmouth. Ten academic departments within the school will be collaborating to bring the course to life, including women’s and gender studies, anthropology, math, English and history. Fifteen professors will be teaching different sections of the course.
The idea for this class was sparked at a Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning workshop, which encouraged professors to incorporate the events in Ferguson and thereafter into their coursework.
“We just thought that it might be interesting and innovative and exciting to have a course that’s dedicated to this, whereas lots of other people are incorporating it into other courses,” geography professor Abigail Neely told The Dartmouth.
“We hope students will be able to understand that Ferguson is not just an event in 2014, but something that’s tethered in time to a long history and still-emerging ideas about race in the U.S. and how policing works in an age of social media and distributed surveillance,” said English professor Aimee Bahng, who is currently writing her syllabus.
The class will be taught during the upcoming Spring semester.