Prerequisite: Negotiation Workshop Students who are registered for the Negotiation Workshop in the Winter or Spring are eligible to take Fugitive Negotiation this Fall.

Exam Type: No Exam

Fugitive Negotiation is a space to think, feel, and practice negotiation philosophies and strategies for those of us moving through the very systems we seek to disrupt, dismantle, and/or evade.

Traditional negotiation theory often assumes, explicitly or implicitly, the legitimacy of the institutions or of the institutional agents with which we negotiate. Fugitive Negotiation refuses that premise. Instead, we seek to understand negotiation with/in the law as intimately related to the backdrops of colonialism, chattel slavery, and their afterlives. We examine critically the endorsed rules of engagement that re-produce inequitable distributions and the figure of the undifferentiated individual or “reasonable man” as our object(ive) subject.

Fugitive Negotiation is a Black queer feminist approach to negotiating the world as we know it to be. A negotiation theory rooted in surviving, not denying, long histories — personal, relational, ancestral — of extraction, violence, and dispossession, and then visioning and building a new future. A negotiation theory that looks as closely at the power and agency we can, do, and might impose as the power often imposed on us. We will examine how power shapes our negotiation and legal practice and what strategies we might find beyond those traditionally offered in the law or marketed in its shadow.

We will draw negotiation expertise from Black queer feminist texts and ancestors, arts practices, and creative engagement to expand our repertoire of negotiation strategy and practice. Our pedagogies will be creative, reflective, provocative, and dialogic. Core texts for this course include Dawn by Octavia Butler, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman, and The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.

Note: This course will meet for the first six weeks of the term.