Prerequisite: Negotiation Workshop

Exam Type: No Exam

This course is a space to think, feel, and practice negotiation philosophy and strategy 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 seeking to understand negotiation with/in the law as intimately related to the backdrops of colonialism, chattel slavery, and their afterlives. Fugitive Negotiation is a Black queer feminist approach to negotiating power, space, and purpose rooted in surviving long histories of extraction, violence, and dispossession, while visioning and building new futures; a negotiation theory that looks as closely at the power we can, do, and might wield as the power we encounter.

This course will invite you to examine how power shapes your negotiation and legal practice and to explore strategies beyond those traditionally offered in the law or marketed in its shadow. We will draw wisdom from Black queer feminist texts and ancestors, arts practices, and creative engagement to identify our negotiation principles and expand our negotiation repertoire. Our pedagogies will be experiential, reflective, embodied, provocative, and dialogic. This is not a lecture-based course or traditional seminar. Core texts for this course include Dawn by Octavia Butler, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman.

Note: This course will meet for six sessions in the first half of the term from September 7 to October 12, 2023.