SMC2 - Engineered Pathologies: Expanding Mike Davis’s 1990s Los Angeles to a Critique of All of California and All of Its History

Course Description:

Mike Davis’s City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear provide searing critiques of Los Angeles as a city shaped by speculation, militarized policing, and disaster capitalism—forces that, rather than being unique to LA, are symptomatic of broader patterns in California’s history. This course expands Davis’s critical framework not only statewide but also historically, tracing how systems of exclusion, environmental destruction, and racialized fear long predate the state’s official founding. By integrating applied health humanities, this course deepens Davis’s structural critique to examine the psychological, moral, and existential injuries produced by systemic inequality, focusing on how individuals, communities, and cultures metabolize—or fail to metabolize—historical traumas.

From Indigenous genocide and land dispossession to racialized labor control and prison expansion, California has functioned as a testing ground for some of the most extreme formations of engineered pathologies—economic, political, social, and environmental crises actively produced by human design. These structural forces have led to collective moral injuries that manifest as public health crises, systemic abandonment, and social despair. Yet, alongside these engineered pathologies, alternative histories of resistance, resilience, and healing emerge, raising the question: Can we imagine California otherwise?

Key Questions:

• How do cycles of dispossession, labor exploitation, and environmental destruction define California’s history?

• How does the mythology of California—as a land of endless opportunity—mask its deeper patterns of racial exclusion and economic extraction?

• How do narratives of fear, apocalypse, and social collapse serve to justify ongoing state violence, economic inequality, and environmental destruction?

• What are the psychological and moral consequences of living in a society structured by fear, displacement, and structural abandonment?

• How can an applied health humanities perspective illuminate alternative frameworks for resistance, repair, and justice?

Through readings in urban geography, environmental history, critical race theory, and health humanities, students will reframe California’s history as a series of engineered crises—not inevitable, but actively produced, and therefore contestable.

Course Objectives:

By the end of the course, students will:

1. Apply Mike Davis’s critiques beyond Los Angeles to a broader, historically grounded analysis of California.

2. Examine how racial capitalism, environmental destruction, and state violence have been systematically engineered.

3. Explore the psychological and moral injuries that result from structural pathologies and their impact on collective health.

4. Integrate health humanities to analyze how narratives of trauma, resilience, and agency shape public consciousness.

5. Develop original research projects that apply these critical frameworks to contemporary California issues.

Course Readings:

Primary Texts:

• Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

• Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

• Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (selected chapters)

• Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (excerpts)

Expanded Readings:

• Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West

• Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (for comparison)

• Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (on global racial capitalism)

• Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics

• Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (on the psychic effects of economic precarity)

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership

• Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

• Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

• Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development

Supplementary Media & Film:

• Requiem for the American Dream (Noam Chomsky)

• Chinatown (1974, for water politics in California)

• Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003, on urban mythmaking)

• The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (on carceral geography)

Course Schedule:

Week 1: California as a Construct: Myth, Crisis, and Pathology

• The fantasy of California as a land of opportunity

• The contradictions of its history: exclusion, extraction, and engineered inequalities

Readings:

• Davis, City of Quartz, Introduction

• Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (excerpt)

Week 2: The Architecture of Exclusion—Racial Capitalism, Real Estate, and Urban Warfare

• How exclusionary zoning, policing, and racialized labor have shaped California’s geography

• The carceral logic of urban planning

Readings:

• Davis, City of Quartz, Ch. 3: "Fortress LA"

• Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit (excerpt)

• Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land (excerpt)

Week 3: Indigenous Dispossession and Settler Capitalism

• California’s Indigenous genocide and its long aftermath

• The health consequences of intergenerational displacement

Readings:

• Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting (comparison)

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag, Ch. 1

Week 4: California’s Environmental Collapses—Disaster Capitalism in Action

• Fire, drought, and privatization of natural resources

• Speculative development in catastrophe-prone regions

Readings:

• Davis, Ecology of Fear, Ch. 2

• Julie Sze, Noxious New York (selected sections)

Week 5: Fear as Governance—Media, Racialized Violence, and the Politics of Paranoia

• How fear justifies repression and economic inequality

• The role of media in maintaining social pathologies

Readings:

• Davis, Ecology of Fear, Ch. 4: “Beyond Blade Runner”

• Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics

Week 6: Applied Health Humanities—Psychic and Moral Pathologies of Structural Violence

• How do individuals and communities metabolize trauma?

• What is the role of resilience, agency, and relational repair?

Readings:

• Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (excerpt)

• Ananya Roy, Poverty Capital

Final Weeks: Research & Project Development

• Students will develop an original critique applying course themes to contemporary California issues.

• Project options: traditional research papers, multimedia storytelling, or intervention-based policy critiques.

Assignments & Evaluation:

1. Reading Responses (20%) – Weekly reflections on course materials

2. Short Analysis Paper (15%) – Applying Davis’s framework to a contemporary issue

3. Midterm Exam (20%) – Testing comprehension of key concepts

4. Final Project Proposal (10%) – Outlining and justifying final research project

5. Final Project (35%) – A deep-dive analysis applying course themes to California’s history

Conclusion:

This course reframes California as a space where engineered inequalities manifest as collective pathologies, extending Davis’s critique both historically and across disciplines. By integrating health humanities, it offers students a new analytic lens to examine how power structures impact not just economic and political realities, but also the moral and psychological fabric of individuals and communities. The ultimate goal is to equip students with the critical tools needed to expose, critique, and reimagine California’s past, present, and future.