| source Indiana University Bloomington (X) |
level |
department Cultural Studies (X) |
ÂGlobal Feminisms, co-taught with Maria Bucur (History Department), will be an inter-disciplinary course on important debates involving the status of women and feminist agency internationally. Organized around keywords such as ÂGender, ÂSubalternity, ÂResistance, ÂCitizenship, ÂSexuality, and ÂImperialism, the course explores these terms in different geopolitical contexts such as Europe, South Asia, and the Middle East. Our aim is to identify patriarchal paradigms that might be similar in these regions even as we engage with the specificities of the histories of different geographies. Course materials will draw from feminist theory, feminist historiography, novels and films. In our exploration of these materials, we will follow Cynthia EnloeÂs lead to ask what a Âfeminist curiosity can reveal about national and international affairs. A feminist curiosity raises new questions about the operations of gender: How do imperialism and its legacy inform gender and the world order? What role do women play in national liberation movements and resistance organizations? How does political detention have an impact on family relations? And how do women become more vocal about asserting new forms of agency and challenging cultural meanings for sexual violence and other gender-coded values? Our course materials will consider how struggles to define masculinity and femininity in public life are crucial means by which states and corporations advance their agendas. A feminist curiosity can illuminate the relationship between women and production and track changes in this relationship before and after the Cold War. Enabling new definitions of production itself, a focus on gender shows how national subjects in service of and against the state are created. In addition, it makes visible the means by which women are interpellated as both consumers and commodities in the global economy. Maria and I approach our scholarship from an interdisciplinary perspective informed by our training in area studies, and appointments in Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, History and English. Throughout the semester, we will encourage students to reflect on the constitution of archives, the nature of historical evidence, and the challenges of re-constituting womenÂs subjectivity and agency in the absence of voluminous documentation. We will also consider the significance of narrative form and language in relation to the content of specific texts, asking what narrative conventions women use in the telling of their stories. Because some experiences exceed the limits of language and representation, our explorations will necessarily wrestle with the challenge of interpreting the silences and gaps in our materials. Students should expect to participate actively in class discussion and produce papers that engage these debates in a transnational/comparative framework, making use of the interdisciplinary theoretical tools offered in the course. Our readings will include Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases; Joan Scott, Parite!; Meghan De La Hunt, In the Casa Azul; Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India; Sahar Khalifa, Wild Thorns; Margaretta DÂArcy, Tell Them Everything; as well as selections from books and articles by scholars such as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Gayle Rubin, Geoff Eley, Nira Yuval-Davis, Dan Haley, and Carol Pateman.
Score: 13.273791 Details | Listing | Web page
Over the last twenty-five years, media studies and Cultural Studies have seen increasing attention to reception, to the ways that audiences decode media texts. Previous theories had constructed the spectator as an abstract, disembodied entity who passively responded to the strategies and messages of media texts and industries. In reaction, scholars began to employ historical, ethnographic, and empirical research to examine how individual viewers or groups of viewers responded to films, TV shows, and other media within specific social contexts. These scholars helped diversify ideas of who spectators are and how they use media texts, showing the importance of age, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality to discussions of viewing. Within this context, the study of fans has emerged as a particularly vital area of inquiry. Working against the commonplace misunderstanding of fans as crazies or misfits, researchers analyze the fan as a spectator par excellenceÂan avid, participatory consumer of media texts whose practices speak volumes about the interpretive strategies and pleasures of viewers. In this course, we will begin by examining the methodological tools used in fan studies (particularly ethnographic and empirical methods). As we proceed, we will examine a number of questions that have structured this area of research, particularly in relation to film, television, and new media. Who are fans and what makes their viewing habits and strategies distinct? What are the interpretive practices of fans and how do they affect textual decoding? How do fans use media as a resource in their everyday lives? How have new media, such as the Internet and multiple platforms of access to film and television, affected the formation of fan communities and interactions with media texts? Can we consider fan activities as subversive? What challenges do cases of transnational fandom represent for fan studies? These questions are posed as a means of understanding the intricate relationships between viewers and mass culture particularly, but not exclusively, in a U.S. context. Weekly screenings will showcase films about fans, as well as a broad range of media texts favored by avid viewers, from cult film and TV programs to fan-made videos. These screenings will provide the opportunity to think through the fan theory and criticism we will read in class. In turn, assigned readings (by Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills, and many others) will acquaint the student with the development of fan studies in the field and the major schools of thought that have helped to define this area of scholarship. Assignments will also include presentations and a research paper.
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This seminar will explore the relationships among culture, power, subjectivity, and state formation through close readings of theoretical and ethnographic texts. We will examine how distinct theoretical approaches (Marxism, structuralism, post-structuralism, and feminism) have defined and analyzed these contested terms. Instead of assuming that culture, power, the subject, and the state are given concepts, we will study how their meanings have changed over time. How do cultural beliefs and outlooks organize the production, distribution, and even definition of power? How are power and subjectivity mutually constitutive? How do states structure power relations, define subjectivity, or shape cultural attitudes and expectations? How are states themselves produced through the practices and interpretive acts of their citizens? Developing insights from Marx and Engels, Weber, Gramsci, Althusser, Bourdieu, Butler, and Foucault, we will compare ethnographic works and their efforts to integrate various theoretical approaches with anthropological data. Students will be asked to evaluate and use these theoretical frameworks in relation to their own research. This course is designed for graduate students.
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In this class, we will read texts which explain the science of food and cooking with some literary flair. Beginning with Brillat SavarinÂs The Physiology of Taste and covering topics such as the molecular structure of various types of food, the locavore movement, food-borne illnesses and molecular gastronomy, we will explore several genres of scientific writing about food that combine elegant prose, exquisite description, and frequent meditations upon the nourishing aspects of food and literature to both the soul and the mind. Among the authors whose works we will read are This Hervé, Oliver Sacks, Russ Parsons, Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth Gilbert, Gary Paul Nabhan, and Michael Pollan.
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This graduate seminar is about everyday life as both problem and possibility for cultural politics. On the one hand, the humdrum routines associated with everyday lifeÂwaking, bathing, working, eating, consuming, playing, and resting every single dayÂmay stifle human creativity and foster complacency. On the other hand, as Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and others affirm, these very same routines also can be resources from which innovation might flow, to the extent that they present opportunities for doing the same thing all over again . . . but differently. This course will address this tension through four principal questions: what is everyday life? how does everyday life enable and constrain social and political action? in what ways has cultural studies engaged everyday life? and how might it continue to do so in ways that resist the fieldÂs becoming intellectually and politically unimaginativeÂits becoming, in the banal sense, everyday? Roughly the first half to two-thirds of this seminar will be dedicated to exploring specific theories and practices of everyday life. Thereafter, weÂll investigate how the field of cultural studies can find itself subjected to everyday lifeÂs deadening routines. Specifically, weÂll focus on everyday problems stemming from cultural studies institutionalization and internationalization. Our aim in this course, ultimately, is to think through the conditions necessary to reinvent the project of cultural studies for the 21st centuryÂa more imaginative, effective, and globally relevant cultural studies which, with any luck, might help to reinvigorate everyday life as both theoretical category and domain of human practice. Books are likely to include: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. I; Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life; Agnes Heller, Everyday Life; Gary Hall, Digitize This Book!; Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. II; Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis; Meaghan Morris, Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture; and Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects. We also will read essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, Rita Felski, Melissa Gregg, Lawrence Grossberg, Martin Heidegger, Michèle Mattelart, Meaghan Morris, Naoki Sakai, Gregory J. Seigworth, Dorothy Smith, Carolyn Steedman, and Raymond Williams, among possible others.
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This course examines the dynamics of popular culture and mass media in the Middle East, including the Arabic speaking nations, Israel, Turkey, and Iran. This course proceeds from the idea that popular culture and performance are in fact foundational means of negotiating power and resistance, social interaction, and identity. Through course readings, lectures, discussions, and various written assignments students will confront the many ways in which popular culture has had a formative impact upon conceptions of identity in the Middle East. Our readings will build upon fundamental anthropological understandings of social groups, of symbols and categories, the linkages of culture and agency, and the various forms of power in human social groups. Ethnographic case studies will explore Arab Pop, Israeli and Palestinian cinema, Egyptian television, Turkish Arabesk, transnational Hip-Hop, and the impact these media have on contemporary understandings of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and nation in the Middle East.
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This course examines the role of science and medicine in the construction(s) of "race," historically and in the present. Students will interrogate the development of scientific authority over American race relations as well as challenges to racial science, paying particular attention to the intersection of race with other categories of human difference, such as gender and sexuality. The readings will focus primarily on the United States, in order to examine in depth the specific historical contexts and changing cultural politics at play in scientific understandings of racial difference. Additional themes include: gender norms and racial thought; the production of scientific knowledge; biological determinism and raced/gendered bodies; health disparities; the racial coding of disease; and the implications of recent trends in genetic science.
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The course explores ethnographic research methods in the study of communication and culture. It is designed to connect the study of performance, public discourse, and media under the rubric of ethnography. We address a range of theoretical and methodological issues involved in constructing ethnographies of performance, text, public discourse, and media. The course begins by considering current questions related to ethnographic research practices, including ethnographic authority, ethics, intersubjectivity, and time and space. Through a series of case studies, we then look at how communicative practices ranging from live performances to mediated events have been approached ethnographically. Throughout the semester, students work on their own ethnography projects in the Bloomington area.
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Whether we think of it as a discursive practice (public address broadly construed to include everything from oratory to photojournalism to television to film to hyper-mediated web sites) or as a meta-discursive theory or techne, "rhetoric" has survived from classical times to the present in large measure as a result of its capacity to reinvent itself from one epoch to the next as a means of serving the changing demands of collective judgment  i.e., social judgment, political judgment, public judgment, etc.  at a particular historical moment. ÂJudgment or krisis is a problematic term that implicates and articulates the dynamic and culturally presumed relationship(s) between knowledge, understanding, and action in a world of contingencies and probabilities. Viewed from this perspective, Ârhetorical theory" is an always already unstable domain, a discourse practice subject to and predicated upon the changing conditions and configurations of judgment in collective life at any given moment. Such indeterminacy is a potential strength rather than a weakness, however, for it positions rhetorical theory as a potentially powerful heuristic for producing social and political criticism designed to respond to and effect the problems and possibilities of collective judgment at any given historical moment. The goal of this seminar is to examine the ways in which Ârhetoric is being (re)invented as a heuristic for social and political critique apropos the problem of public or collective judgment in late- or postmodern societies. By "late" or "post" modernity I mean to make general reference to the rapidly increasing (and often paradoxical) conditions of intellectual, political, and cultural fragmentation precipitated by hyper-specialization, pluralism, multi-culturalism, globalization, and high-speed electronic/digital mediation, all of which contribute to what Lyotard calls the "incredulity to metanarratives" and which we might identify as the prevailing discourses of Âprogress, Âsovereignty, Âthe nation-state, Âthe liberal-democratic consensus, and so on. We will move to our task by framing the problematic within a dialectic of hermeneutics and critical theory, and then examining some of the more prominent ways in which rhetoric-as-judgment is constituted therein as a praxis designed to mediate the contemporary demands of collective decision-making and action. Key topics will include the relationship between rhetoric and aesthetics (and epistemology); constitutive rhetorics and public emotionality; and phronesis and prudence. Throughout, we will focus attention on specific, problematic instances of social and political judgment in contemporary public culture. This course will be of interest to anyone concerned with exploring the possibilities of Ârhetoric as heuristic to the performance and transformation of public culture across media. It should be of particular interest to those studying the relationship(s) between discourse and social/political theory, and especially those concerned to retheorize the relationship between Âliberalism and Âdemocracy in contemporary Western public culture. Readings will draw from a range of 20th and 21st century readings on the relationship between rhetoric and judgment that draws prominently from rhetorical studies as well as social and political theory broadly considered. The course is reading intensive. Assignments will include student journals, a theoretical review essay in which students put rhetorical theorists in dialogue with those working in related areas, and several in-class presentations.
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This course takes a serious look at horror as a cultural and cinematic form, and attempts to draw some conclusions about its ÂpoliticsÂÂsexual, ethnic, familial, economic etc. How has horror dealt with social changes in sexual mores. gender roles and family structure, political and economic events, the increasing role of technology in our lives, AIDS, addiction? Is horror essentially conservative or does it challenge accepted social paradigms? What is its relationship to mainstream cinema and to cultural criticism at large? What is the relationship of art-horror to trash cinema; horror to the avant-garde? Films will include: Meet Me in St. Louis, George RomeroÂs original Night of the Living Dead, Michael PowellÂs Peeping Tom, HitchcockÂs Psycho, and units on European horror, experimental horror, vampire films, Asian Extreme horror and early horror. Readings will run the gamut from novels (Geek Love, Dracula) to theory by Derrida, Freud, Carol Clover, Barbara Creed, Mark Jancovich, Jeff Sconce, Linda Williams, Robin Wood and other scholars working on the genre. There will be some lecture, but the class will be conducted primarily as a seminar. Weekly screenings. Required course work will include a short paper, an oral presentation and a final project. Readings: Essays on e-reserve Mark Jancovich, Horror: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2001) Carol Clover, Men , Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, 1992) Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in AmericaÂs Wound Culture (Routledge, 1998) Katharine Dunn, Geek Love Bram Stoker, Dracula
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