Fall 2024 Cultural Studies Courses

 CULS-C 601: Introduction to Cultural Studies

Media Research

• Registration Information: CULS-C601-0001 (#32377)
• Meeting Information: Th 6:30PM-8:30PM in FF310
• Joint Listed with: MSCH-M502
• Instructor: Ryan Powell
• Course Description: This course serves as the introduction to Cultural Studies course which is required for the minor. 

CULS-C 701: Special Topics in Cultural Studies

Interpreting Religion

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0001 (#33382)
• Meeting Information: We 3:00PM-5:30PM (Classroom TBA)
• Joint Listed with: REL-R665
• Instructor: Winnie Sullivan
• Course Description: This course is an invitation to think deeply together about what we might mean by religion through thoughtful encounters with some intriguing and provocative writing about religious stuff, with a view to helping you to find your own voice in this conversation.

History of Rhetorical Theory II

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0002 (#33384)
• Meeting Information: Mo 11:30AM-2:30PM in AC C103
• Joint Listed with: ENG-R608
• Instructor: John Arthos
• Course Description:
  • : All are welcome to this introductory seminar, which will explore the extraordinary career of a discipline that has hidden in plain sight for much of its two thousand year history. In one of the great paradigm battles of intellectual culture, rhetoric and philosophy faced off as fierce disciplinary rivals, and for more than half that time, it may come as a surprise, rhetoric held sway at the summit of the humanities. Even more explosive than this status game is the fact that rhetoric has held latent within itself epistemic and ontological treasures that we are still mining for all their radical potential. Rhetoric’s modest tool-chest of usable knowledge has held conceptual resources for challenging the standard scientific, religious, and philosophical guardians of knowledge, truth and right. Running quietly along the subterranean channels of composition and speech instruction, it periodically sets off nuclear explosions that remake the intellectual landscape. Grounded in the contingent and situated demands of audience and occasion, rhetorical instruction undermines the presumptions of absolute certainty, autonomous judgment, categorial logic, and transparent knowledge. Governing the arts of genre, figure, invention, composition, style, memory, and performance, it has proven a powerfully transgressive weapon against the claims of methodological, classificatory, and ahistorical thinking. From out of its mobile army of resources we discover that advances in theoretical science are impossible without the figural imagination, practical judgment is impotent without narrative and symbolic understanding, reason is self-deluding without acknowledging its affective and ideological investments, morality sits atop an unstable dialectic of convention and invention, and deliberation disingenuously skates over the inescapable pluralism of our social being. When you turn these paradigm-busting insights on the urgent political questions of our times, you get a very different look at the difficult work of social transformation.

  Selected Reading List:

  • Barbara Biesecker and John Lucaites, eds. Rhetoric, Materiality, & Politics. Lang, 2009.
  • Catherine Chaput, Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates. USC Press, 2019.
  • Karma R. Chávez. Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities. U of Illinois Press, 2013.
  • James Crosswhite. Deep Rhetoric: Philosophy, Reason, Violence, Justice, Wisdom. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2014.
  • Kevin M. DeLuca. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. Guilford Press, 1999.
  • Debra Hawhee. A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis Is Changing Rhetoric. U of Chicago Press, 2023.

Theory for Troubled Times

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0003 (#33387)
• Meeting Information: W 3:00PM-5:30PM in PV 270/ W 7:00PM-10:00PM in LI 048
• Joint Listed with: CTIH-T500
• Instructor: Joan Hawkins
• Course Description:
  • This class will revisit poststructuralist and  postmodern theory within the contemporary context, specifically its relationship to panic culture (both the ways in which it theorizes everyday panic and has been used to construct new, anti-intellectual, anti-theoretical panics both within and without the academy).We willl read theory and see films that address the issues we confronted—and still confront—in everyday life: ambient fear, panic, paranoia, conspiracy theory, epidemic contagion, the role of the media and emerging technologies, perpetual war, cyberspace, the status of the body, sex and gender, race, nationalism, culture, and that thorniest of issues—the relativity of knowledge and truth. While many of the texts were written by academic theorists and scholars for an academic audience, a number target readers outside the academy. Our class discussions will revolve as much around the dialogue between these two kinds of theory—academic and nonacademic—as it will be structured around the topics and themes themselves.

   

  Readings will include:  Henry Giroux (2021), Race, Politics and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (London, New York et al: Bloomsbury Academic), Naomi Klein (2023), Doppelganger : A Trip into the Mirror World (NY: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux) to look at some attempts to address contemporary concerns from a theory-friendly perspective. Works by Hal Foster, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, Brian Massumi, Mark Dery, de Certeau,  Bourdieu, Latour, Foucault, Paul Virilio, bell hooks,  Donna Haraway, Scott Bukatman, Constance Penley, Fredric Jameson, Lawrence Rickels , Leo Bersani,  Virginie Despentes, Avital Ronell,  Hardt and Negri, Paul Presciado’s Testo Junky and François Cusset’s French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Co Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States.

Aesthetics in the Anthropocene

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0004 (#33494)
• Meeting Information: Tu 4:45PM-7:00 PM in BH 317
• Joint Listed with: GER-G625
• Instructor: Teresa Kovacs
• Course Description:
• In this class, we delve into the complex intersections between art and the environment, exploring how creative practices can both reflect and respond to the challenges of our rapidly changing world.
  
  Through guided readings and discussions, we will grapple with pressing questions surrounding environmental degradation, climate change, and the Anthropocene epoch and pay close attention to their interconnection with the transformation of literary and theatrical forms. The main focus and the goal of the class will be to collectively work on a possible special issue/edited book volume dedicated to this topic and/or to support you step-by-step to work on an article that can be submitted to a journal by the end of the semester. By focusing on research, writing, and presentation skills, participants will emerge from this course equipped to contribute to ongoing dialogues within academia and beyond.

Beat Religion

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0005 (#33496)
• Meeting Information: Tu 4:00PM-6:30PM in BH 221
• Joint Listed with: REL-R667, REL-R767
• Instructor: Cooper Harriss
• Course Description:
• As writers and artists who challenged American norms in the immediate postwar era, the Beats famously turned to cars, jazz, sex, drugs, and “kicks” in order to think, feel, and express in new ways (establishing American norms of their own in the process). Less notably (yet of equal importance), they were religious seekers and visionaries—Jewish and Catholic mystics, appropriators of Buddhist thought, fetishists of ecstatic expression, and practitioners of a “Bop Apocalypse.” Indeed, the word “Beat” itself is said to derive in part from the “Beatitudes” of the Christian Bible. This seminar asserts that Beat culture and social practice should be understood as an important 20th century transnational US religious movement. In pursuit of this understanding we’ll pair a cultural-historical overview of these Beats with a series of important critical contexts afforded by the study of religion, seeking simultaneously to expand our conception of Beat culture while refining religion’s broader critical possibilities. Readings include literary texts and other primary sources, works of cultural criticism and theory, and religious studies work that spans subfields of religion and literature, American religion, the history of religions, religion and law, and social scientific religious approaches. 

Women's Folklore

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0006 (#33503)
• Meeting Information: TuTh 11:30AM-12:45PM in LH 004
• Joint Listed with: FOLK-F802
• Instructor: Solimar Otero
• Course Description:
• This combined undergraduate and graduate course explores women's folklore. We engage with a range of cultures, locations, and practices that emphasize the central yet constructed nature of gender and sexuality.  Topics include but are not limited to artistic creation, migration, trauma, family relations, the body, spirituality, and social movements.  Course materials include fairytales, rituals, film, literature, visual art, and performance. Women’s expressive culture from Kenya, Senegal, Japan, Cuba, the United States, Ancient Greece, France, (among other transnational cultural contexts), will be engaged with in this class).

Music and its Poetics

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0007 (#34813)
• Meeting Information: MW 1:15PM-2:30PM in BH 018
• Joint Listed with: ENG-L646-0002
• Instructor: Alberto Varon
• Course Description: Forthcoming!

Narratives of Healing and Abolition

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0008 (#34885)
• Meeting Information: Tu 10:00AM-12:30PM in BH 503
• Joint Listed with: AMST-G751
• Instructor: Sonia Lee
• Course Description:
• This course explores narratives of healing and abolition, as imagined, embodied, and practiced by Black, Latinx & Afro-Latinx, Asian American and Indigenous activists and artists. It recognizes that carceral logics are located not only in prisons, but also in ordinary places like progressive K-12 schools, universities, church worship services, health clinics, substance abuse treatment programs, and movement spaces. It shapes every social relation that is embedded within capitalist, racialized and gendered hierarchies in which human beings have been subjected to a politics of surveillance, punishment, social death, and structures of unwellness. How, then, have abolitionists and healers envisioned spaces of quiet, communion, surrender and interdependence in the midst of living in a constant state of crisis? How have Black feminists produced images and embodiments of Black girl pleasure and power when their bodies are still reviled as sexually deviant? Have quotidian practices like storytelling and creative play produced new measures of success, health and happiness for women of color? While most of the texts covered in this class will focus on poetic, artistic, and quotidian practices that reveal how feminists of color learned to “mother” themselves within non-institutional settings, it will also consider their engagement with institutions and ideologies that sustain mainstream notions of health, salvation, and healing, such as hospitals and insurance companies, Christian theologies of substitutionary atonement, Pentecostal drug ministries, and the World Health Organization. Borrowing Kevin Quashie’s conceptualization of the aesthetic of “Black aliveness,” we will ask, how do ordinary folks of color reimagine their relationship with themselves and the world around them by envisioning a new poetics of being?

Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0009 (#35697)
• Meeting Information: We 9:30AM-12:00PM (Room TBD)
• Joint Listed with: AMST-G603-0002
• Instructor: Karen Inoyue
• Course Description:
• Representative readings in interdisciplinary scholarship; the origins and the development of American Studies and current trends.

Screen Technologies and Cultures

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0010 (#35698)
• Meeting Information: Th 9:00AM-11:30AM in FF 212
• Joint Listed with: MSCH-C792
• Instructor: Stephanie DeBoer
• Course Description: The goal of this course is to encourage new critical scholarship on the relationships between screen technologies, screen spaces, and cultural screen practices.  
  
  Over the past several decades, we have witnessed increasing attention to the study and practice of “screen cultures.” Academic programs and journals, public forums, and courses such as this one have identified the “screen” (however defined) as a significant entry point for inquiry into the dynamics that form our everyday to spectacular film and media lives. Certainly, this inquiry has accompanied the proliferation of a wide range screens of differing shapes, sizes, and properties in the spaces in which we live, dwell, work, play, create, commune, and transit. They influence the ways in which we experience these spaces and our presence within them. They are technologies and interfaces that connect us to other people, communities, information, expressions, causes, and entertainment. They situate us where we are. They are also tools for our control, tracking, and surveillance.
  
  This identification of the “screen” as a locus of inquiry at the same time indicates an uneasy search for vocabulary to adequately address the ways in which screen-based technologies, spaces, and practices are often located at the intersections between cinema, television, video, computation, architecture, spatial design, advertising, performance, and (often public) infrastructure and art – all further situated within a range of locations, ecologies, and processes. As befits the various conjunctives that identify the “screen,” readings will be interdisciplinary. As further befits the variety of situations that form “screen space,” subject areas will also be globally dispersed. Readings will attend to the scope of this inquiry across cinema and media studies, screen studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, media archaeology, media architecture and design, media art and activism, studies of media ecologies, postcolonial and transnational media studies, and media infrastructure studies.
  
  While grounded in scholarship by both established and emerging writers and practitioners, this course is also designed to be in some sense speculative and encouraging of innovative work by individuals and the seminar group. Much attention will be placed upon the location of scholarship and theorization – particularly important as a corrective to some approaches that have been uncritical of the dynamics (of power, location, identity, experience, and so on) through which theories and critical tools are produced and reproduced.