Spring 2024 Cultural Studies Courses

 CULS-C 601: Introduction to Cultural Studies

Rhetorical Theories of Cultural Production

• Registration Information: CULS-C601-0001 (#13998)
• Meeting Information: W 9:45a-12:45p in ED 2280
• Joint Listed with: ENG-R611
• Instructor: Freya Thimsen
• Course Description: This seminar will provide an in-depth consideration of some of the foundational texts of Cultural Studies. This will include reading key works produced by scholars associated with Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, the Frankfurt School, and public sphere theory. In addition to reading key texts in each of these areas, we will also read works that inspired them and have been inspired by them, including Marx, psychoanalysis, Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Spivak, Butler, etc. The trajectory of Cultural Studies from the mid-twentieth century to today prompts us to consider urgent questions about the relationship between scholarly work and contemporary politics and culture. These questions may include: What does it mean to do scholarly research that is informed by political concerns about culture? What are the ethical and political implications of methodologies in studies of culture? What is the relationship between the cultural researcher and that which they write about? What are the political potentials of critical and materialist methods for studying culture? How do decolonial and antiracist imperatives extend and reject foundational cultural studies approaches? How is the relationship between the university and knowledge production about culture changing and remaining the same? Course participants will write weekly reading responses and complete a final essay.

CULS-C 701: Special Topics in Cultural Studies

Power, Subjectivity, and the State

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0001 (#33570)
• Meeting Information: M 4:10p-6:40p in SB 138
• Joint Listed with: ANTH-E648
• Instructor: Sara Friedman
• Course Description: Explores relationships among culture, power, subjectivity, and the state through close readings of theoretical and ethnographic texts. We will examine how different theoretical approaches have defined and used these contested terms. Developing insights from social theorists, we will compare ethnographic efforts to integrate theory with anthropological data.

The Social Life of Intertextuality

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0002 (#33571)
• Meeting Information: Tu 3:00p-5:30p in BH 010
• Joint Listed with: ANTH-E647
• Instructor: Jane Goodman
• Course Description: Charts the foundations of the concept of intertextuality in the works of Bakhtin and others. Explores modes of intertextuality in relation to genre and performance. Investigates intertextuality as a social, political and cultural practice in a range of ethnographic settings.

Popular Culture in the Middle East

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0003 (#33573)
• Meeting Information: Th 1:00p-3:30p in C2 203
• Joint Listed with: FOLK-F617
• Instructor: David McDonald
• Course Description: This graduate seminar explores the dynamics of popular culture, politics, and media throughout the Middle East and North Africa, including Turkey, Israel, and Iran. Through our readings, discussions, and various course activities students will confront the many ways in which popular culture and media has had a formative and foundational impact upon conceptions of identity throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Our readings will build upon fundamental understandings of social groups, the linkages of culture and agency, and the various forms of power and resistance articulated through expressive, performative, and media cultures. Various case studies will critically examine Egyptian soap operas, Iraqi comic books, Turkish love songs, Arab pop music, Israeli and Palestinian cinema, Moroccan crime novels, Iranian protest songs, and the impact these various media have had on contemporary understandings of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and globalization in the contemporary Middle East.  While open to graduate students in all fields interested in qualitative humanities-based research, this is an area course in the graduate folklore and ethnomusicology curriculum. This course also fulfills the CULS 701 requirement for the Ph.D. minor in Cultural Studies and is Cross Listed in the Department of Middle Eastern Cultures and Languages and the IU Media School.

Ethnomusicology Beyond the Human

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0004 (#33574)
• Meeting Information: : W 11:00a-1:30p in C2 272
• Joint Listed with: FOLK-F722
• Instructor: Julianne Graper
• Course Description: Scholars in a wide range of disciplines have questioned the figure of “the human,” its function in humanities discourses, and the historical inequities it implies (Boiserron 2018; Haraway 2008; Jackson 2020).  While ethnomusicologists have begun to adopt some such approaches, a radical reorientation away from the concept of “humanly organized sound” (Blacking 1973) remains to be achieved. This seminar will bring together theoretical approaches from actor-network theory, cyborg theory, critical animal studies, sound studies, science and technology studies, ecomusicology, traditional ecological knowledges, and inhumanism/Black studies, questioning how each might critically intervene in the discipline of ethnomusicology.
  
  The seminar will be taught in preparation for an end of semester symposium, entitled Ethnomusicology Beyond the Human. The symposium will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds to consider the question, “What does it mean to be human?”  Students will read works by each of the invited speakers as well as situating materials. The final project for the course will be a collectively written document that will be presented at the symposium and slated for inclusion in a forthcoming edited volume.  As such, the seminar considers new forms of interdisciplinarity and collaboration, providing opportunities for students to become directly engaged in the research process.

Indigenous and Black Transfeminisms

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0005 (#33575)
• Meeting Information: Th 3:00p-5:30p in (TBD)
• Joint Listed with: AMST-G751
• Instructor: Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa
• Course Description: This graduate seminar focuses on trans-feminist organizing and its production of aesthetics and texts informed by ideas surrounding Indigeneity and Blackness, and their critique of colonialism, capitalism, and the state across the American hemisphere. Our working definition of trans-feminism locates it as a coalitional, transborder, immigrant, and antiracist struggle working towards gender abolition. In this sense, the class explores the meanings of Blackness and Indigeneity in contemporary scholarship stemming from Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Latinx studies. Trans-feminist approaches are situated in relation to concepts such as marica and travesti, as well as with pre-settler and pre-colonial indigenous non-binary identities.

Music, Gender, and Queer Studies

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0006 (#33830)
• Meeting Information: Tu 10:00a-12:30p in C2 272
• Joint Listed with: FOLK-F722
• Instructor: Eduardo Herrera
• Course Description: This seminar will examine how contemporary ethno/musicological scholarship engages with recent developments in gender and queer theories, scholarship on LGBTQIA+ topics, and social justice projects that challenge patriarchy, heteronormativity, and sexism.  By entering a dialogue with recent works in ethnomusicology, we seek to critically understand how queer and trans-inclusive ethnomusicology might look like, how music, gender, and queer studies inform each other, and what we can illuminate by studying sound and music as we embrace queer methodologies, queer field sites, queer folks, queer sounds, and queer listening. Tentative topics include queer and trans bodies, performative construction of masculinities, musical misogynism, transphobia, and homophobia, transgender vocal performance, camp, homoeroticism, drag and cross-dressing, butch/trans masculinities, Black/Brown queerness, and media representations of polyamory. However, students will be encouraged to propose materials and directions according to their research interests.

Poetics, Ritual, & Embodiment

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0007 (#34162)
• Meeting Information: W 3:00p-5:30p in C2 272
• Joint Listed with: FOLK-F734/ LATS-L701/ GNDR-G701
• Instructor: Solimar Otero
• Course Description: This course explores the relationship between gender and embodiment with an emphasis on ritual elements found in narrative.  By focusing on transnational works that engage with magic and metaphysics, we examine how poetics in literature and art approximate conjure in unique and foundational ways.  Film, performance, and multi-media productions will also be consulted.  Topics to be discussed include but are not limited to: Afrofuturism, post-humanism, queer narrative and performance, and Latine and Indigenous decoloniality.

Critical Black Thought

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0008 (#34630)
• Meeting Information: Tu 1:15p-3:45p in BH140
• Joint Listed with: AAAD-E697-0001
• Instructor: Judith Rodriguez
• Course Description (Updated!): To name a Hemispheric Black Studies calls into question what Carol Boyce Davis discusses as “the narrow U.S. paradigm of Afro-U.S.-centricity as the equivalent of all America” and positions (anti)Blackness as structurally and globally significant. This course takes up Carol Boyce Davis’s critique as foundational for critical black thought because such a critique forces us to expand its geopolitical and affective registers. We will therefore discuss the importance of theory and theorizing for the Black diaspora by closely reading texts within Black study that create novel frameworks of critical black thought for describing, analyzing, and defining the current moments of Black life and living.

Ideology and Storytelling: New Addition!

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0009 (#34959)
• Meeting Information: TuTh 9:45a-11:00a in AD A151
• Joint Listed with: THTR-T583
• Instructor: Ana Candida Carneiro
• Course Description: Stories are not innocent. In this class, we will examine how they carry ideological constructs, intentionally or unintentionally. By looking at artistic creations across disciplines – from plays, to spectacle, to film, to graphic novels, to video games – we will tap into the deep connection of structure to thought or content. Students will be exposed to a variety of texts that will enhance their competence in cultural criticism, with an emphasis on decoloniality. This course has a strong critical thinking component but adopts a pedagogical approach that supports creativity.