New and Revised Courses
New and revised courses approved by faculty during the 2021-2022 academic year will be displayed here.
The following New and Revised Courses and Programs were approved by the Scripps College faculty during the 2021-2022 academic year. These courses will be within the Course Descriptions and Programs of Study sections of the 2022-2023 catalog, and are presented here to highlight them as additions/revisions to the College’s curriculum this year.
Approved by Scripps faculty in October 2021
ART114 SC: Expanded Ceramics: Making a Feminist Life
Description: This course brings the critical insights and questions of Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life into direct conversation with ceramics studio practice. Students will examine their artistic methodologies, identify openings for feminist art practice, and expand their work into that space. Our work will be grounded by four major projects that begin with a cue from Ahmed: 1) chipping away, 2) brick wall, 3) cement, and 4) material manifesto. Class time includes group discussion and studio work.
ART118 SC: Expanded Ceramics: Buidling Historical Memory
Description: This course examines the ways hegemonic historical memory is represented in this country, and how contemporary artists are engaging with, subverting, or inverting this construction. From this examination, students will articulate and investigate strategies for building critical historical memory through sculptural engagement in private and public spaces (and spaces that shift in-between). Focus is on local subjects, with an emphasis on historical and contemporary student activism and action.
BIOL61L KS : Genomics & Society
Description: Genomics has revolutionized the study of medicine and biology, but has also generated complex controversies. This non-majors course (Natural Science) course will provide a foundation in the scientific principles governing the structure, function and evolution of genomes, as well as highlight key genomic technologies. Along the way, we will also place these topics in a broader ethical and social context. The course will focus on the ways genomics intersects with human society and include topics such as personalized genomics, ancestry detection, and agricultural genomics. This course does not count towards Biology-related majors.
BIOL113L KS : Ornithology
Description: Ornithology is an upper-level biology course with a lab component. It will reinforce student understanding of basic anatomy and physiology, evolution, and ecology of birds and expand on this knowledge with an in-depth study of their biology, including avian form, diversity, behavior, and conservation. Students will engage in discussion of current scientific articles, apply the scientific method to the study of birds in the field, and learn to identify Southern California birds by visual and behavioral characteristics as well as by call and song.
BIOL/CHEM/PHYS/EA/NEUR197 KS: Natural Science Research I
Description: Students will gain experience working independently on a natural science research experience, whether it involves field, laboratory, or data investigation and must be taken in collaboration with a Keck Science faculty member. The format and expectations of the research will be mutually agreed upon at the start of the semester. At the end of the semester, students will complete a project which could include things such as a reflection paper, an oral or poster presentation, a lab notebook, a dataset, a protocol, a figure, etc. This course is a ¼ credit course with a 3-5 hour commitment each week. The course is taken pass/fail and can be repeated up to the maximum allowed by the student’s home college, with the same research mentor or with different research mentors. May not be applied toward major requirements. In any semester, students may take only one Natural Science Research course at Keck Science.
BIOL/CHEM/PHYS/EA/NEUR198 KS : Natural Science Research II
Description: Students will gain experience working independently on a natural science research experience, whether it involves field, laboratory, or data investigation and must be taken in collaboration with a Keck Science faculty member. The format and expectations of the research will be mutually agreed upon at the start of the semester. At the end of the semester, students will complete a project which could include things such as a reflection paper, an oral or poster presentation, a lab notebook, a dataset, a protocol, a figure, etc. This course is a ½ credit course with a 6-8 hour commitment each week. The course is taken pass/fail and can be repeated up to the maximum allowed by the student’s home college, with the same research mentor or with different research mentors. May not be applied toward major requirements. In any semester, students may take only one Natural Science Research course at Keck Science.
CLAS164 SC: Pompeii and the Cities of Vesuvius
Description: Explores the archaeology, history, and art and architecture of the ancient Roman towns of the Bay of Naples buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79CE, including Pompeii and Herculaneium, as well as the villas and estates in the area. Examines the evidence for daily life in an ancient Roman city through the unusually well-preserved remains of these sites and considers them in the context of the wider Roman world.
ECON134SC: Corporate Finance
Description: The purpose of this course is to introduce the techniques of financial analysis with applications to corporate finance. We will assume the perspective of the financial manager, making decisions about what investments to undertake and how to finance these projects. The main topics covered include the time value of money and the net present value rule; valuation of bonds and stocks; capital budgeting decisions; uncertainty and the tradeoff between risk and return; portfolio theory; corporate financing decisions, and financial planning.
FGSS177 SC: Creating Revolutions
Description: In this course, we will explore the rich and diverse ways that feminists of color in the global North and South are revisioning social justice and revolution through their visual art—whether this be painting, photography, mixed media, murals, and other forms of street art. We will look at the biographies, and the explicit and/or implicit political critiques offered by individual and collective visual art projects. We will also be creating our own art through the class.
FGSS188 SC: Feminist and Queer Writing and Anthropology
Description: This class will explore a diverse range of ethnographic writing that has been explicitly, or implicitly, produced as “feminist” and/or “queer” within the field of Anthropology. We will look at the theoretical interventions that have shifted ethnographic writing from earlier conventions of hetero‐ masculinist and white European “objectivity” in the classifying and the study of “other cultures.” We will spend the first few weeks situating ourselves in the classic, and latest debates, about gender and writing culture. We will, then, spend most of the class looking at one ethnography a week and discussing its feminist and/or queer and/or queer feminist perspectives.
GERM111 SC: Leaden Times: Film After 1968
Description: More than 50 years on, 2021 looks a lot like 1968 did: widespread political upheaval and economic crises; global war, mass migration, unresolved fights for equality and civil rights, student revolts, violent political terror, deteriorating welfare states… And cinema was there to record it all. In fact, no other period in international cinema has been more impactful than the late 1960’s. This comparative film history class discusses some of Germany’s most influential/controversial political films of the time in conversation with a selection of international productions of and since 1968. Features a thorough introduction to film theory and film analysis. Taught in German.
MUSC111SC: Music and Power
Description: This course examines how music has been used to shape society and particularly how imbalances of power are maintained or redressed through musical means. After a brief introduction to definitions of how music deploys power, ideology, and coercion, we will investigate how changes in sociopolitical, cultural, and technological arenas have in turn influenced the production of music. Specifically, the course explores the following questions: What is the relationship between music and power? How have nations and other cultural entities used music to consolidate power and form collective identity? How has music evolved in response to changes in technology, or shifting political landscapes? How have changes in the economic structure of societies changed the shape and content of music? How has music been an ‘activist art’ and how has it served the status quo?
PHYS187B KS: Quantum Field Theory
Description: This course is an advanced physics course in particle physics and relativistic field theory. Topics include: the spectrum and interaction vertices of the Standard Model; decay rates; scattering amplitudes; Feynman diagrams. Additionally: field Lagrangians; symmetries; conserved quantities, scalar, spinor, and vector fields. Lastly: the emergence of particles as quantized excitations of fields.Prerequisites include Physics 35 or equivalent (special relativity and a first introduction to quantum mechanics). Some prior familiarity with Lagrangian mechanics will be helpful, but not strictly necessary.
POLI146 SC:Slow Theory: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Description: In this seminar, we will examine one exceptionally good work of political theory, read slowly over the course of the semester. Taking the time to slow down, students are encouraged to linger in the text’s richness and complexity, to find pleasure in thinking more deeply and with care, and to resist feeling pressured always to read instrumentally – as if the efficient processing of information and extraction of key points defined reading well. Moving slowly through a single text, we will also have time to examine supporting materials for historical context and to better understand the authors and ideas with which our primary text is engaged.
POLI147 SC: Slavery and its Afterlives
Description: This course examines what Saidiya Hartman calls the ‘afterlife of slavery.’ By drawing from readings in cultural studies, Black feminist theory, sociology, philosophy, and decolonial thought, the class explores questions surrounding the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlives. A crucial goal of the course is to engage critically the meaning of sexuality, intimacy, reproduction, labor, and domination in slaveholding societies. Throughout the course, students will discuss how the afterlives of slavery inform current ethical debates on issues like: sexual violence, reparations, surveillance, criminalization, incarceration, housing, militarism, imperialism, distribution of wealth, environmental racism, education, mental illness, political participation, and anti-colonial activism. The course is therefore structured less as a historical survey of slavery and more as an investigation as to how slavery is remembered and its rhetorical function when reasoning about today’s moral and political controversies. Special attention is paid to how a study of slavery’s afterlives challenges narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and innocence, as well as stories commonly told about freedom, emancipations, and racial progress.
POLI187N SC : Global Migration and Citizenship
Description: This course provides a survey of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of borders, migration, and citizenship. We will examine current debates around immigration policy in the United States, militarized border regimes in Latin America, exploitation of Black migrants in Europe, and the racial politics of citizenship in the “Black Mediterranean.” Students will explore the role of U.S. foreign policy and international financial institutions in creating the conditions for forced displacement and mass migration. The seminar also draws on Black feminist, Black queer, and anti-colonial thought to explore the prevalence of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous discourses in Latinx movements for migrant justice. By drawing on specific case studies and recent works in political theory, this course invites students to consider how capitalism, U.S. imperialism, settler colonialism, and anti-Blackness complicate cherished understandings of justice, equality, and citizenship. Throughout the semester, students will learn what it means to think theologically about movement, borders, nations, sovereignty, and western constructions of the “human.”
POLI187O SC: Revolution and Mutual Aid
Description: This course introduces students to debates about political and religious revolution that are grounded in what Ashon Crawley calls “otherwise possibility.” Students will explore radical political theory in Latin America, Africa, the Caribbean, and the U.S. The class will also examine how scholars theorize concepts like fugitivity, abolition, statelessness, and the desire to be both ungoverned and ungovernable. By drawing on theories of mutual aid, we will see how practices of care, cooperation, and solidarity help people survive and mobilize communities toward collective action.
PSYC158 SC: The Psychology of Indigenous Diasporic
Description: This course covers frameworks in social, cultural, and developmental psychology to explore topics related to the diasporic and transnational experiences of Indigenous Latinx communities. Students will be introduced to various theoretical lenses and methodologies that are critical to research of immigration in the field of psychology. The course will examine the lived experiences of Indigenous Latinx communities in contexts such as schools, communities, and families. Although the course will emphasize a social and cultural psychological perspective, we will consider anthropological, sociological, and educational contributions to the study of diasporic Indigenous Latinx communities.
PSYC185 SC: Autonomy, Self-Determination, Conscience: Perspectives from Cognitive Science
Description: Autonomy, Self-Determination, and Conscience are central concepts in the Cognitive Science of the self and decision-making. Deciding who is autonomous, self-determined, and who does and does not possess a conscience has practical implications for whom clinicians, lawyers, and judges consider mentally competent and responsible for their own actions. The course will address major themes illustrating how interdisciplinary psychological science looks at and specifies what makes agents (human persons and putative AI agents) autonomous, whether this requires people to be fully free of any physical causes of their own brains, how drug use affects conceptions of autonomy in Cognitive Science, how clinical psychiatric and psychological conditions affect conceptions of autonomy in Cognitive Science, and how these conceptions make their way into policy and law. We will also examine what it means to be a self that is self-determining regarding one’s choices, identities, and affiliations, and how conscience emerges from heteronomy to autonomy, and whether there are scientifically defensible constructions of “trusted autonomy” and moral responsibility in artificial intelligence.
RLST098: Queering Christian Mysticism
Description: This course applies the analytical and conceptual resources of queer theory to a range of premodern Christian sources on mystical experiences of the divine that were penned by women and men primarily in the Ethiopian, Roman, Persian, and Arab states.
WRIT169B IO SC: Writing Center Literacies I/O
Description: In this course, we discuss the concept of literacy as it is implemented in college composition courses and Writing Centers, with attention to the ways that literacy functions in minoritized populations and excluded contexts (such as inside prisons). We will examine the history of this kind of tutoring and the discussions of its theory, scholarly research, and practice in the discipline of Writing Studies; we will also develop a working Inside-Out pedagogical praxis for it in the classroom and pilot it in other Inside-Out courses. Students will write responses to the readings, observe and critique tutoring sessions, and work on adding a section on literacies to the CRC Writing Center Handbook. This course requires at least one hour before and one hour after of travel time to our classroom at CRC prison.
Approved by Scripps faculty in January 2022
MATH052 SC: Introduction to Statistics
Description: This course is meant to give a liberal arts student a sense of statistical theory and practice. It will emphasize the use and interpretation of statistics, with applications to both the natural and social sciences. Topics will include: collection and summarizing of data; measures of central tendency and dispersion; probability; binomial and normal distributions; confidence intervals and hypothesis testing; linear regression; ANOVA methods; topics in non-parametric statistics; and discussion and interpretation of statistical fallacies and misuses.
MS036: Worldbuilding
Description: In this course, students will develop and create their own fictional worlds through the process of worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is the practice of creating a fully developed fictionalized environment in which the political, historical, cultural, environmental, philosophical (and more) are fully conceptualized and explored. Throughout the semester, students will engage with different forms of concepting and world-design such as creative writing, storyboarding, digital painting and photobashing in order to understand and visualize their respective worlds. This will ultimately culminate in the creation of a media artwork that portrays a narrative within this created universe. In addition to this, we will engage with a variety of films, artworks, games and more to learn about the process of world creation.
Revised Courses in spring 2022
ART121 SC: Intro to Ceramic Sculpture
Change in description: This course is an introduction to contemporary sculptural practices in clay. Topics covered include hand-building techniques, conceptual development, firing, glazing, ceramic history, and contemporary artistic practices. Classes will consist of lectures, discussions, technical demonstrations, assignments, and critiques.
ART122 SC : Expanded Ceramics: Systems and Processes
Change in title: Expand Ceramics: Systems & Proc.
Change description: This course introduces ways of working with clay that were not covered in ART 121 SC. Techniques and approaches may include but are not limited to: mold making, slip-casting, decals, image transfers, alternative uses of the potter’s wheel and custom extruder die fabrication. Classes will consist of lectures, discussions, technical demonstrations, assignments, and critiques. Although the completion of ART121 is recommended prior to enrollment, this course can be completed successfully without previous ceramics experience. This course may be taken twice for credit.
Change in pre-requisite: ART121 recommended
CHEM123L KS: Advanced Organic Chemistry
Change in title: Adv. Org. Chem. w/Laboratory
Change in description: This course is designed to introduce students to advanced concepts in the field of organic chemistry. Topics covered will expand upon material on stereoelectronic effects in organic reaction mechanisms. 123L includes a laboratory component to provide fundamental experimental techniques training for students unable to complete in-person Chem116/117 laboratory instruction in the 2020-2021 academic year due to the pandemic. Prerequisites: Chemistry 117, or permission of instructor.
ENGL147 SC: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Change in title: Multi-Ethnic U.S. Lit 1770-1945
Change in description: This course introduces students to the critical and historical frameworks literary scholars have used to study multi-ethnic literature in early U.S. contexts, especially those related the intersections of race and ethnicity. Readings focus on the eighteenth, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth centuries and include works by U.S. authors of African, Asian, Indigenous, Latinx, and SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) descent. The course pays particular attention to the various ways literary scholarship has engaged with U.S. writers situated at literal and figurative borderlands and/or writing from hybrid identities.
GERM108 SC: Pop & Protest, Conversation and Grammar
Change in title: Pop & Protest
Change in description: What is Krautrock? What was so radical about disco? How conscious is German hip hop? What did die Hamburger Schule fight for or against? In this conversation class, we will listen to music and discuss German lyrics by Die Goldenen Zitronen, Sookee, Slime, Kraftwerk, Ja Panik, Tocotronic, Leila Akinyi, K.I.Z., Michaela Melián and many other artists. We will read pop theory and manifestos. German 44 required, German 33 considered.
GERM110SC: Karl Marx
Change in title: Modern Thought I: Karl Marx
Change in description: The Modern Thought series of conversation classes introduces to the times and concepts of modernism’s eminent thinkers. This specific class features a selection of excerpts from some of Karl Marx’ most important writings on capitalism and socialism, labor, the working class, and revolution. All readings will be provided in English and German. May be taken alongside the English-taught GRMT 103H—Karl Marx: Capital. German 44 ideal, but German 33 considered. Taught in German.
GERM103H SC: Karl Marx
Change title: Karl Marx: Capital
Change in description: This conversation class offers a guided close reading of volume I of Karl Marx’ magnum opus Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867). Suitable for first-year students, no prior knowledge required. May be taken alongside the German-taught class GERM 110—Modern Thought I: Karl Marx. Taught in English.
MS053 SC: Intro to Computational Media
Change in description: This course explores the potential of code as a medium for media studies and arts practice. Students learn the programming language p5.js with assignments focusing on different methods for creating two-dimensional graphics. p5.js is a JavaScript library for creative coding, with a focus on making coding accessible and inclusive for artists, designers, educators, beginners, and all others. The course centers on the process of reflection and critique, including visits from practicing artists in the field. This course is designed as an introductory production course for media studies majors and minors and for all students who are interested in learning creative coding.
MS054 SC: Intermediate Computational Media
Change in description: This course focuses on the creation of three-dimensional computational forms for media studies and arts practice. Students explore spatial design, motion, and visualization in augmented, virtual, and extended reality (XR) by way of a variety of softwares ranging from Tinkercad to Blender to Adobe Spark. The course centers on the process of reflection and critique, including visits from practicing artists who will share their work and expertise in XR. This course is designed as an intermediate production course for media studies majors and minors and for all students who have taken an introductory production course and/or have some experience with programming.
WRIT197 SC: Archetype, apocalypse, imaginati
Change in title: Gnostic Poetics
Change in description: Courses under this number will vary from year to year, and will focus on a close analysis of a given genre (the essay, the short story, the poem, the newspaper article, the memoir, etc.) by an established practitioner of the form. May be repeated for credit. Offered one semester per year. Spring 2022: In this course we will explore a hybrid form of documentary poetics by writing our way into and around some of the most intriguing and mysterious texts on record, The Nag Hammadi Library, a 4th century collection of mystical writings housed at the Claremont Graduate University. We will approach The Gospel of Thomas, The Thunder Perfect Mind, and lesser-known portions of this startling anthology not as scholars or historians, but as detectives, diviners, and poets, imaginatively making sense of what we find, and using what we find to make new forms of sense.
New Core Courses offered in spring 2022
CORE002: Protesting Women
Women in the public sphere are more visible than ever. They now routinely occupy positions traditionally held by men: as Supreme Court justices, corporate executives, presidential candidates, and, of course, superheroes. In this course, we will study the mobilization of women throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through major literary texts of the women’s movement from both a historical and theoretical perspective. In class we will engage a variety of issues related to such topics as women’s activism, women and political agency, and the gender and sexual politics of identity. Focusing on social-movement and protest literature by and about women, this course will also bring to light the social, political, and cultural frameworks structuring past and present discussions of women’s human rights and gender equality, particularly within the U.S. We will read both classic and newer texts as we take a chronological approach that begins with the abolition movement in the US and UK and continues to Suffrage and second wave feminism, the women’s liberation movement of the 1970’s, intersectional feminism, and the #metoo and reproductive rights movement of the current age.
CORE002: Southern California: Regional Representations and Realities
Many people have ideas about what Southern California; is like, even if they have never actually visited. These regional representations come from many sources, including architecture, art, films, history, literature. and tourism. Scholars from these and other disciplines. as well as local residents, question these images, often claiming they do not reflect regional realities. This course will explore the constructions and conte1ted meanings of Southern California through both historical and contemporary interdisciplinary lenses. _Part of the course will involve working with archival materials from Denison library about Scripps College’s choice to design the campus in the Spanish Colonial Revival style.
CORE002: Music and the Body: Sound, Sensorium, Affect
What is the impact of sound in the body? How does the body experience sound? Is sound perception always an individualized experience? What about the sounds the body produces? Are “groove,” “the beat,” and “feeling the music” universal experiences? This seminar explores the varied possibilities for relationships between music and human bodies. Additional topics considered are rhythm, musical gestures, the physicality of playing music as forms of choreography, music and all the senses, embodied meanings, ideas about mind-body dualism/connections, trance, musical and dance improvisations (in Western and non-Western contexts) and the entanglements and intersections of music in the body with race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. We will embody, think, and write about music and movement, holding reading discussions alongside listening in-class experiences. The course requires reading and writing, music listening, online journaling, attending performances, and some guided movement experimentation.
CORE002: Musical Persuasions
How can music, an art form that is held by many to be ‘asymbolic,’ persuade someone of a truth or relay a story? How can the goals, methodologies, theories, audience reception, performance practice, technology, language and other elements involved in the practice of music serve to uphold or undermine what societies hold true? According to Aristotle, ‘history’ (from the Greek ἱστορία) specified not a record of past events, but rather, an inquiry or investigation into the essence of things, which ideally led to wisdom. With the goal of finding some of this wisdom, rather than any absolute truth, this course will consider how music, as it has historically been studied, performed, and received, can both transmit and transgress dearly held truths. In a spirit of self-reflective inquiry, we will explore the myriad ways in which music and other disciplines intersect and face off around important truth claims about race, gender, history, and nature, and how the eye and the ear receive and adjudicate these persuasions differently.
CORE002: Queer History in Popular Music
This course is an historical survey of LGBTQ+ culture and civil rights in 20th-century America via the music created, performed and consumed by self-identifying members of the LGBTQ+ community. Topics include various social-political-musical intersections, many of which are rooted in race, ethnicity, religion, class and gender. We will examine the functions of popular music to express, suppress, rally, protest and counterprotest in this and other social movements.
CORE002: Local/Global Exhibition Cultures
This course will introduce students to key issues in 21st century art and exhibition-making through the case study of a major international art exhibition on display during the course dates (Spring 2022: The Hawai’i Triennial). We will invite students into conversation with curators, artists, and community stakeholders, and the exhibition’s parallel program activities. Team-taught by faculty in Media Studies and Art History, the course engages a range of interdisciplinary questions, including: what is the role of community and collaboration in creative and curatorial processes? How can an exhibition with a global audience privilege local knowledge and community? How are histories of place, land, geography, and identity communicated to audiences on site and remotely?
CORE002: 2=3
2=3: is sort of how ancient texts like Ecclesiates and the Tao Te Ching see the idea of truth. You might say they think that math is a projection of a desire for right answers, which are a thing that never quite exists in life, but even that would be a distortion, since it was said in language where there are also few right answers. In exploring texts like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Lost in Math by the feminist particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea by Yukio Mishima, Wild by Sheryl Strayed, the film Six Degrees of Separation, The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, the work of art critic Rosalind Krauss, and The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan, this course examines how truth and power constellate under pressure, and how truth is misconstrued by power and consciousness.
CORE002: Dante and the Medieval World
Few texts have represented an entire civilization as fully as the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). This c curse will offer an interdisciplinary approach to situating the poem within its Florentine, European, and Mediterranean contexts. Students we will read not only the entire Comedy (in translation), but they will also examine artwork, chronicles, philosophical and theological texts, and other material relevant for interpreting the poem.
CORE002: The Body: Studies in Self-Care
This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study and practice of Self-Care. Its focus is on embodied, experiential activities and self-reflection. Students will meditate, journal, engage in activities designed to support/regulate the nervous system, explore somatics (physical practices designed to build awareness of the self towards autonomy and agency), make art, and discuss reading and film topics regularly. Students will learn about concepts such as body neutrality and radical self-love while tailoring personalized self-care regimens with support from their peers that align with and reflect their own values. The course will be augmented by readings, podcasts, and films by scholars, activist s, writers, and scientists that contextualize Self-Care in its broader historical framework. Students will invest in the study of Self-Care as political act of resistance and self-preservation propelled by the Women’s Liberation and Reproductive Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Movement(s), Disability Rights and LGBTQ+ movements, social justice reform, advancements in Neuroscience, and the practice of self-care for sustaining community engagement overtime.
Revised Core Course in spring 2022
CORE002: Performances of Identity
Change in description: Music, dance. and other performative acts play important roles in the representation. transformation. and (re)-creation of identities. This course examines the creation of national. institutional. and other large-group identities through public displays of culture and investigates ways in which various ethnic, racial, and gender groups negotiate identities through the performing arts. We will work with cultural forms from the late nineteenth century to the present including songs, dances, films. plays, musicals, operas, and large-scale ceremonies (e.g. US Presidential inaugurations and Olympics ceremonies). In doing so, we will consider how historical performances of collective identity inform our understanding of present-day performances and how such cultural performances are, in the end, political acts.
CORE002: Art & Encounters in the Pacific
Change in Description: The history of Oceania has traditionally been structured by narratives of first contacts between and among cultures, languages, and world views. This course, by contrast, introduces dynamic histories of ongoing travel, exchange, and mobility centered on Pacific Indigenous art and artistic expressions, both historic and contemporary. We will investigate episodes of contact through the frame of the 2022 Hawai’i Triennial, an event that stages an encounter between sixty artists from across the Great Ocean. Guest speakers will include curators, activists, artists, and scholars who will address the local and global implications of this international exhibition
|
