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Class Information: Term 2, 2015/16 Tuesday, 2:30pm-5:15pm
Critical Studies in Media Communication, 1989
413 GSMC REVIEW AND CStlTICISM Roek, P., ft Mdotoih, M. (1974). Deviance and social control. London: Tavistock. Smith, A. a H. (1975). Paper voices: The popular press and todal change, 1935-1965 (with E. ImniiRi ft T-BUckweU). Tatiwa, NJ: Rowman and Litdefidd. Sparb, C. (1977). The evolutioa of cultural itudio. Screen Education, 22,16-30. Streeter. T. (1984). An alteniative appraadi to tdevigioa meardi: Devek^xnenti in Britiih cultural itudia at Binnin^iam. In W. R. Rowland, Jr. ft B. Watldni (Edi.), Interpreting television: Current research perspectives (pp. 74-97). Beverly HUIK Sage. Tobon,A.(1977). The Umiti of masculinity. honAaaiTanttack. Toboo, A. (1986). Popular culture: Practioe and inititution. ID G. MacCabe (Ed.), High theory/low culture: Analyting popular television and fUm (pp. 143-155). New York: SL Martin's Pms. Whannel. G. (1984). Blowing the whistle: The politics of sport. London: Pluta Williami, R. (1961). Thebngrevobitim. Hannondiwortii: Penguin. Williami, R. (Ed.) (1968). May Day mani^sto, 1968. Harmondiworth: Penguin. Willianu. R. (1974). Television: Technology and cultural form. Gla^ow: Fontana. WiUiami, R. (1977a). A lecture OD rcaUsm. Screen, 78(1), 61-74. Williami, R. (1977b). Marxism and literature. Oidbnl: Oxfonl Univenity Fren.
This course explores the relations of cultural artifacts in the contemporary world to their various social contexts. Culture is understood as the material expressions and images that people create and the social environment that shapes the way diverse groups of people experience their world and interact with one another. The course focuses on the critical analysis of these various forms of media, design, mass communications, arts, and popular culture. DETAILED COURSE DESCRIPTION & OBJECTIVES The present era is often characterized as an age of global integration and a truly world economy as well as an era of social and environmental crises. In the midst of these changes we can often hear " culture " invoked as both a positive expression of this globalism and sometimes as something that opposes it. The full meaning of culture remains a topic of fierce debate and so " culture " is used as a political weapon, a claim of privilege, a rallying point for identity, a reservoir of resistance, or refers to various artifacts and practices that must be either preserved (good culture) or eliminated (degenerate culture). Cultural Studies emerged from the attempts to understand these complex social and political uses of " culture " in such debates as those over " high & low " art, the value of the artifacts of popular culture (cinema, television, music, etc.), the deployments of knowledge and authority in the social relations of everyday life. We will examine how Cultural Studies offered a critical understanding of what Max Horkheimer termed " life as it is lived. " Attention will be paid to the fate of Cultural Studies as it became accepted and absorbed by various academic disciplines. In the final sessions, special attention will be given to the reception of Cultural Studies in the United States. This course is designed to give you a foundation in Cultural Studies. It will show you how Cultural Studies emerged and its subsequent variations and lines of descent. You are not expected to already know this, nor are you expected to already be familiar with the texts we will use and issues that will be raised. You are expected to engage the course materials seriously. You will finish the course with an introduction to different ways of understanding the history of the present day and the social relations of everyday life.
2023
In the previous iteration of the course, I learned a lot about where my students experienced different types of resistance to the course materials. I revised the reading schedule to continue to challenge students in useful ways and moved away from some of the material that felt counterproductive for the students. That's always the gambit with teaching about the politics of culture. I also wanted to expand the ways the class engaged with transnational and postcolonial feminisms. Surprisingly, a lot of energy went into re-imagining the class from MWF to TTh--a sneaky bit of logistics!
This course introduces students to the work and significance of representation and power in the understanding of culture as social practice. It helps students to understand the relationships among sign, culture and the making of meanings in society. From this base it approaches the question of ideology and subjectivity in the shaping of culture. With reference to various cultural texts and social contexts, we study examples of cultural production from history and politics to lived experiences of the everyday, from photography and art to cinema and museum, from popular culture to lifestyle etc. In appreciating divergent concerns in the critical analysis of culture and power, we focus on selected topics both mainstream and emergent, with an emphasis on contemporary developments in the Asian contexts. A brief account of the intellectual formations of Cultural Studies will be provided to allow students to appreciate the global, regional and local perspectives in the evolving field of study.
OVERVIEW: Stuart Hall, one of the recognized founders of cultural studies, posed a question that provides an ideal starting point for this course as an introduction to the field: "Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook." Hall's idea that integral to cultural studies is a political and ethical mandate to " change anything " squarely places cultural studies within the domain of critical theory, which has for long provided a pillar to the humanities as central to a model of higher education that is now being slowly dismantled by the neoliberal corporate academia. That notion of the humanities has, on the other hand, reflected the assumptive logics of modern humanism as the dominant cognitive framework within which, among other intellectual endeavors, critical theory has emerged. Humanism is, in fact, predicated upon the Human intended both as the subject of critical theory and the beneficiary of its emancipatory aspirations. Trying to answer Hall's question (" what is the point of cultural studies? ") invites therefore reflection on the critical intersections between cultural studies as a form of knowledge and the human(ist) projects sustaining the now beleaguered humanities. The aim of this course is to provide opportunities, theoretical approaches, and conceptual tools for this type of reflection. The course's topics and readings are therefore loosely organized around few questions: What is the " human " in the humanities? What are the potentialities, effects, constraints, and omissions inherent in the grounding of critical and cultural theory in the " human " ? How do concepts and insights in critical theory invest and define cultural studies? How are such entanglements questioned by writers, voices, and approaches that challenge humanism and its universalist claims by exposing its affinities with coercive and violent processes of colonialism, enslavement, racialized oppression, indigenous displacement, economic exploitation, gendered domination, and environmental devastation? We will, in other words, subject critical theory and cultural studies to the unflinching scrutiny demanded by, in Hall’s words, “people dying in the streets”. The invitation, in the opening quote, to consider the World’s violence and lethality as questions that unsettle Human cultural agency and capacity will also require you to think on whether what is here at stake are mostly injuries on a generic humanity, or rather the perpetuation of a more structural violence that, at variance with humanist universalism, has torn humanity apart or, more precisely, defined humanity as the (white and male) point of enunciation and organization of global social and cultural hierarchies. It is along these lines that cultural theory has been affected by the work of scholars, especially prominent in Black studies and radical theories of race, pointing out that the World the human/ities made exists in fact, to use Saidiya Hartman’s expression, in the “afterlife of [Black] slavery” and, as Christina Sharpe writes, “in the wake” of its “ongoing disasters”. The course will pay specific attention to these lines of inquiry since they have uniquely confronted cultural studies and critical theory in their very intellectual foundations (even requiring, in Sylvia Wynter’s words, a “rewriting of knowledge” beyond the humanities’ current epistemic framework), making such approaches eminently suitable to an introductory graduate course. The course is driven by questions and concepts, rather than canonical authors and schools of thoughts. Weekly discussions will invite you to think through a set of key terms in the humanities and cultural theory by addressing authors and readings that, in conversation or opposition with one another, address those terms from various critical and meta-critical standpoints. “Meta-critical” (in the sense of “critique of the critique”, so to speak) broadly refers, for our purposes, to interventions that do not necessarily proceed from the assumed coherence of categories (like race, gender, class, nation, agency, and culture itself) informing critical theory as a human/ist capacity, but rather position those categories along the problematic divide—often ignored by critical theory itself—between the human/ist subject and those whose humanity and subjecthood are removed or curtailed. The core expectation underlying this course is that you will reflect on the questions and debates raised in class with a view at defining (or revising and refining) your intellectual and scholarly interests, as well as specific empirical questions of your research, by considering these broader theoretical challenges. You should also be able to acquire a complex perspective on the concepts we shall discuss, with a view to their deployment in your own work.
In a nutshell, this course is about the relationship between culture and power. This relationship will be investigated from a variety of perspectives, disciplines, and methodologies. More formally, our goals are twofold: to provide a systematic review of the state-of-the-art work on the relationship between politics (particularly power) and culture and (b) to explore how "cultural" approaches can complement, enrich or replace more common acultural political scientific and economic analyses of political processes.
2022
This course taught me a lot about a student population I was working with for the first time. For this class, I decided to lean into the overlap between cultural studies and critical ethnic studies. I also did a lot of work developing and fine tuning my 'Uneven U' assignments. There was definitely a learning curve for me and the students, but a number of students described feeling more confident with reading and writing academic prose by the end of the term.
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