Curriculum & Courses

This course plunges students into content and ideas that universities often leave until graduate school, as we consider the role played by the 'critical' in 'visual and critical studies.' For the past ten years, it has been referred to as 'a primer for the art world.' It will still, mostly, provide you with a working vocabulary and crash course as to bodies of knowledge integral to the study of visual culture. At the same time, to productively engage in a reflective critique of society and culture, it will consider 'texts' from as diverse and contemporaneous a group of scholars, theorists, critics, and cultural producers as possible, from both inside and outside the academic institution.

Hybrid Practices seeks to bring artistic experimentation and research-based scholarship together. In general, Visual and Critical Studies promotes academic and artistic hybridity as a way to examine the social forces that shape our lives. Many fields will be engaged, including queer and feminist theory, literature, social identity, postcolonial studies, art history, and philosophy. The goal is to support student practices by exposing them to various critical conversations related to politics (social life) and art (general creativity). This course prioritizes artists historically marginalized because of their social identities, including gender, race, ethnicity, able-bodiedness, sexual orientation, and more. Some artist, writers, and thinkers to be considered include, Black Audio Film Collective, Glenn Ligon, #decolonizethisplace, Sky Hopinka, Park McArthur, Sunaura Taylor, Michel Foucault, Super Futures Haunt Qollective, and Judith Butler. Screenings will include a variety of videos related to contemporary art and critical theory, including “Martha Rosler Reads Vogue: Wishing, Dreaming, Winning, Spending,” Forensic Architecture’s 'Rebel Architecture: The Architecture of Violence,' Coco Fusco’s “TED Ethology: Primate Visions of the Human Mind,” Paper Tiger TV’s “Donna Haraway Reads the National Geographic on Primates,” and Democracy Now’s “Freed but Not Free: Artists at the Venice Biennale Respond to the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” Coursework includes a reading schedule, research-supported discussions, moments of creative presentation/critique, and writing assignments that engage hybrid approaches to culture, history, and theory.

This course is an investigation of how media communicate messages and how we interpret them. From political propaganda to advertisements, television news to ?tweets?, we examine a process of critically 'reading' the many messages that we encounter on a daily basis. Through readings, class discussions, presentations and writing assignments we come to grips with what critic Stuart Ewen has called a world of 'all consuming images.' Readings include works by Plato, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Postman, Susan Sontag, Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, and Henry Jenkins. Assignments include short critical essays on contemporary media, an in-depth at home exam based on class activity and readings, and a term paper or media presentation that analyses a current critical issue in media.

This interdisciplinary course approaches the topic of gender, race, and medicine from cultural, historical, and scientific perspectives. We consider hysteria (purported to be caused by a 'wandering uterus') and other mental afflictions associated with sex and gender, the foundation of U.S. gynecology and its dependence on enslaved bodies, the Women's Health Movement and its legacy, queer and trans health issues, and sex health education. Readings include works by Audre Lourde, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elaine Showalter, Leslie Feinberg and Andrea Smith. We will also consider the ways in which artists have addressed issues of gender, race and medicine in their work. Assignments include an interview project, written reflections, and a final research-based project.

This course is an experimental seminar devoted to recent discussions about disability in the US and in Europe: how is disability represented, and how are these representations constructed? Readings include the following, among many other texts: Georgina Kleege's Sight Unseen, Julia Kristeva's recent essays on disability, and several Supreme Court Opinions regarding ADA, including Alabama v. Garrett, Toyota v. Williams, and Tennessee v. Lane. In the second half of the semester, seminar participants present papers and related research on disability as a social and theoretical construction.

This course will provide a link between Issues in Visual and Critical Studies, required of all first-year B.A. students, and the Thesis Seminar required in their final year. Typically, students will take this course at the end of their second year of full-time study. Building on the Issues course, early in the course students will read material that suggests the range of possibilities for visual and critical studies. Then each student will undertake a project that focuses on some aspect of visual and critical studies of particular interest to them. The project must include a substantial written component, although it might also make use of other media. Student presentation of their projects, as works in progress and then completed work, will provide opportunity for discussion of how they might give coherence to their final semesters of study. This will include suggestions for connections they might make among different aspects of their education, and will serve as an early stage in the process of developing a senior thesis project.

This course offers an introduction to the thought of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). Deleuze was one of the 20th century?s most influential critical theorists, almost single-handedly revising the reputation of Nietzsche in France, critiquing psychoanalysis in its postmodern heyday, and devising new approaches to ontology, leftist political theory, and literary and art theory. To this day, his concepts are frequently deployed in critical theory of all kinds, especially those concepts he developed in collaboration with activist and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. Such concepts have even been accused of radical chic, and he remains a frequently cited but ?difficult? author to read. This course provides an introduction to the reading of Deleuze?s work. The goal of the course is to familiarize you with the contours of his career and acquaint you with his peculiar style of writing. It also acquaints you with a (very) few subsequent elaborations on Deleuzian thought. The course is structured into units corresponding to the core notions of becoming, encounter, schizoanalysis, and the rhizome. A fifth unit pursues Deleuze?s involvement with aesthetics and models some ways of applying Deleuzian thought. Expect to read much of Deleuze's own writing, critical reflections on it by Thomas Hirschorn and Elizabeth Grosz, among others..., and then to write two substantial essays elaborating on this material, attempting to make it serve your own interests as artists, historians, etc.

This studio seminar is centered around intergenerational queer art-making within the context of The LGBTQ+ Intergenerational Dialogue Project, which is a partnership between The Senior Services Program at The Center on Halsted and faculty members Adam Greteman and Karen Morris of SAIC. This spring course is run as a workshop in which students focus on intergenerational creative production with LGBTQ+ elders. Classes will be held at both SAIC and Center on Halsted. Students and elders will share a meal together after class meetings at Center on Halsted, and take at least one field trip together. A range of artists, works, scholars, and activist groups will be introduced during the first third of the course as students get to know one another and the purpose of the course. This will potentially include the following: Marlon Riggs, Lesbian Avengers, Chase Joynt, ACT-UP, Ron Athey, S.T.A.R., Paul Preciado, E. Patrick Johnson, Mickalene Thomas, and others. Over the course of the latter 2/3rd of the semester, students collaborate with LGBTQ+ elders in small groups to conceive and produce work related to LGBTQ+ experiences, histories, and issues. Each small group decides on topic(s) and medium(s) while working with the instructors to create a list of relevant readings, films, and/or podcasts they will engage as part of the research and production process. Over the course of the semester, students collaborate with LGBTQ+ elders in small groups to conceive and produce work related to LGBTQ+ experiences, histories, and issues. Final projects might take the form of visual art, video, oral history, photography, writing, a podcast, or something else. This work will be showcased on the project’s website (generationliberation.com) and have the potential to be expanded into a range of other educational resources.

In 1976, as noted by a recent Viewpoint Magazine piece, Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, a former sessions player for Frank Zappa, whose landmark West Coast funk compositions effortlessly fused his auto-theoretical 'gangster of love' persona with post-soul, pre-discotheque blues guitar, released the eponymous single from his album Ain't That A Bitch the same year Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And I quote: Everything is outta pocket! / Somebody do something! / The present situation is abstract! In 2015, James Franco committed to film the character 'Alien,' purportedly based on real-life Houston-based rapper Riff Raff (who has a giant tattoo on his chest of Bart Simpson holding a beaker that reads,'The Freestyle Scientist'). Right around the time of Friedman's victory speech (titled 'Inflation and Unemployment,' and dedicated to the memory of Alfred Nobel), Dr. Funkenstein (George Clinton, the 'cool ghoul with the funk transplant') and his Holy Mothership began to hover around a new consumer class of Thumpasorus peoples, just as Parliament-Funkadelic's cosmological dispersion mirrored another kind of outsourcing?paraphrasing here, but why not put the jobs someplace they've never been perceived to be, like a spaceship. Funk, then the history of automation, then aliens. The shared history isn't some mute-poetic post-automatic ontological flirtation: it's embedded in Kurt Vonnegut's first novel Player Piano, and intertwined with the anomie registered by the twentieth century's increasing alienation of assembly line workers and e-commerce representatives. In 1963, Detroit autoworker and Marxist activist James Boggs wrote The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook, about his experiences on the Chrysler assembly line, where he presupposed a new generation of the working class made obsolete by advances in heavy labor automation, left without a body to sell or their own labor-power to broker the deal. How did blip blip Marx's Labor Theory of Value 010101 Space is the Place Where I Go All Alone take us through deregulated technocratic neoliberalism and to the other side: via the simulated proprietary satellite mapping that Curtis Mayfield may or may not have fever-dreamed in 'Diamonds in the Back'? We know that it knows the Waze to your Uber Pool's rendezvous with the Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership (T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M.). 'Abdul Jabar couldn't have made these prices/with a sky hook.' Long story short: funk emerged in the waning days of Fordism's hold on the American economy, before drums largely lived in machines and workers were brokered out of politics. Funk parallels Jimmy Hoffa, Wattstax, the death of Henry Ford's crony Harry Bennett, the arguments of Jefferson Cowrie's Last Days of the Working Class, Dock Ellis throwing a perfect game on LSD, the goddamned Deer Hunter, stagflation, the threat of nuclear annihilation and concerts mounted against such, pro-labor PACs, Betty Davis's 'Politician Man,' two energy crises, the Business Roundtable Lobby, Bootsy Collins dropping acid and flipping over the handlebars of his road bike in the middle of the woods triggering an out of body experience, and good ol' monetarist theory. P-Funk's Mothership is now in the Smithsonian Museum. 'Strike on Computers!,' as Watson suggested. I once climbed through a window of the abandoned Studebaker-Packard Plant one Detroit afternoon in 1996 and cut my foot on a shard of glass perhaps manufactured in the form of a Pepsi bottle at the Mack Avenue warehouse two blocks away or two decades before. I bled for a while through an anklet, but then we listened to the Fugees cover Roberta Flack's 'Killing Me Softly' on someone's CD of The Score (playback technology developed by the Advent Corporation) the rest of the ride home.

Where does an artwork begin & end? Where does an exhibition begin & end? Is an exhibition solely about the materialization of specific works of art, or is it also—and if so, in what ways—about the various conventions that go into the making of exhibitions—which include press releases, announcement cards, checklists, wall labels, catalogues, and digital-based media? Conventions like these are representations. We engage in different kinds of representations both because of the implausibility of re-presenting, and also because representation is a means by which we further, through the use of language and images, and through a process that is both otherwise and otherhow, the reach of the real. In this respect, moving closer to the artwork involves moving away from the artwork--to look closer at fringes and margins and representations, and ask a very fundamental question: to what extent are these various exhibition conventions actually part of the art--and not merely an extension of it? While the course is experiential and practical, it also explores conceptual issues underpinning the relationship between curatorial and creative practice. The class is open to both graduate and undergraduate students interested in curating across many historical periods, as well as BFA and MFA students interested in the ways exhibitions create contexts for their work, and how they might participate in the construction of these contexts.

This course explores the anthropological methods employed in ethnographic fieldwork and analysis. Students acquire a critical and historical knowledge of the range of research methods in cultural anthropology. In addition, they gain personal experience in designing an ethnographic research project, conducting fieldwork, and analyzing findings. We examine classic and contemporary ethnographic texts and films and discuss the theoretical foundations underlying ethnography, ethical issues within ethnographic research, and key debates around fieldwork as a method of knowledge production.

This course is a continuation of Undergraduate Thesis: Research and Writing I. Students will continue to work on the drafts developed during the first semester and will meet at times as a group and at times individually with the instructor or teaching assistant. By the end of the semester, each student will have a 25-35 page superbly written thesis (maximum 45 pages), which will most likely (although it is not required) have visual content. Students will also present their thesis projects in the VCS Undergraduate Thesis Symposium at the end of the semester. Class meetings are used to discuss readings, workshop writing, share research methods and techniques, and discuss research and writing problems. Guest speakers and group visits to libraries may also be part of the class. Students are required to attend all meetings, participate actively in class discussions and workshops, present work in the symposium, and complete a polished thesis by the end of the semester.

This graduate-level course immerses students in research methods and resources for use in their Visual and Critical Studies coursework and their theses. Guest speakers include librarians and curators. Students combine study of general research information with the pursuit of individual research projects directed by the instructor. [This is a required course for first-year students in the MA in VCS program.]

In 1976, as noted by a recent Viewpoint Magazine piece, Johnny ?Guitar? Watson, a former sessions player for Frank Zappa, whose landmark West Coast funk compositions effortlessly fused his auto-theoretical ?gangster of love? persona with post-soul, pre-discotheque blues guitar, released the eponymous single from his album Ain?t That A Bitch?the same year Milton Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics. And I quote: ?Everything is outta pocket! / Somebody do something! / The present situation is abstract!? In 2015, James Franco committed to film the character ?Alien,? purportedly based on real-life Houston-based rapper Riff Raff (who has a giant tattoo on his chest of Bart Simpson holding a beaker that reads,?The Freestyle Scientist?). Right around the time of Friedman?s victory speech (titled ?Inflation and Unemployment,? and dedicated to the memory of Alfred Nobel), Dr. Funkenstein (George Clinton, the ?cool ghoul with the funk transplant') and his Holy Mothership began to hover around a new consumer class of Thumpasorus peoples, just as Parliament-Funkadelic?s cosmological dispersion mirrored another kind of outsourcing?paraphrasing here, but why not put the jobs someplace they?ve never been perceived to be, like a spaceship. Funk, then the history of automation, then aliens. The shared history isn?t some mute-poetic post-automatic ontological flirtation: it?s embedded in Kurt Vonnegut?s first novel Player Piano, and intertwined with the anomie registered by the twentieth century?s increasing alienation of assembly line workers and e-commerce representatives. In 1963, Detroit autoworker and Marxist activist James Boggs wrote The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker?s Notebook, about his experiences on the Chrysler assembly line, where he presupposed a new generation of the working class made obsolete by advances in heavy labor automation, left without a body to sell or their own labor-power to broker the deal. How did blip blip Marx?s Labor Theory of Value 010101 Space is the Place Where I Go All Alone take us through deregulated technocratic neoliberalism and to the other side: via the simulated proprietary satellite mapping that Curtis Mayfield may or may not have fever-dreamed in ?Diamonds in the Back?? We know that it knows the Waze to your Uber Pool?s rendezvous with the Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership (T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M.)? ?Abdul Jabar couldn?t have made these prices/with a sky hook.? Long story short: funk emerged in the waning days of Fordism?s hold on the American economy, before drums largely lived in machines and workers were brokered out of politics. Funk parallels Jimmy Hoffa, Wattstax, the death of Henry Ford?s crony Harry Bennett, the arguments of Jefferson Cowrie?s Last Days of the Working Class, Dock Ellis throwing a perfect game on LSD, the goddamned Deer Hunter, stagflation, the threat of nuclear annihilation and concerts mounted against such, pro-labor PACs, Betty Davis?s ?Politician Man,? two energy crises, the Business Roundtable Lobby, Bootsy Collins dropping acid and flipping over the handlebars of his road bike in the middle of the woods triggering an out of body experience, and good ol? monetarist theory. P-Funk?s Mothership is now in the Smithsonian Museum. ?Strike on Computers!,? as Watson suggested. I once climbed through a window of the abandoned Studebaker-Packard Plant one Detroit afternoon in 1996 and cut my foot on a shard of glass perhaps manufactured in the form of a Pepsi bottle at the Mack Avenue warehouse two blocks away or two decades before. I bled for a while through an anklet, but then we listened to the Fugees cover Roberta Flack?s ?Killing Me Softly? on someone?s CD of The Score (playback technology developed by the Advent Corporation) the rest of the ride home.

In this reading-intensive seminar, we will consider formations of site specificity since the 1960s. We will learn about art around topics such as borders, migration, resources, and climate change, and we will discuss how non-human agency might change our concept of making art altogether. We will reflect on the term `anthropocene', proposed to understand our current geological period as highly influenced by human activity, and probe its usefulness. How can geographical concepts be applied aesthetically and politically? Scholars we will read include Bruno Latour, Donna Harraway, Kathryn Yussuf, Anna Tsing, Lucy Lippard, and others. Assignments include concept presentations, preparing the readings for the group discussion, research exercises, and a research paper.

Publishing yourself and publishing others will both be addressed in a start-to-finish manner as we cover the key aspects of publishing as a creative enterprise, from pitching and editing to fundraising and promotion. We will look at various historical and current models for both digital and print publications as students develop and produce their own publishing projects.

This independent study course is a continuation of Thesis I and is taken with the student's primary thesis advisor to facilitate completion of the thesis. Research and approval (by the advisor and the rest of the student's committee) of the thesis topic and approach should have been completed during Thesis I. Students work closely with a thesis advisor during this semester in addition to scheduling meetings with other faculty on his or her committee whose input may prove useful in their research. This course covers the final completion and submission of the master's thesis. It is required for the Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies.

This independent study course is a continuation of Thesis I and is taken with the student's primary thesis advisor to facilitate completion of the thesis. Research and approval (by the advisor and the rest of the student's committee) of the thesis topic and approach should have been completed during Thesis I. Students work closely with a thesis advisor during this semester in addition to scheduling meetings with other faculty on his or her committee whose input may prove useful in their research. This course covers the final completion and submission of the master's thesis. It is required for the Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies.

This independent study course is a continuation of Thesis I and is taken with the student's primary thesis advisor to facilitate completion of the thesis. Research and approval (by the advisor and the rest of the student's committee) of the thesis topic and approach should have been completed during Thesis I. Students work closely with a thesis advisor during this semester in addition to scheduling meetings with other faculty on his or her committee whose input may prove useful in their research. This course covers the final completion and submission of the master's thesis. It is required for the Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies.

This independent study course is a continuation of Thesis I and is taken with the student's primary thesis advisor to facilitate completion of the thesis. Research and approval (by the advisor and the rest of the student's committee) of the thesis topic and approach should have been completed during Thesis I. Students work closely with a thesis advisor during this semester in addition to scheduling meetings with other faculty on his or her committee whose input may prove useful in their research. This course covers the final completion and submission of the master's thesis. It is required for the Master of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies.