| Tutorial in Visual and Critical Studies |
Visual and Critical Studies |
3010 (002) |
Spring 2026 |
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Description
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.
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Class Number
2525
Credits
3
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| Participatory Art |
Visual and Critical Studies |
3050 (001) |
Spring 2026 |
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Description
This course will focus on socially engaged art practices through which participants are encouraged to be directly involved in the creative process. The seminar will explore project planning, strategies of engagement, participatory methodologies and the development of resources designed to facilitate working in collaborative situations with social groups, communities and publics. Participatory art considers approaches to art making which engage publics in generative processes that allow participants to become co-authors as well as observers of the work. At its core, participatory art requires that the artist makes space for co-creation by removing themselves from the work or receding enough so as to become an equal partner and participant in the project. In this seminar we will explore ideas of authorship, authority, agency and interaction as themes central to generative collaborations between artist, audience and environment.
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Class Number
1010
Credits
3
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| Voids |
Visual and Critical Studies |
5050 (001) |
Spring 2026 |
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Description
When considering the void we are immediately confronted with nothing, absence, vacuity, the invisible, the ineffable, with destruction and rejection. As emptiness, as the absence of everything or as negation, the void is the opposite of life. However, the experience of the void is not emptiness: it is not about nothing, nor is it about absence. The void is a whole, yet a whole which has no noticeable reality and exists as emergent, potential or conceptual. This seminar will focus on the ideologically driven construction of space. The course will explore spaces as concepts and alternately concepts as generative spaces to occupy, as entities which establish an environment for thought and action. Site, as space performed through shared social and psychic schemata, as actual space, as sacred space and as virtual space. We will consider earth formed sites, human approaches to environmental design, computational media, information as landscape in cyberspace, case study homes and closed world site proposals. In this seminar, the construction of the commons, how we exist within it and questions relating to conceptualizing public space are of central concern. Readings and course material encourage trans disciplinary methodologies and cross-media production. Final projects can take form either as research based texts or as a substantial creative project that blends academic and creative production.
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Class Number
1940
Credits
3
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| Gathering |
Visual and Critical Studies |
5060 (001) |
Spring 2026 |
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Description
How, where and why do we gather? In what ways is the impulse to gather informed by histories of exclusion? This seminar is a survey of the myriad ways that communities come together to thrive in times of crisis, assemble in times of celebration, come together around shared concerns and form structures with the capacity to take in and hold energy from scattered places and sources. Is the impulse to gather an innate tendency for humans? What informs our social need for connection, community, and shared experiences? And, how do we manifest this impulse in various forms like social gatherings, rituals, celebrations, or even simply seeking out the company of others? This course will consider forms of hospitality and hosting as well as the politics and protocols of gathering as a form of resistance. In this seminar we will explore methods of facilitating small and large group encounters with a focus on participant experience. We will examine how the structure of a gathering informs the identities, roles, desires and biases that individuals import into the group, as well as the emergence of conscious and unconscious group dynamics. This course will focus on community as form, social context as integral to human interaction and the participatory aspects of experience.
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Class Number
1943
Credits
3
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| Thesis II |
Visual and Critical Studies |
6999 (004) |
Spring 2026 |
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Description
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.
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Class Number
2529
Credits
3
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