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 a sound production practicum with a focus on sampling and appropriation. Students will engage sound archives as a resource for creative sound design and music production. The seminar will consider contemporary strategies of sampling and appropriation in the context of popular culture, media preservation and intermedia design. Special attention will be given to public sound archives and library collections. Coursework includes reading responses, a mid-term, and a final project. Final projects can take form as a research based text or as a creative project that blends modes of creative production. Students are expected to actively and critically engage the social, political and cultural factors that inform their practice. Course readings explore the scholarly discourse on Interculturalism with focus on processes, structures, systems, and methodology in relation to the moral, ethical and aesthetic questions raised by working with cultural artifacts as material. The seminar encourages trans-disciplinary methodology and cross-media production. The seminar format includes lectures, student-led group discussions and individual student meetings. Online discussion groups will be created for each unit. Students are expected to participate in online discussions in response to unit readings, case studies and discussion prompts. Sound studio access, access to sound technology and tech support will be facilitated for students who wish to have access to campus resources.

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.

Conspiracy Theory and Other Metanarratives

The term 'conspiracy theory' has long been used to indicate a narrative genre that includes a broad selection of arguments for the existence of systemic furtive acts. Cautiously construing a space between the unwarranted and the unidentifiable, conspiracy works to situate grand narratives at the core of distinctions between the individual and the institution, public and private life, and visible and invisible architectures. At the same time, the events that sustain conspiratorial knowing are often articulated as the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public, actively questioning how concerns with collective memory, loss, and paranoia fuel both the desire for transparency and our projective urge to insert ourselves into our uncomfortable past and unknown future. From Wikileaks, the Cold War, and the Kennedy Assassination, nostalgia-driven television programs (Quantum Leap, You Are There), astrology, and the history of editorial redactions to the work of writers and artists such as Mark Lombardi, Pierre Huyghe, Dziga Vertov, Spaulding Gray, and Don Delillo, we'll examine how the sense of a 'master plot' shapes the way we narrate social and cultural experiences. What role do these narratives play in our struggle to assign meaning to events and artworks that are otherwise inexplicable? And how does our fascination with conspiracy--and its often melancholic and performative relationship to loss--address the potential of 'putting right what once went wrong'?

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.

Topics vary by semester. Please see individual topic descriptions.

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 course explores artistic, tactical, theoretical, cultural and pedagogical approaches to resisting Empire through the work of John Akomfrah, Black Audio Collective, #decolonizethisplace, Sky Hopinka, Tirza Even, Forensic Architecture, Rafa Esparza, Damon Locks, SuperFutures Haunt Collective and Santiago X. We will consider how artists, activists and scholars destabilize linear time, imagine queer futures and utopias by remixing hegemonic forms of social memory including archives, explore community-based knowledges and develop reparative counter-narratives. Structure: Readings, discussions, presentations, visits to Chicago archives, guest lectures, and development of pedagogical materials and/or scholarly/creative projects.

Group research trips include visits to libraries and collections to meet with archivists and researchers, including the following sites: the Gerber Hardt Library for GLBTQ studies, American Indian Center, Leather Archive and Museum, Edward E. Ayers Collection of native studies at the Newberry, Vivian G. Harsch, Harold Washington Special Collections and visits to informal, uncurated collections, including flea markets. Readings may include Eve Tuck, Audra Simpson, Stuart Hall, Russell West-Pavlov, Tina Campt, Gerald Vizenor, Jose Esteban Mu?oz, Arjun Appadurai, Tananarive Due, and Saidiya Hartman.

Students will engage in weekly discussions to readings, 3 written responses, conduct an independent visit to a collection and present findings. Final projects may include hybrid production: written, artistic and/or pedagogical projects, final presentation and critique.

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 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.

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.