CST 200B  - J. Fort - Theories of Cultural Studies

Definitions of "critical" scholarship and examination of various contexts in which cultural studies theory has emerged worldwide. Both mainstream and alternative theoretical traditions, such as those developed by people of color and by other minoritized groups.

Tue: 3:10pm - 6:00pm

CST 250  - G. Wang -  Research Seminar: 

This seminar focuses on the preparation and writing of a draft dissertation prospectus in the qualitative interdisciplinary field of cultural studies. A dissertation prospectus is a distinct genre that can vary somewhat in its characteristics depending on specific field(s). During the quarter you will write components of the prospectus and critique each other’s work. By the end of the quarter you will have a workable initial draft of a dissertation prospectus.

While our work will focus on developing a working draft for your dissertation prospectus, we will also attend to other important writing opportunities such as academic journal articles, grant proposals, and public-facing, activist-oriented scholarship. This seminar should provide you space to think about how all these writing activities might fit within the developing trajectory of your research, scholarship, and public engagement.

Tue: 2:10pm - 5:00pm  

CST 290 - Colloquium: CST Speaker Series.  

Designed to provide cohort identity and faculty student exchange. Opportunity to present papers, hear guest lecturers, and see faculty presentations, gather for organizational and administrative news, exchange information, and make announcements.

Thur: 4:10pm - 6:00pm

AFFILIATE COURSES

GSW 200A - R. Jaleel - Current Issues in Feminist Theory 

This seminar examines current issues in feminist theory, techniques employed to build feminist theory in various fields.  

Mon: 3:10pm - 6:00pm

ENL 233 - M. Jerng - Law and Literature: Racial Differentiation, Social Life, and Speculative Knowledge

This seminar has two research areas that we will work to put into dialogue: 1) genealogies of critical race theory in legal studies; 2) speculative writing. With the first, we will focus on the ways in which critical race theorists have analyzed the law and its reproduction of norms of freedom, property, contract, personhood, corporations, and violence. We will think through the law as a regulatory apparatus that uses grammars and conventions such as the counterfactual, precedent in-place-of history, tort, causation, and testimony. With the second, we will focus on writers using practices of speculation across various modes of writing (historical speculation; what ifs; time-travel; science fiction) that invite alternative knowledge structures, ways of being and making realities possible, and worldbuilding. We will develop our approaches for thinking across legal and literary modes of thinking. We will have some explicit help in the form of the legal theorist Derrick Bell whose major critical work consists in large part of speculative fiction. Throughout we will decipher intersections across law and speculative writing that reproduce and legitimize modes of individuality, freedom, incorporation, justice, contract, and property-making entangled with racial capitalism. But we will cultivate re-imaginings of sociality, collectivization, and sense-making drawing from the speculative worldmaking of Bell, Octavia Butler, Cherie Dimaline, W.E.B. DuBois, N.K. Jemisin, Victor Lavalle, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Patricia Williams, among others

Mon: 12:10pm - 3:00pm

STS 205 - F. Brunton - The Priors: Archives, Preservation, Libraries

The goal of this seminar is to think about the role of archives and libraries in the production of knowledge, particularly in areas pertinent to STS. Along with a review of the canonical STS literature and theories on the subject, we will be exploring unorthodox or less studied forms of preservation, archival collection, and librarianship. These will include shadow libraries like libgen, Sci-Hub, Monoskop, and Anna's Archive; emergent collections like the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive; biomedical data collection and preservation practices; seed banks and botanical gardens; the Prelinger Archive and their approach to moving image preservation; documenting and preserving ephemeral knowledge, bodily techniques, practices, and performance; data management and data friction for ultra-large-scale materials in domains like climate and high energy physics research; and the role of all of these and more in the production, not just maintenance, of knowledge itself. 

Tues: 1:10pm - 4:00pm

ANT 210/PFS 265A - C. Giordano - Getting Caught: A collaboration on and off stage between theater and anthropology

This graduate seminar is an exploration of and a cross pollination between research and narrative practices in theater and anthropology. By creating a dialogue between these disciplines in a laboratory format, we explore techniques that will enrich our engagement with anthropological questions and embodied production.

We simultaneously engage theatrical devising practices, anthropological modes of attending to forms of life, and affect and post-dramatic theories, to practice what we call Affect Theater. This is not a seminar on the anthropology of theater nor an acting or playwrighting class. In this practice, theatrical devices will provide us with tools to analyze our findings through the body and the embodiment of narratives in space. By exploring our research through the elements of the stage (lights, sets, objects, sound, bodies etc.), theater can teach social scientists and artists to engage the empirical more viscerally in their writing. Anthropological listening to the intricacies of stories that are embedded and woven within specific worlds can broaden and deepen the ways in which theater makers and performers render narratives for the stage. This practice can inspire new forms of writing and production (essays, plays, short stories, installations, performance pieces etc.), or revitalize existing practice of academic writing.

We will engage a body of empirical material gathered by my collaborator Rima Praspaliauskiene who will participate in the seminar. Rima is currently working on a memoir project about growing up in a working-class family with a grandmother, an illiterate fortuneteller in Soviet-occupied Lithuania. As a historian and anthropologist Rima will share with us the ethnographic and archival material around her grandmother Veronika’s experiences of two World Wars, the Bolshevik revolution, the holocaust, and the unraveling of the Soviet Empire. Through the process of Affect Theater, we will further explore this material and discover new ways of approaching and rendering it for the page and the stage.

Wed: 9:00am - 11:50am

EDU 235 - C. Whithaus - Critical Pedagogy 

This seminar focuses on developing socio-cultural critiques of educational systems. We examine how critical pedagogy intersects with contemporary social justice movements. Participants consider how students, teachers, and community members can advocate for reform and change. We stress interdisciplinary perspectives that cut across emphasis areas within education and reach across the social sciences, humanities, and STEM fields. Much of our work will consider how social power differences are perpetuated through educational systems, the texts they value, and the learning activities they encourage.
We'll read foundational works within critical pedagogy such as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress. We will also turn to books by contemporary researchers: April Baker-Bell’s Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, Aja Martienez’s Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory, and works recommended by seminar participants. suggest. Other readings will include recent works from scholars such as Anita Casavantes Bradford and Alberto Eduardo Morales, Geneva Smitherman, Ernest Morrell, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa, and Asao Inoue. 

Wed: 9:00am - 11:50am