Ctr for Art, Society & Pub Pol (ASPP-UT)

Students in the Tisch School of the Arts are required to take this course. The course follows Writing the Essay: Art and the World (EXPOS-UA 5) and provides advanced instruction in analyzing and interpreting written texts, art objects and performances; using written texts as evidence; developing ideas; and in writing persuasive essays. It stresses analysis, reflection, revision, and collaborative learning. The course is tailored for students in the Arts so that course readings and essay writing focus on issues that are pertinent to that discipline. Students are NOT permitted to add or switch sections after the first week of classes without EWP permission. To view syllabi visit the EWP website: http://www.nyu.edu/cas/ewp/index.html

We will return to and consider together these terms and others as ways of locating or "framing" socio-ecological life. What are the implications of understanding socio-ecological life in these terms (and/or others)? This is a broad topic that has been addressed by many scholars. This class will not offer a comprehensive history, but rather a way of understanding the specificity of the ways some contemporary political and aesthetic practices have reworked or departed from these terms. So we will review some of the history of the enclosure and appropriation of communal space made possible by the imposition of the economic framework of private property. We will also review some of the history of the partitioning, political administration and policing of space by states through the emergence of international law. And we will consider some attempts to revisit these histories in Western science and philosophy. At the same time, we will look at very different ways of understanding the ground or space or material contours of socio-ecological life that are fundamental to communal, indigenous, pastoral, and exilic/diasporic social formations, among others. Finally, will look at documentation of some recent projects—political and aesthetic—that maneuver, elude, or make use of the contradictions in these terms, or that attempt to sustain or imagine and activate other forms of socio-ecological life without them. We will consider the work of writers like: John Locke, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Samera Esmeir; Wen Liu; Anooradha Siddiqi; Renisa Mawani; Isaac Newton; John Bell; Karen Barad and Nathaniel Mackey. We will also consider work by groups and artists such as: The Freedom Farm Cooperative, The EZLN and Zapatista Caracoles; Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti; Jorge Furtado; Hélio Oiticica; Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman; Beatriz Santiago Muñoz; Julieta Aranda; Alan Lomax; Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum; among others.

This course explores the use of comics and graphic novels to tell stories about disability and illness. Students will be introduced to both recent and historically significant comics about disability and illness. Our goals are to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between image and text in sequential art, to explore and utilize the core elements of graphic novels (such as image and text, panels and pages, language and rhythm, character, plot, point of view), and develop the ability to critically analyze graphic novels that deal with complex and sometimes challenging subject matter. What are the ethical and methodological issues that arise when constructing sequential narratives of disability and illness? What are the comparative strengths and differences between such narratives that are autobiographical, documentary or fictional? Is there something unique about the format of graphic novels that enables artists to tell a different kind of story than filmmakers, musicians or performers? How do comic books circulate culturally, and how might this expand or limit their ability to inform our understandings of disability and illness? Wewill explore these questions through close readings, robust discussions and careful written analysis of well-known graphic novels by Ellen Forney, David Small and David. B, as well as comics by Kimiko Tobimatsu, Christian Ryan, Thersa Wong, Kristen Radtke, Mikaël Ross, Matt Freedman, Sarah Leavitt, Nate Powell, Takehiko Inoue, Laura Lee Gulledge and Peter Dunlap-Shohl.

The Reproductive Unit: We will look at some of the history of the ideal of the nuclear family, as socio-bio-economic-affective and reproductive unit. We will consider the moral/ideological justifications for this unit and the measures taken by states and other apparatuses to promote it, however unsustainable it may be, and to interdict it, however sustaining it may be (measures that include state surveillance, management and dissolution of families or other support systems that don’t fulfill the functions this unit is meant to fulfill). We will consider the way class war, colonial war, race war, the wars against women, queer and crip people are carried out through interventions in biological in reproduction, including eugenics and population/workforce management through birth control, coerced sterilization, “one child” policies, sex-selection (now legal only in the US), and adoption as well as efforts to control pregnant people through rape, restrictions on pregnancy termination and IVF, among other measures. We will also consider the way the reproductive unit has been supplemented by paid surrogates, wet nurses and other caregivers. Course materials will include sentimental, utopian and “monstrous” representations of families as well as critical writing about reproduction in its various forms by authors and artists such as: Thomas Robert Malthus; Jonathan Swift; Jade Sasser; Michel Foucault; Francis Galton; Mary Shelly; Silvia Federici; Edward Steichen; Daniel Patrick Moynihan; Jennifer Morgan; Hortense J. Spillers; Ana Maria García; Lourdes Portillo; Rita Laura Segato; Mary Pat Brady; Jennie Livingston and her many coauthors; Mark Rifkin; Joseph M. Pierce; Tsai Ming-liang; Rey Chow; W. E. B. Du Bois; Octavia Butler; Rachel Carson; Heather Davis; Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos; Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and perhaps some horror films from the 1970s.

In this course, you will develop the skills you need to write about your own work. A series of guided reading, research, and writing exercises will help you think about what your work is, what it means, and why it matters, so that you will be able to craft language that accurately and effectively represents you as an artist and thinker. We will study a variety of personal statements, project descriptions, manifestos, and other artist writings, examining them for their relative strengths and weaknesses with an eye towards gathering effective expressive strategies. You will use the writing you’ve generated in your assignments as the groundwork for several final artist statements that approach and represent your work from different perspectives. After we explore a variety of public and private sources of funding, fellowships, and residency opportunities in the US, you will identify several opportunities that would be appropriate for your work. You will then prepare applications for two opportunities of your choosing (three for graduate students). You will exit the course with writing that you might revise and reuse for many different purposes in your professional creative life. This course will count toward elective credit for undergraduate students.

This seminar aims to give students both a conceptual and practical grounding in the range of issues and approaches by which arts politics can be understood. The course will be framed by the following considerations: What are the institutional, discursive, and ideological contexts that shape the objects, images, sounds or texts we call “art?” What are the links between cultural spaces-- the museum, the movie-theater, the gallery, the music/dance hall, the bookstore, the fashion runway, the public street, television, cyber space-- and the larger realm of politics? And how do these relationships impact, implicitly or explicitly, the ways we create, curate, or study the arts? How do consumers play an active role in the reception of cultural products? What is the relation between formally promulgated cultural policy and the tacit knowledge that artists call upon to get their work into the world? What dimensions of the broader cultural terrain are made legible through artistic practice? What are the means through which art intervenes in the political arena? “Art” will be studied as a site of contested representations and visions, embedded in power formations-- themselves shaped by specific historical moments and geographical locations. Given contemporary global technologies, cultural practices will also be studied within the transnational transit of people and ideas. Such issues as the legal and constitutional dimensions of censorship, the social formation of taste, the consumption of stars, the bio-politics of the body, transnational copyrights law-- will all necessarily entail intersectional analyses incorporating the insights of critical race, postcolonial, feminist, queer, disability and ecological studies. We will read texts that offer theoretical formulations of key concepts and consider case studies that give us an opportunity to revise and/or extend these concepts. Students will also be invited to explore the questions raised in this class in the context of their own artistic and political practices.

This course examines the relationship between law and race, especially as it relates to the production of subjects and how they come to be managed. In addition to engaging case law in the construction and management of race, we will study how the humanities and arts have come to contend with this history. The larger point in doing so is to reflect on the theoretical, methodological, and political ramifications of humanistic discourse and cultural production in how they create specific visions and understandings of the law. As such, we will unpack a set of interlocking questions that ultimately highlight the stakes of placing law, culture, race, and institutional critique together: What notions of justice are achieved through artistic, cultural, and theoretical engagements with the law that exceed the law's capacity? What ideas of institutional critique can such engagements produce beyond merely being resistant to the law or “against” the institution? Most importantly, how does the legacy of liberalism overdetermine the very terms in which we understand these questions? This course will examine theorists like Saidiya Hartman, Jacques Derrida, Lisa Lowe, Janet Halley, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Robert Cover, and Cheryl Harris, amongst others.

This course provides an overview of the field of disability studies as it intersects with feminist theory and queer of color critique. Our discussions will focus heavily on how disability functions in relation to notions of sexuality, gender, race, and class. The first part of the semester will review the field’s foundations, analyzing investments in the notion of disability from a variety of fields and approaches. In particular, we will trace the field's foundations in relation to first person memoir that have shifted towards questions around biopolitics, biopower, and populations. The second part of the course will give an introduction to some of the major directions within the field, such as the transnational/global, biopower, debilitation, neoliberalism, war, transgendered body, posthumanism, affect, invisible disabilities, animal studies, and technology. Although we will certainly engage the history of disability along with the lived experiences of real people, this course is not meant to provide a full historical overview of disability or of specific disabilities. Rather, this course is meant to analyze the emergence of the field, along with its past and developing concerns. We will engage texts and objects including but not limited to Mel Chen, Terry Galloway, Sins Invalid, Michel Foucault, Preciado, Eli Claire, Paul Longmore, Chris Bell, Robert McRuer, Sue Schweik, Susan Stryker, Jasbir Puar, Mara Mills, Georgina Kleege, and Anna Mollow.

This course looks at how difference (othering) is constructed in film. We accomplish our goals via in class viewing of short and full length features, and critical analysis of the visual form and content in mainstream Hollywood, independent, and international films. This inquiry takes note that while some of these films may be conventional in form, in content they challenge accepted notions of differences or other. Our goal is to catalog films and other media that resist accepted notions of the “other.” We deal primarily with textual analysis that focuses on story, character and cultural spaces, as well as cinematic space and time. With the help of reading assignments, we examine socially accepted notions of the “other” and see how they are derived and/or challenged in and by films, thus looking at how an art form can interact with socially accepted forms of “othering.” The objective of the course is to train emerging artists and scholars to engage in critical analysis that can make profound contributions to the individual’s unique creative or academic process. Another intention of the course is to delineate and occupy the space left for debate between authorship as expressed from a directorial perspective from authorship from the spectator’s point of view.

This class will concentrate on research methods of art making. It has been argued that creativity has seven stages: orientation, preparation, analysis, ideation, incubation, synthesis, and evaluation. Each of these steps will be explored and researched with complimentary writing assignments and individual or group creative problem solving exercises. These seven steps of creativity will be a platform to structure the class and hopefully come to understand the mystery of inspiration, originality and invention. We will examine other related theories such as trauma and creativity, spontaneity, chance, creativity as a voice for empowerment and the function of freedom and lack of freedom to heighten artistic movement. How are we inspired? Is there a method to our creativity? Can the creative process have a formula? How does research inform the creative process? The class will utilize the archives, galleries and libraries as a research tool and NYU as research University. We will visit the Fayles library, the Tainamont library, NYU Grey Art Gallery as well as visit with scholars and artists to consider the furthering of ideas into a series of stages to a final project and paper.

This class considers the multiple ways we create artistic content. How do we creatively respond to this historical moment? Do you wish to create art inspired by lived experience and offer representation to your voice? How do we artistically engage with resilience and resistance to represent stories and histories not told? How do we find purpose and meaning in these crazy and challenging times within our practice and identity? We will examine cultural examples in history, exhibitions and hear from guest speakers to inspire our vision for a hopeful future. Imagination as celebration can be a space to transcend and resist. This is a dynamic, generative class where you will be able to engage in creative production. We are creating and making. You will have your choice of mediums - performance art, installation, hybrid media, film, photography, site-specific, poetic or text based, or experimental practice. Sound work, drama or movement is also welcomed. Creatives or curators that work in related areas are invited to expand their practice to explore new ground! This is a workshop atmosphere and the professor strives to have an educational space for trying things out and discovering together. We will go on field trips to investigate art practices that will look at identity, representation, new media gender, race and activism. At the time of this writing the professor is still planning our cultural adventures and field trips for Fall 2026. Last 2025 class we attended Homage to Queer Lineage Video. at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University and met with the gallery director and to The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art to see Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exploring Black Dandyism, when the museum was closed to the public for an invited viewing with staff. In both of these examples students created and researched presentations / creative production inspired by the exhibits. We will have guest artists, last year we had Noa Micaela Fields who describes themselves as a trans poet with hearing aids who visited our class and discussed their practice and most recent book of poetry. We will have a research session to learn about artist archives at the NYU special collection. At the archives we will study the Magic Box by Queer artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. How do we research and document the creative process? In Fall 2026 I have been invited to bring our class to see and respond to the exhibition by fluxus artist Alison Knowles at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. Finley will update exhibitions, guests and field trips in the summer. We will observe, review and research ways to expand our practice and methods. Performing, embodiment, intersectional feminism, communicating the body: gender, race and identity. Recovery, restoration and healing is made possible. Appreciating in-progress, process, or How do we give and receive feedback?. How do we translate our practice to the page? Humor and absurdity is appreciated. Introverts and ambiguity welcome. I look forward to working with you. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out to the professor via email - karen.finley@nyu.edu

How do we create transformative art that activates social change? How do we create art that expresses the world we see and the world we wish to change to? What concerns do you feel passionate about that you wish to activate artistically? How can emotions, events, policy, loss, grief, hope for peace, end to war, healthcare, gender, race, cultural equity, social justice etc... become art? Can this work be abstract or diffuse or should it be direct and clear? Considering the artist as a historical recorder we will strive to develop work that witnesses, illustrates and communicates issues about which we wish to foster awareness or change. We will consider art examples, meet with artists, experiment and workshop works in progress. We will have readings, creative assignments, formulate poetic voicing and artistic vision. As we develop our own content we will begin to consider context and concept with our own practice and transformation. Intentional areas of reflection will be employed for the student to experiment and expand perspective. Units such as Architectural Methods as a Way to Unify, will include activities such as ""making"" bridges, creating windows, building foundations, urban wall murals or graffiti art. Sound and color will emerge as a way to express emotion, outrage and cultural shifts. We will consider memorials, monuments and borders. Collaboration, collectives, community practice and public art. Cultural and collaborative manifestos. Through this all we need to find the passion, courage and faith to sustain our practice and heart. Finley may share her own practice, such as with installation, sound, video, poetics, performance, memorials or Art in response to AIDS. This class aims to facilitate the development and awareness of transformative art with assignments, research, reflections, discussion and creative practice. These undertakings will provide the impetus for deeper inspiration and theories in our artistic development and scholarship. The professor will initiate concepts with readings and artistic examples. We will also consider artists and examine their themes and practices. Students are welcome from a variety of fields and disciplines. Guests working in the field will be visiting the class with their research and experience. Students will create a midterm, a final presentation and paper.

This class considers intersectional feminism. The class will be a series of explorations of case studies, readings, events, artistic examples, and topics reflecting on cultural, social and political issues. Female Cultural Rebels his will be a space to further and deepen reflection while reimagining possibility, rebellion, resistance empowerment and expression. One part of this semester will be considering body agency. We will study and/ or meet with abortion activists such as from Thank God for Abortion, Shout Out Your Abortion and The Jane Collective, an underground abortion service from the 60's. We will monitor the recent protests in Iran and global response after the death of Mahsa Amini. We will hear from the producer of Disclosure, an eye-opening documentary on transgender depictions in film and television. We will hear from the Feminist Institute and the archive. And the drag queen story hour and recent censorship issues. We will also consider wellness, healing, spirituality, and emotions. We will examine archetypes, roles, the gaze, casting and gender stereotypes. Monsters, crones, hags, witches, the ingenue. We will also look at the rebelliousness of socially acceptable norms of being, acting out from gender expectations and going against dominant norms such as is Narcissister, Andrea Dworkin, Chantal Ackerman, Viva Ruiz, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Annie Sprinkle, Cassils, Pamela Sneed, and Ana Mendieta. Readings, discussion, lectures, and guests will be part of the class structure. The class is given regular writing assignments and to present presentations. We will work solo but also in pairs and small groups. There will be a midterm presentation that can be a creative response with a companion essay. A final project of the student’s choice will be presented. In addition to the project or presentation a paper, artist statement and historical references will accompany the project. Of course, the choice and focus will be designed individually for the student. And can be in a research project, creative project that is focused with the student’s area of interest. The professor is a feminist artist activist who looks forward to working with you.

The class is to consider the depth of grief and loss within artistic responses and to inspire love and hope with our creative transformation. How does the artist process or respond to the emotions and events of loss? What are cultural heritage examples? What are ways we were taught in our families? What traditions do we wish to reimagine? Who needs to be commemorated? Is creative transformation possible? Is there a space for hope, love and joy within the complexity of these emotions? The course will have creative exercises and conceptual prompts that can be developed in the medium of your choice. We will consider creative texts such as visual, film, music, media, performance, installation, and poetic examples to broaden and inspire our understanding of ways to respond. There are other forms of expression to contemplate such as fashion, outsider art, architecture, archives, memorials, gardening, and cultural movements. We will have discussion, guests, field trips, and presentations. Is there a way to create an archive? How do we document or forget? Together we will be a collective of considering, contemplating and creating. Some of the strategies we will be considering are: metaphor, expression within nature, fairy tales, abstraction, fragments, love, celebration and the space of silence for restoration. Some of the artists /writers will be Maya Angelou, Dunbar, David Wognarowicz, Krishnamurti, Pamela Sneed, Barthes, Rilke and bell hooks. We will look at films such as the 1926 silent film, Page of Madness by Kunsuga, Let me Come in by Bill Morrison, or News From Home by Chantal Ackerman. I look forward to being your guide for the seminar, Grief, Loss , Love, Hope and Creative Transformation. Feel free to contact me with any questions karen.finley@nyu.edu

Art and War: Battle Lines of the Graphic Novel This course explores storytelling about war through the use of the graphic novel. Students will be introduced to both recent and historically significant comics about war. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between image and text in sequential art, and the ability to critically analyze graphic novels that deal with challenging subject matter. What are the methodological and ethical issues that arise when constructing sequential narratives of war? What are the varying strengths between war narratives that are autobiographical, documentary or fictional? Is there something unique about the format of graphic novels that enables artists to tell a different kind of war story than filmmakers, musicians or performers? How do comic books circulate culturally, and how might this expand or limit their ability to inform our understandings of war? We will explore these questions through close readings, robust discussions and careful written analysis of well-known works by Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi and Joe Sacco, as well as graphic novels by Keiji Nakazawa, Jason Lutes, Gipi, Emmanuel Guibert and others.

Artists and cultural workers have always engaged in critical, integral ways in advocacy, organization, resistance & re-imagining the world. Art, the imaginary, the engagement of culture; have informed, supported, translated, transformed, and uplifted movements for social change/ justice/rights. This is true throughout the world. In many places, it is understood and assumed that art and politics are intertwined and that art offers ways of understanding, connecting, dreaming, grieving, playing, and building that make even the idea of change possible, make existing conditions survivable. At the same time, when the story is told, or the “leaders” gather to challenge or make policy, artists and art in the broadest sense are still, often considered extra, even if valuable. And, where, in many places, artists have perhaps longer been recognized as central to social change, much has changed in the U.S. in the last 40 years regarding this question. New generations of activists integrate art and imagination into their work at every level, in breathtaking ways. This class will explore models of how artists and cultural workers have worked and continue to work in relation to movements, pressing social challenges, community and policy initiatives, envisioning possibility. We will study examples to understand creative forms of intervention, invention, invitation; looking also at how different initiatives emerged, were evaluated (if they were), what is to be learned, and ways of creative resistance and world building today. Students will be invited to develop a plan for a project that engages art in relation to a social, community, political reality with which they’re seeking to engage. This work will be based on a broad interpretation of the terms “art” and “politics,” opening the possibility for exploration of definitions, methodologies, and collaboration, border crossings and re shapings. We will read works by organizers, cultural workers, artists, dreamers, theorists and educators who’ve engaged in this wide field, and look at films, exhibitions and performances in relation to the work. This class is open to graduate students and undergraduate seniors and juniors with permission from the professor.

With the growing numbers of immigrants/refugees in cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, belonging no longer corresponds to one geography, simplistically imagined as “over there.” This seminar will study questions of displacement as represented, mediated and narrated in a wide variety of texts. It will focus especially on memoirs, whether in written or audiovisual form, which confront exclusionary and essentialist discourses with a rich cultural production that foregrounds a complex understanding of such issues as “home,” “homeland,” “exile,” “hybridity” and “minorities.” How are identity and history performed in these colonial, post­colonial and diasporic contexts? What is the status and significance of the oral, the visual and the performed within the context of memory? We will examine different narrative forms of memory­making, analyzing how post/colonial authors and media­makers perform “home,” “homeland,” “diaspora,” and “exile.” How does memory become a filter for constructing contemporary discourses of belonging, especially in the context of post­independence and transnational dislocations? We will also address questions of genre, and the socio­political ramifications of certain modes of writing and performances of memory that create new hybrid genres such as the poetic documentary and experimental autobiography. We will analyze works where a fractured temporality is reassembled to form a usable past where the body serves as an icon of migratory meanings. We will also examine contemporary cyber diasporic practices, problematizing such issues as “nostalgia” and “return” in the context of new communication technologies.

How can we direct our creative process and implement to challenge, inspire and disrupt the status quo? Can art be an intervention? This is an opportunity to expand strategies in creating cultural production. We will develop our art practice and its public. How do we envision a project and follow up on the various versions that are possible? We will consider purpose, research, process, and mission. What do we define a public sphere? How do we create an installation? How can we create a meaningful conceptual practice? How do we reimagine memorials? What is our research process? How do we consider an archive? How can our art transform society? Can we consider healing in our art? For creatives working in a variety of media – from video to performance, from object making to sound works, from movement and photography to poetics, you will find an environment that will be experimental and engaging. We will work solo but also in collaboration, create collectives and awaken cooperation. What is the community we are engaged in? What is the purpose, the humanity and message of our creativity? I will plan events for our class. We will visit archives, exhibitions, meet with artists, and create our own in class exhibitions. Finley will update the description as confirmed. We will consider appropriating other mediums. We will also consider public spaces such as nightlife, disco, joy, celebration, and processions. Other possible themes: Bridges, earthworks, protest, social practice, installations, interventions and disruption, borders and memorials, homages, silence, encounters, social and new media, and time-based art will be studied. I am a multidisciplinary artist and activist who looks forward to sharing and inspiring cultural production with you. And we will discover the energy of joy within our practice, being together with support and encouragement. Guest artists and field trips are part of the class. Selected historical, theoretical readings, artist writings and case studies accompany our studies. Please feel free to contact the professor with any questions karen.finley@nyu.edu

Reading and Writing Water If we listen to the water, what will we learn? “…it is really vain to attempt to express the nature of something. We notice effects and a complete account of these effects would perhaps comprise the nature of this thing. We attempt in vain to describe the character of a man; but a description of his actions and his deeds will create for us a picture of his character…water is essentially the element of life, wherever possible it wrests life from death. It is the great healer of all that is sick and has lost its living poise; for water forever strives after balance, a living balance, never a static one that would extinguish life. It is everywhere a mediator between contrasts which grows sharper where it is absent. Thus it brings together elements hostile to one another, constantly creating something new out of them. It dissolves what is solid, rendering it back to life.” - Theodore Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos “All water has a perfect memory….” - Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory “Words are waves. You learn to swim from the seduction of a wave that wraps you in foam. Words have the rhythm of the sea and the call of the obscure: Come to me in search of what you know not, the blue called out to you…” - Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, translated by Sinan Antoon What are the language(s) of water… We will read and write water – as essential, as movement, as nourishment, as power, as story carrier, as cleanser, as resilience, as sensuous, as cold, as warm, as bubbling, as still, as wave, as ripple, danger and endangered, uncertain and constant, as beauty, as connector, as politicized, as mysterious, in relation to land, ownership, liberation, libation, spirituality, constructs of time; as body, as metaphor. As sacred. And more. We will attempt to work (and play), writing as water, with water, to water, guided by water. Which means a kind of fluidity. We will read, listen to, look at, watch and sense in all ways works in relation to [bodies of] water, from different perspectives, geographies, from and in varying forms including movement, film, visual art, sound. As water changes, flows, freezes/ melts; so does our writing, our making – as flood, as drought, as “fresh”, as “toxic”, as interspersing, from and in the individual body, and as from sky, from earth, as puddle, droplet, pond, lake, river, ocean and… as rain…as tears… Materials may include Sea and Fog, Etel Adnan; Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi, theory of water, Lenne Betasamosake Simpson, Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith, the work of Christina Sharpe, The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison, Water Wars, Vandana Shiva, Undrowned, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the visual work of Carolina Caycedo, and more.

This course will offer neither a linear, developmental history nor a comprehensive survey of feminism but a look at various dissident creative practices--sometimes disjunctive, sometimes conflicting, sometimes interlinked--from a range of contexts in the Americas. The focus will be primarily on practices that resist the modes of gendering and the gender-based relations of domination that underpin settler colonialism, racial capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy and by defending and/or inventing alternative ways of life. We will think about the social and aesthetic aspects of the various forms such practices take, including writing, image-making and performing, but also organizing, assembling, caring, etc. and what those forms make possible. The practices we consider can and will necessarily expand beyond the geographical frame loosely specified here to account for transnational or inter-local connections. Students will also contribute to a collective archive of feminist practices in order to further elaborate our sense of what feminism might be or do.

Following ongoing critiques of liberal humanism from critical race, Afro-pessimist, transnational, queer, and feminist studies, what alternative political projects or visions might now inform our practices and work? What should follow after we question the grounds of modernity, liberalism, and materialism? This class seeks to examine one critical possibility: Marxism, particularly Marxist humanism. Although we will define this political project, we will also question its limits. The legacy of humanism in both liberalism and Marxism becomes a problem when placed alongside recent critiques around the subhuman and inhuman. In particular, what is the figure of the human for Marxist humanism? And how does such a figure sit with and/or against the liberal subject, person, and Man that has come under critique by queer inhumanism (with a focus on objects, animals, and environmental relations), along with the larger ontological turn coming from Black studies, Afro-pessimism, trans and queer theories, and new materialism? This class examines 1) differing notions of the human and subject as informed by liberalism and Marxist humanism, 2) the political limits and possibilities of Marxist humanism, and 3) the history and the continued mediation of Marxism alongside discourses of race, the transnational, disability, queerness, sexuality, and gender. In addition, we will situate how the aesthetic has engaged these larger questions. This course will examine theorists like Sylvia Wynter, Raya Dunayevskaya, Cedric Robinson, Silvia Federici, CLR James, Jacques Derrida, Stuart Hall, Shu-mei Shih, Fredric Jameson, Mario Mieli, and Petrus Liu, amongst others.