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gRADUATE CERTIFICATE IN
EXPERIMENTAL ETHNOGRAPHY
COURSE LISTINGS
CORE COURSES
COMM XXX: Critical Race Media
John Jackson
Ethnography isn’t magic, but sometimes it can feel like a kind of alchemy, this transformation of
“deep hanging out” into real empirical “data.” Given how ambitious ethnographic research tends
to be (both as an all-encompassing methodology and as a representation of what can be learned
anew from a “qualitative” approach), it can often feel like an unwieldy, ambiguous, and
unconvincing (since not statistical) way to capture cultural knowledge and craft a narrative about
what that knowledge tells us. This course attempts to work through some of the conceptual and
practical possibilities that open up when one examines the assumptions that underpin written
ethnography and think about what might be gained and/or lost when rendering the cultural world
not only in “words, words, words” but also in images, sounds, bodies [dance, theater], and other
media that might serve as compelling carriers of sociocultural—and particularly
analytical—content. Moreover, what is the role of “the analytical” in ethnographic research, and
does it work the same way (and have an equivalent valence/impact) when the ethnographic work
is not reduced to a printed page? Are there other ways to “do” ethnography that matter?
ANTH 551: Experimental Ethnography at the Interfaces of the Arts & Sciences
Kristina Lyons
This course takes inspiration from conversations and practices occurring at the interfaces of
cultural anthropology, the environmental humanities, and feminist science studies.
Anthropologist Stuart McLean (2017) asked: "What might become of anthropology if it were to
suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring
its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a
world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans?" At the same time, the
emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline in the twenty-first century
reflects the growing conviction on the part of the diverse sectors that "environmental" problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. Instead, cultivation of experimental methods and alliance building between the arts and social and natural sciences has become ever more important strategy in terms of fomenting public engaged scholarship. In this course, we will not necessarily suspend the social scientific claims of anthropology, and ethnography more
specifically, but we will push our methodological premises and conceptual work to experiment
with our objects of study, matters of concern, and the diverse materialities that emerge from and
participate in our ethnographic work.
XXX: Experimental Ethnography in the Professions
Regina Austin, Fran Ammon, Fran Barg & Nadia Dowshen
A proseminar currently in development. It will be crosslisted with PennMed, PennLaw, Design, and Wharton.
FNAR 583: Performance/Camera
Sharon Hayes
This course supports the individual and collaborative production of performance works. As the
medium of performance consists of diverse forms, actions, activities, practices and
methodologies, the course allows for an open exploration in terms of material and form. Students
are invited to utilize technologies, materials and methodologies from other mediums and/or
disciplines such as video, photography, writing and sound. In addition to the production
component, the course will examine multiple histories of performance through readings,
screenings and directed research.
John Jackson
Ethnography isn’t magic, but sometimes it can feel like a kind of alchemy, this transformation of
“deep hanging out” into real empirical “data.” Given how ambitious ethnographic research tends
to be (both as an all-encompassing methodology and as a representation of what can be learned
anew from a “qualitative” approach), it can often feel like an unwieldy, ambiguous, and
unconvincing (since not statistical) way to capture cultural knowledge and craft a narrative about
what that knowledge tells us. This course attempts to work through some of the conceptual and
practical possibilities that open up when one examines the assumptions that underpin written
ethnography and think about what might be gained and/or lost when rendering the cultural world
not only in “words, words, words” but also in images, sounds, bodies [dance, theater], and other
media that might serve as compelling carriers of sociocultural—and particularly
analytical—content. Moreover, what is the role of “the analytical” in ethnographic research, and
does it work the same way (and have an equivalent valence/impact) when the ethnographic work
is not reduced to a printed page? Are there other ways to “do” ethnography that matter?
ANTH 551: Experimental Ethnography at the Interfaces of the Arts & Sciences
Kristina Lyons
This course takes inspiration from conversations and practices occurring at the interfaces of
cultural anthropology, the environmental humanities, and feminist science studies.
Anthropologist Stuart McLean (2017) asked: "What might become of anthropology if it were to
suspend its sometime claims to be a social science? What if it were to turn instead to exploring
its affinities with art and literature as a mode of engaged creative practice carried forward in a
world heterogeneously composed of humans and other than humans?" At the same time, the
emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline in the twenty-first century
reflects the growing conviction on the part of the diverse sectors that "environmental" problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. Instead, cultivation of experimental methods and alliance building between the arts and social and natural sciences has become ever more important strategy in terms of fomenting public engaged scholarship. In this course, we will not necessarily suspend the social scientific claims of anthropology, and ethnography more
specifically, but we will push our methodological premises and conceptual work to experiment
with our objects of study, matters of concern, and the diverse materialities that emerge from and
participate in our ethnographic work.
XXX: Experimental Ethnography in the Professions
Regina Austin, Fran Ammon, Fran Barg & Nadia Dowshen
A proseminar currently in development. It will be crosslisted with PennMed, PennLaw, Design, and Wharton.
FNAR 583: Performance/Camera
Sharon Hayes
This course supports the individual and collaborative production of performance works. As the
medium of performance consists of diverse forms, actions, activities, practices and
methodologies, the course allows for an open exploration in terms of material and form. Students
are invited to utilize technologies, materials and methodologies from other mediums and/or
disciplines such as video, photography, writing and sound. In addition to the production
component, the course will examine multiple histories of performance through readings,
screenings and directed research.
METHODS COURSES
EDUC 586: Ethnographic Film Pt. I (Fall)
Kathy Hall and Amit Das
This ethnographic methodology course considers filmmaking/videography as a tool in
conducting ethnographic research as well as a medium for presenting academic research to
scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. The course engages the methodological and theoretical
implications of capturing data and crafting social scientific accounts/narratives in images and
sounds. Students are required to put theory into practice by conducting ethnographic research
and producing an ethnographic film as their final project. In service to that goal, students will
read about ethnography (as a social scientific method and representational genre), learn and
utilize ethnographic methods in fieldwork, learn about ethics and the politics of representation,
watch non-fiction films (to be analyzed for formal properties and implicit assumptions about
culture/sociality), and acquire rigorous training in the skills and craft of digital video production.
METHODS (1 or 2; students may petition to have other methods-based courses count for this
requirement)
FNAR 604 Monument Lab: Public Art & Civic Research Praxis
Ken Lum
What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? This question is the central prompt for a Fall 2017 citywide public art and history project, as well as a specially designed community-based and engaged research course in Fine Arts. Students in Monument Lab: Public Art & Civic Research Praxis will participate as members of specialized research teams, in partnership with local high school research fellows, embedded in iconic public squares, West Philadelphia sites, and neighborhood parks around the city; serve as trained art guides to facilitate learning around over twenty temporary monument installations by internationally and locally-based artists; collect research proposals as a form of creative datasets managed by Penn's PriceLab and Library; and engage civic partners and public audiences around key issues of the project, including issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, social justice, and civic belonging. The class is structured as a socially-engaged art praxis experience: students will meet weekly for group facilitations, civic dialogues, and special guest lectures by participating artists. In lieu of midterms and a final exam, students will work at research "labs" throughout the city for a set amount of hours per week, write reflection papers, and produce a final site specific research portfolio. The course is ideal for students invested in issues of socially-engaged public art, history, and civic engagement.
LAW 979: Visual Legal Advocacy
Regina Austin
Visual Legal Advocacy will introduce students to the art of making short nonfiction advocacy films on behalf of actual individual clients and/or groups devoted to the advancement of the cause of social justice. Instruction will track the steps in the production of a nonfiction or documentary film, starting with pre-production planning (including writing treatments and shooting scripts, budgeting, and scheduling), going on to the rudiments of production (including introductions to camera, lighting, and sound equipment), and concluding with post-production (including making paper edits and an introduction to editing). Participants will be divided into several working groups that will be responsible for the production of a short piece of visual legal advocacy, most likely a video clemency petition made on behalf of a formerly incarcerated person whose employment opportunities are limited by her/his criminal record or a victim impact statement made on behalf of a person harmed or injured by Philadelphia’s gun violence.
URBS 530: GIS Applications in Social Science
Amy Hillier
This course will introduce students to the principles behind Geographic Information Science and applications of (GIS) in the social sciences. Examples of GIS applications in social services, public health, criminology, real estate, environmental justice, education, history, and urban studies will be used to illustrate how GIS integrates, displays, and facilitates analysis of spatial data through maps and descriptive statistics. Students will learn to create data sets through primary and secondary data collection, map their own data, and create maps to answer research questions. The course will consist of a combination of lecture and lab.
MUSC Sound Studies, Ecology, and Ethnography
Jim Sykes
This course has a dual focus. First, we will consider the history of sound studies as a discipline and its increasing rapprochement with anthropology. Then, the second half of the course opens up more broadly to sensory studies and multimodal ethnography, as students pursue projects in what I’ll call “experimental sonic ethnography.” Students will be encouraged to find creative ways to position their own sound recordings as essential to their written work; alternatively, students can position multimodal ethnography centrally in their writings about sound. Housed in the music department but centered on “sound” rather than “music,” the course is intended to draw music students interested in sound studies and anthropology, while attracting non-music students interested in sound and recording who are pursuing a certificate from the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Some themes running throughout the course will include the notion of soundscape; ontological differences in the definitions of sound, personhood, space, and time; issues of class, race, and gender pertaining to field recordings; and recent theorizations of the relationship between nature and culture.
MUSC 650: Field Methods in Ethnomusicology
Tim Rommen
This course explores various methodological challenges and theoretical concerns that confront us during the course of ethnomusicological fieldwork. How can we approach writing about our ethnographic work without silencing the voices of those who should be heard? In what ways might transcription and notation complicate power structures and reinforce our own musical values? What special challenges need to be negotiated in the process of documenting ethnographies on film? How do ethical and economic dilemmas inform our approach to making sound recordings? What institutional structures/strictures do we face in designing our ethnographic projects? What possibilities, moreover, do recent developments in sensory and experimental ethnography open for us? A series of readings in ethnomusicology and anthropology will suggest some answers to these questions – answers that will, in turn, be tested through practice. Throughout the semester, each student will engage with a community of her or his choice (ideally in Philadelphia) moving through several small-scale projects including a field notes exercise, a recording of a musical event, a photo essay, and a short film; these will culminate in a final project that melds theory and practice. Our seminar environment will follow a workshop model.
CIMS 592: Documentary Cinema
Staff
Over the last twenty years, no film practice has been more dynamic and innovative that documentary cinema, a trend that will be the main focus of the course. We will begin with a broader survey of the history of documentaries since the films of John Grierson and Robert Flaherty in the 1920s and through the evolution of modern documentaries such as cinema vérité, meta-documentaries, and essay films. As part of our investigation we will attend to different cultural movements around the world, as well as the impact of technological changes and industrial shifts. Alongside these practices, we will read various critical and theoretical positions, such as those found in the writings of Dziga Vertov, John Grierson, Jean Rouch, Bill Nichols, and Stella Bruzzi. There are no prerequisites. Requirements will include a seminar presentation and a research essay.
HPR 503: Qualitative Methods in Health
Fran Barg
The purpose of this course is to expose students to a variety of qualitative approaches/ methodologies that may be used in health services/policy research. In didactics, the instructors will discuss the pros and cons of a range of qualitative methods and how these methods are actually implemented (with multiple experts presenting approaches). Presentations are paired with broader discussions that allow students to compare and contrast health-oriented articles in which different methods were used. Students will have the opportunity to apply the theoretical approaches to their own research interests with direct input from the faculty and their peers.
Kathy Hall and Amit Das
This ethnographic methodology course considers filmmaking/videography as a tool in
conducting ethnographic research as well as a medium for presenting academic research to
scholarly and non-scholarly audiences. The course engages the methodological and theoretical
implications of capturing data and crafting social scientific accounts/narratives in images and
sounds. Students are required to put theory into practice by conducting ethnographic research
and producing an ethnographic film as their final project. In service to that goal, students will
read about ethnography (as a social scientific method and representational genre), learn and
utilize ethnographic methods in fieldwork, learn about ethics and the politics of representation,
watch non-fiction films (to be analyzed for formal properties and implicit assumptions about
culture/sociality), and acquire rigorous training in the skills and craft of digital video production.
METHODS (1 or 2; students may petition to have other methods-based courses count for this
requirement)
FNAR 604 Monument Lab: Public Art & Civic Research Praxis
Ken Lum
What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? This question is the central prompt for a Fall 2017 citywide public art and history project, as well as a specially designed community-based and engaged research course in Fine Arts. Students in Monument Lab: Public Art & Civic Research Praxis will participate as members of specialized research teams, in partnership with local high school research fellows, embedded in iconic public squares, West Philadelphia sites, and neighborhood parks around the city; serve as trained art guides to facilitate learning around over twenty temporary monument installations by internationally and locally-based artists; collect research proposals as a form of creative datasets managed by Penn's PriceLab and Library; and engage civic partners and public audiences around key issues of the project, including issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, social justice, and civic belonging. The class is structured as a socially-engaged art praxis experience: students will meet weekly for group facilitations, civic dialogues, and special guest lectures by participating artists. In lieu of midterms and a final exam, students will work at research "labs" throughout the city for a set amount of hours per week, write reflection papers, and produce a final site specific research portfolio. The course is ideal for students invested in issues of socially-engaged public art, history, and civic engagement.
LAW 979: Visual Legal Advocacy
Regina Austin
Visual Legal Advocacy will introduce students to the art of making short nonfiction advocacy films on behalf of actual individual clients and/or groups devoted to the advancement of the cause of social justice. Instruction will track the steps in the production of a nonfiction or documentary film, starting with pre-production planning (including writing treatments and shooting scripts, budgeting, and scheduling), going on to the rudiments of production (including introductions to camera, lighting, and sound equipment), and concluding with post-production (including making paper edits and an introduction to editing). Participants will be divided into several working groups that will be responsible for the production of a short piece of visual legal advocacy, most likely a video clemency petition made on behalf of a formerly incarcerated person whose employment opportunities are limited by her/his criminal record or a victim impact statement made on behalf of a person harmed or injured by Philadelphia’s gun violence.
URBS 530: GIS Applications in Social Science
Amy Hillier
This course will introduce students to the principles behind Geographic Information Science and applications of (GIS) in the social sciences. Examples of GIS applications in social services, public health, criminology, real estate, environmental justice, education, history, and urban studies will be used to illustrate how GIS integrates, displays, and facilitates analysis of spatial data through maps and descriptive statistics. Students will learn to create data sets through primary and secondary data collection, map their own data, and create maps to answer research questions. The course will consist of a combination of lecture and lab.
MUSC Sound Studies, Ecology, and Ethnography
Jim Sykes
This course has a dual focus. First, we will consider the history of sound studies as a discipline and its increasing rapprochement with anthropology. Then, the second half of the course opens up more broadly to sensory studies and multimodal ethnography, as students pursue projects in what I’ll call “experimental sonic ethnography.” Students will be encouraged to find creative ways to position their own sound recordings as essential to their written work; alternatively, students can position multimodal ethnography centrally in their writings about sound. Housed in the music department but centered on “sound” rather than “music,” the course is intended to draw music students interested in sound studies and anthropology, while attracting non-music students interested in sound and recording who are pursuing a certificate from the Center for Experimental Ethnography. Some themes running throughout the course will include the notion of soundscape; ontological differences in the definitions of sound, personhood, space, and time; issues of class, race, and gender pertaining to field recordings; and recent theorizations of the relationship between nature and culture.
MUSC 650: Field Methods in Ethnomusicology
Tim Rommen
This course explores various methodological challenges and theoretical concerns that confront us during the course of ethnomusicological fieldwork. How can we approach writing about our ethnographic work without silencing the voices of those who should be heard? In what ways might transcription and notation complicate power structures and reinforce our own musical values? What special challenges need to be negotiated in the process of documenting ethnographies on film? How do ethical and economic dilemmas inform our approach to making sound recordings? What institutional structures/strictures do we face in designing our ethnographic projects? What possibilities, moreover, do recent developments in sensory and experimental ethnography open for us? A series of readings in ethnomusicology and anthropology will suggest some answers to these questions – answers that will, in turn, be tested through practice. Throughout the semester, each student will engage with a community of her or his choice (ideally in Philadelphia) moving through several small-scale projects including a field notes exercise, a recording of a musical event, a photo essay, and a short film; these will culminate in a final project that melds theory and practice. Our seminar environment will follow a workshop model.
CIMS 592: Documentary Cinema
Staff
Over the last twenty years, no film practice has been more dynamic and innovative that documentary cinema, a trend that will be the main focus of the course. We will begin with a broader survey of the history of documentaries since the films of John Grierson and Robert Flaherty in the 1920s and through the evolution of modern documentaries such as cinema vérité, meta-documentaries, and essay films. As part of our investigation we will attend to different cultural movements around the world, as well as the impact of technological changes and industrial shifts. Alongside these practices, we will read various critical and theoretical positions, such as those found in the writings of Dziga Vertov, John Grierson, Jean Rouch, Bill Nichols, and Stella Bruzzi. There are no prerequisites. Requirements will include a seminar presentation and a research essay.
HPR 503: Qualitative Methods in Health
Fran Barg
The purpose of this course is to expose students to a variety of qualitative approaches/ methodologies that may be used in health services/policy research. In didactics, the instructors will discuss the pros and cons of a range of qualitative methods and how these methods are actually implemented (with multiple experts presenting approaches). Presentations are paired with broader discussions that allow students to compare and contrast health-oriented articles in which different methods were used. Students will have the opportunity to apply the theoretical approaches to their own research interests with direct input from the faculty and their peers.
TOPICAL SEMINARS
ANTH 5XX: Topics in Multi-Modal Anthropology, Grad Level*
Taught by Visiting CEE Fellow
*This class can be taken more than once, as the topic will be different with each Fellow
What does the digital age mean for humanistic, social scientific, and professional inquiry and practice? How do non-text based formats – such as film, dance and other kinds of performance, creative writing, and sounds – transform both the processes and products of research? How do they inform and transform our disciplines, and what might this mean for the communities with which we work? This advanced undergraduate seminar will address these (and other related) questions. Taught by the invited Fellows from the Center for Experimental Ethnography, this course will take shape differently each semester according to the Fellow’s area of expertise and practice. Students will be encouraged to explore alternative formats of representation that move beyond text while still being grounded in ethnographic research, and they will develop skills in relevant media.
ANTH 541: Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s)
Kristina Lyons
This course places science studies in conversation with counter-forensic and experimental ethnographic methodologies, decolonial and feminist approaches, data and environmental justice, critical race and disability studies, conflict medicine, and speculative fiction, among other topics. We will be looking at the ways that the arts, natural and social sciences, and community-oriented research agendas come together, and what tensions and possibilities these emergent alliances, intersectional modes of thinking, and practical collaborations may produce. This class offers a unique opportunity for graduate students from engineering, natural and social sciences, humanities, and the arts to learn to converse and collaborate around pressing socio-environmental issues. Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to the socio-environmental dilemmas being faced require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, and their relationships with nonhumans and materialities. Aspirations for justice and the possibilities for evidence making require translation across different practices, temporalities and scales; negotiations with the forces of economic structures; and endurance within colonial legacies as well as situations of everyday militarization and social and armed conflict. Throughout the course we will collectively explore moments of newly shared insight, mutual incomprehension, and partial connection between disparate actors and potentially unlikely allies. The idea is not for us to necessarily give up our disciplinary orientations, but rather to learn how to approach shared matters of concern without canceling out our differences and the generative agonisms they produce through collaborative experimentation and practice-oriented approaches.
AFRC XXX: Modalities of Black Freedom and Escape: Ships
Grace Sanders Johnson
The course combines methods from environmental humanities, visual arts and history to consider multi-modal practices of black freedom and escape. The course circulates around the ship. From free black sailors in the eighteenth century Caribbean Sea, to twentieth and twenty-first century West African fishing boats, notions of Haitian “boat people,” Parliament Funkadelic’s mothership, and sinking boats with Somali and Ethiopian migrants off Yemen’s coast, ships have been and remain technologies of containment and freedom for communities of African descent. In the face of environmental vulnerabilities and the reality of water ways as systems of sustenance and imminent death, this course asks: how do black people use the ship and the process and practice of shipping as vessels for freedom, escape, and as a site to experiment with futures? Using the city of Philadelphia and the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers as our primary site of interrogation, the course attends to the threats that black people experience following natural disaster (New Orleans, Haiti, Puerto Rico) and everyday engagement with the local and global state structures regarding water (Flint, MI). In this context, we also look to shipping as a site to theorize and account for black innovation, meanings of (non-)sovereignty, and alternative futures. The artistic and community practice of boating/shipping is the touch point for this course. The course revolves around three major projects. First, the seminar readings and discussion will prime students with ethnographic, historical, theoretical, and technical understandings of boats and shipping. Second, students will share-collect oral histories with members of the black West and North Philadelphia boating communities. With these narratives, course participants will craft a sail that responds to the immediate concerns and aspirations regarding black escape and freedom. Students will design, assemble, and mount the sail onto a boat at the end of the semester. In the process of creating the sail, studying community practices, and mapping routes of escape for Philadelphia communities, students will also earn their boating license (surprisingly, this does not require getting on a boat).
CIMS 595: Copyright and Culture
Peter Decherney
In this seminar, we will look at the history of copyright law and explore the ways that copyright has both responded to new media and driven art and entertainment. How, for example, are new media (books, photography, recorded music, film, video, software, video games, and the internet) defined in relation to existing media? How does the law accommodate shifting ideas and circumstances of authorship? What are the limits of fair use? And how have writers, artists, engineers, and creative industries responded to various changes in copyright law? A major focus of the course will be the lessons of history for the current copyright debates over such issues as file sharing, the public domain, fandom, archives, and fair use.
CIMS XXX: Multimedia Criticism
Peter Decherney
This course has two intersecting goals. One is to examine the current state of media production and distribution through readings, class discussions, and an on-site visit to the Tribeca film festival in New York. We will attend the festival, watching films and talking with festival staff and industry leaders. The second goal of the course is to master the skills of multimedia criticism. We will watch, listen to, and read about the increasingly popular format of multimedia criticism (aka video essays). Many major media critics have given up writing about audiovisual media to analyze it through audiovisual media. Even the New York Times splits its energy between written and multimedia reviews. But this is just the most mainstream tip of the iceberg, which also includes avant-garde, academic, and fan work as well. Every student will create critical multimedia works that may include video, audio, and even virtual reality. Coursework may be individual or collaborative.
MUSC 605: The Creole Archipelago: Sounding Decolonial Possibilities in the Caribbean
Tim Rommen
This course is designed around three sets of interrelated literatures. Part I engages with recent thought in the areas of island and archipelago studies. Part II includes a survey of scholarship on utopias, heterotopias, and the concept of creolization. Part III, finally, turns to questions of decoloniality, citizenship and sovereignty. All of our readings and conversations will proceed from the premise that the colonial project “islanded” the Caribbean and that the anti-colonial moment ironically reinforced this “islanded” reality even as many former colonies claimed their independence. This is particularly challenging for the small island Caribbean – a group of islands that have generally not had the luxury of considering themselves as “islands.” Their dependence on and connection to their regional neighbors has, in fact, historically framed their experience as archipelagic and, as such, also as potentially heterotopic and decolonial. Our deliberations will eventually turn to the concept of creole as an analytical and performative tool. Can creole practices be mobilized to imagine possible futures instead of being understood primarily as an index to the past? What can we learn if we consider creole practice as decolonial praxis? What, moreover, might these deliberations help us understand about citizenship and sovereignty in the region?
MUSC 705: The Ontological Stakes of Music and Sound
James Sykes
What if music history is made by gods, demons, ghosts, and nonhuman animals? What if sound has not been disenchanted? Do reincarnated beings share a music history even when their lives are separated by hundreds of years and miles? What if sound is not always an expression of personhood but a gift – like aspirin – that can be given? What if the elimination of nonhumans from music history reinforced Western notions of how music related to personhood and community, thereby legitimizing the discourses of difference that drive ethnic conflicts? In other words, what if sound studies, ecomusicology, and anthropology’s “ontological turn” are deeply relevant to the politics of national, ethnic, and religious cultures? In this course, we will think through these and related questions through readings on ontology in anthropology, critical theory, and interrelated musicological “turns” (i.e. sound studies, ecomusicology, zoomusicology). Considering that we are in a “post”-postcolonial period in which the discourses that frmaed understandings of culture in the early years of postcolonial rule are outdated yet still endure in the public sphere, we will aim to build a nuanced vocabulary that better represents the persistence of non-Western ontologies of sound, personhood, territory, and their relations in the twenty-first century. In doing so, we will think not just of music but of “sound” and “the philosophy of music,” and we will query some commonplace ideas about Western modernity, such as that music and sound became disenchanted through the decline of music’s social function, the growth of the work concept, and technological progress.
FNAR 530: Making Space and Public Art
Ken Lum
The French social philosopher Michel de Certeau upset the common understanding of the relationship between space and place by elevating space as practice place. By this, he meant that place is but a set of geo-physical particularities that has no dynamic meaning unless activated through social engagement so that space is produced. Spatial practice is a key concept in the modern understanding of the city as a society of abstract space, one in which the problem of human alienation is riven with the logic of spatial spectacularization. Public Art is often employed to address or mollify such urban problems through concepts of historical reconstruction or institutional critique, including possibly testing the limits of public expression. Historical markers play a somewhat different role by calling attention to lost or negative histories, albeit most often vetted through the language of tourism factoids. This course will examine the discursive issues at play in respect to art and markers, particularly for Philadelphia. Additionally, important public art works from around the world will be examined. The course will also include the occasional visit of several key works downtown in which the question of what can and cannot said will be pondered.
FNAR 801: Defense Against the Dark Arts
David Hartt
Defense Against the Dark Arts is a graduate studio that considers the artwork as space for debate and practice as a form of contention. How do we as artists participate meaningfully in the definition of social and cultural positions? Take for example the concept of Sovereignty, what does it mean in an era of failed states, virtual networks, and environmental catastrophe? The .yu domain name was retired 18 years after the dissolution of the Yugoslav state. The island nation of Tuvalu will most likely cease to exist in 50 years due to rising water levels. The 14th amendment, originally designed to grant citizenship rights to slaves was used to grant personhood to corporations. Sovereignty is an unstable concept with real social, political and economic consequences. We as artists have the platforms and the tools to investigate and dimensionalize how this or any other term or concept sits in the world. We’ll look at a variety of historic responses to times of crisis from manifestos to agit-propaganda, from films to a Formulary for a New Urbanism. Readings, screenings, and discussions make up the curriculum along with written and visual responses.
HSPV 638/CPLN 687: Photography and the City: The Visual Construction of Urban and Suburban America
Francesca Ammon
This seminar explores the intersecting social and cultural histories of photography and the urban and suburban built environment. No prior background in photography is necessary. Since its inception in 1839, photography has provided a critical means for representing urban space. The medium has helped to celebrate the great structures of the industrial city, reform cities from the Progressive Era through urban renewal, critique expanding postwar suburbs, and document change in the post-industrial and post-disaster city. In all of these ways, the photograph has been both a reflection of the city and an agent of its transformation. Our subjects each week will include individual images and larger photographic archives. We will discuss not only the creation of these images, but also their application in design and planning discourse. Although technical training in photography is not expected, students will have a chance to construct a photo-essay of their own. Through our investigations, we will collectively explore how photography's dual documentary and aesthetic properties have shaped the city—physically, socially, and culturally.
EDUC 545-006: Activism Beyond the Classroom
Krystal Strong
Activism Beyond the Classroom explores “activism” in theory and praxis. In the first part of the course, students examine theories of power, resistance, and liberatory social transformation. The notion of praxis, a guiding principle of the course, signals the processes through which “theory” is both embodied and realized. As such, in the second part of the course, students experiment with how theory can be brought to bear on contemporary political struggles around education--and, conversely, how the practices of activism can inform scholarship and pedagogy. Students co-design and co-teach the second, inquiry-oriented part of the course, by selecting a set of four “problem areas” to investigate collectively. Activism Beyond the Classroom covers a broad range of issues, including: the school as a site of political struggle for diverse interests, school-community relations, and local, national, and global policies. It also encompasses other timely contemporary matters such as the school-to-prison pipeline, student protests, school closures, critical pedagogies, queer theories in schooling, among others. The working groups that form around each problem area develop a set of resources to guide our exploration over a two-week period, and identify community-based organizations or local experts that are working in this area. Among these grassroots networks, we invite local experts to a class meeting to dialogue further about their work. Each working group also develops an episode of ABC Podcast related to the problem area, which will introduce the topic to a wider audience. Class participants participate in or observe two local community actions around an issue of their choosing. Past community engagements have included: public demonstrations, neighborhood association meetings, community or student organization meetings, art shows, among others. A major objective of the course is for class participants to explore methods of public scholarship. To this end, in addition to the class podcast, class participants each craft an op-ed article intended for broad consumption.
UC 545-006: Activism Beyond the Classroom
FNAR 585 | Performance Studio
Dr. Sharon Hayes
This course supports the individual and collaborative production of performance works. As the medium of performance consists of diverse forms, actions, activities, practices and methodologies, the course allows for an open exploration in terms of material and form. Students are invited to utilize technologies, materials and methodologies from other mediums and/or disciplines such as video, photography, writing and sound. In addition to the production component, the course will examine multiple histories of performance through readings, screenings and directed research.
Taught by Visiting CEE Fellow
*This class can be taken more than once, as the topic will be different with each Fellow
What does the digital age mean for humanistic, social scientific, and professional inquiry and practice? How do non-text based formats – such as film, dance and other kinds of performance, creative writing, and sounds – transform both the processes and products of research? How do they inform and transform our disciplines, and what might this mean for the communities with which we work? This advanced undergraduate seminar will address these (and other related) questions. Taught by the invited Fellows from the Center for Experimental Ethnography, this course will take shape differently each semester according to the Fellow’s area of expertise and practice. Students will be encouraged to explore alternative formats of representation that move beyond text while still being grounded in ethnographic research, and they will develop skills in relevant media.
ANTH 541: Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s)
Kristina Lyons
This course places science studies in conversation with counter-forensic and experimental ethnographic methodologies, decolonial and feminist approaches, data and environmental justice, critical race and disability studies, conflict medicine, and speculative fiction, among other topics. We will be looking at the ways that the arts, natural and social sciences, and community-oriented research agendas come together, and what tensions and possibilities these emergent alliances, intersectional modes of thinking, and practical collaborations may produce. This class offers a unique opportunity for graduate students from engineering, natural and social sciences, humanities, and the arts to learn to converse and collaborate around pressing socio-environmental issues. Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to the socio-environmental dilemmas being faced require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, and their relationships with nonhumans and materialities. Aspirations for justice and the possibilities for evidence making require translation across different practices, temporalities and scales; negotiations with the forces of economic structures; and endurance within colonial legacies as well as situations of everyday militarization and social and armed conflict. Throughout the course we will collectively explore moments of newly shared insight, mutual incomprehension, and partial connection between disparate actors and potentially unlikely allies. The idea is not for us to necessarily give up our disciplinary orientations, but rather to learn how to approach shared matters of concern without canceling out our differences and the generative agonisms they produce through collaborative experimentation and practice-oriented approaches.
AFRC XXX: Modalities of Black Freedom and Escape: Ships
Grace Sanders Johnson
The course combines methods from environmental humanities, visual arts and history to consider multi-modal practices of black freedom and escape. The course circulates around the ship. From free black sailors in the eighteenth century Caribbean Sea, to twentieth and twenty-first century West African fishing boats, notions of Haitian “boat people,” Parliament Funkadelic’s mothership, and sinking boats with Somali and Ethiopian migrants off Yemen’s coast, ships have been and remain technologies of containment and freedom for communities of African descent. In the face of environmental vulnerabilities and the reality of water ways as systems of sustenance and imminent death, this course asks: how do black people use the ship and the process and practice of shipping as vessels for freedom, escape, and as a site to experiment with futures? Using the city of Philadelphia and the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers as our primary site of interrogation, the course attends to the threats that black people experience following natural disaster (New Orleans, Haiti, Puerto Rico) and everyday engagement with the local and global state structures regarding water (Flint, MI). In this context, we also look to shipping as a site to theorize and account for black innovation, meanings of (non-)sovereignty, and alternative futures. The artistic and community practice of boating/shipping is the touch point for this course. The course revolves around three major projects. First, the seminar readings and discussion will prime students with ethnographic, historical, theoretical, and technical understandings of boats and shipping. Second, students will share-collect oral histories with members of the black West and North Philadelphia boating communities. With these narratives, course participants will craft a sail that responds to the immediate concerns and aspirations regarding black escape and freedom. Students will design, assemble, and mount the sail onto a boat at the end of the semester. In the process of creating the sail, studying community practices, and mapping routes of escape for Philadelphia communities, students will also earn their boating license (surprisingly, this does not require getting on a boat).
CIMS 595: Copyright and Culture
Peter Decherney
In this seminar, we will look at the history of copyright law and explore the ways that copyright has both responded to new media and driven art and entertainment. How, for example, are new media (books, photography, recorded music, film, video, software, video games, and the internet) defined in relation to existing media? How does the law accommodate shifting ideas and circumstances of authorship? What are the limits of fair use? And how have writers, artists, engineers, and creative industries responded to various changes in copyright law? A major focus of the course will be the lessons of history for the current copyright debates over such issues as file sharing, the public domain, fandom, archives, and fair use.
CIMS XXX: Multimedia Criticism
Peter Decherney
This course has two intersecting goals. One is to examine the current state of media production and distribution through readings, class discussions, and an on-site visit to the Tribeca film festival in New York. We will attend the festival, watching films and talking with festival staff and industry leaders. The second goal of the course is to master the skills of multimedia criticism. We will watch, listen to, and read about the increasingly popular format of multimedia criticism (aka video essays). Many major media critics have given up writing about audiovisual media to analyze it through audiovisual media. Even the New York Times splits its energy between written and multimedia reviews. But this is just the most mainstream tip of the iceberg, which also includes avant-garde, academic, and fan work as well. Every student will create critical multimedia works that may include video, audio, and even virtual reality. Coursework may be individual or collaborative.
MUSC 605: The Creole Archipelago: Sounding Decolonial Possibilities in the Caribbean
Tim Rommen
This course is designed around three sets of interrelated literatures. Part I engages with recent thought in the areas of island and archipelago studies. Part II includes a survey of scholarship on utopias, heterotopias, and the concept of creolization. Part III, finally, turns to questions of decoloniality, citizenship and sovereignty. All of our readings and conversations will proceed from the premise that the colonial project “islanded” the Caribbean and that the anti-colonial moment ironically reinforced this “islanded” reality even as many former colonies claimed their independence. This is particularly challenging for the small island Caribbean – a group of islands that have generally not had the luxury of considering themselves as “islands.” Their dependence on and connection to their regional neighbors has, in fact, historically framed their experience as archipelagic and, as such, also as potentially heterotopic and decolonial. Our deliberations will eventually turn to the concept of creole as an analytical and performative tool. Can creole practices be mobilized to imagine possible futures instead of being understood primarily as an index to the past? What can we learn if we consider creole practice as decolonial praxis? What, moreover, might these deliberations help us understand about citizenship and sovereignty in the region?
MUSC 705: The Ontological Stakes of Music and Sound
James Sykes
What if music history is made by gods, demons, ghosts, and nonhuman animals? What if sound has not been disenchanted? Do reincarnated beings share a music history even when their lives are separated by hundreds of years and miles? What if sound is not always an expression of personhood but a gift – like aspirin – that can be given? What if the elimination of nonhumans from music history reinforced Western notions of how music related to personhood and community, thereby legitimizing the discourses of difference that drive ethnic conflicts? In other words, what if sound studies, ecomusicology, and anthropology’s “ontological turn” are deeply relevant to the politics of national, ethnic, and religious cultures? In this course, we will think through these and related questions through readings on ontology in anthropology, critical theory, and interrelated musicological “turns” (i.e. sound studies, ecomusicology, zoomusicology). Considering that we are in a “post”-postcolonial period in which the discourses that frmaed understandings of culture in the early years of postcolonial rule are outdated yet still endure in the public sphere, we will aim to build a nuanced vocabulary that better represents the persistence of non-Western ontologies of sound, personhood, territory, and their relations in the twenty-first century. In doing so, we will think not just of music but of “sound” and “the philosophy of music,” and we will query some commonplace ideas about Western modernity, such as that music and sound became disenchanted through the decline of music’s social function, the growth of the work concept, and technological progress.
FNAR 530: Making Space and Public Art
Ken Lum
The French social philosopher Michel de Certeau upset the common understanding of the relationship between space and place by elevating space as practice place. By this, he meant that place is but a set of geo-physical particularities that has no dynamic meaning unless activated through social engagement so that space is produced. Spatial practice is a key concept in the modern understanding of the city as a society of abstract space, one in which the problem of human alienation is riven with the logic of spatial spectacularization. Public Art is often employed to address or mollify such urban problems through concepts of historical reconstruction or institutional critique, including possibly testing the limits of public expression. Historical markers play a somewhat different role by calling attention to lost or negative histories, albeit most often vetted through the language of tourism factoids. This course will examine the discursive issues at play in respect to art and markers, particularly for Philadelphia. Additionally, important public art works from around the world will be examined. The course will also include the occasional visit of several key works downtown in which the question of what can and cannot said will be pondered.
FNAR 801: Defense Against the Dark Arts
David Hartt
Defense Against the Dark Arts is a graduate studio that considers the artwork as space for debate and practice as a form of contention. How do we as artists participate meaningfully in the definition of social and cultural positions? Take for example the concept of Sovereignty, what does it mean in an era of failed states, virtual networks, and environmental catastrophe? The .yu domain name was retired 18 years after the dissolution of the Yugoslav state. The island nation of Tuvalu will most likely cease to exist in 50 years due to rising water levels. The 14th amendment, originally designed to grant citizenship rights to slaves was used to grant personhood to corporations. Sovereignty is an unstable concept with real social, political and economic consequences. We as artists have the platforms and the tools to investigate and dimensionalize how this or any other term or concept sits in the world. We’ll look at a variety of historic responses to times of crisis from manifestos to agit-propaganda, from films to a Formulary for a New Urbanism. Readings, screenings, and discussions make up the curriculum along with written and visual responses.
HSPV 638/CPLN 687: Photography and the City: The Visual Construction of Urban and Suburban America
Francesca Ammon
This seminar explores the intersecting social and cultural histories of photography and the urban and suburban built environment. No prior background in photography is necessary. Since its inception in 1839, photography has provided a critical means for representing urban space. The medium has helped to celebrate the great structures of the industrial city, reform cities from the Progressive Era through urban renewal, critique expanding postwar suburbs, and document change in the post-industrial and post-disaster city. In all of these ways, the photograph has been both a reflection of the city and an agent of its transformation. Our subjects each week will include individual images and larger photographic archives. We will discuss not only the creation of these images, but also their application in design and planning discourse. Although technical training in photography is not expected, students will have a chance to construct a photo-essay of their own. Through our investigations, we will collectively explore how photography's dual documentary and aesthetic properties have shaped the city—physically, socially, and culturally.
EDUC 545-006: Activism Beyond the Classroom
Krystal Strong
Activism Beyond the Classroom explores “activism” in theory and praxis. In the first part of the course, students examine theories of power, resistance, and liberatory social transformation. The notion of praxis, a guiding principle of the course, signals the processes through which “theory” is both embodied and realized. As such, in the second part of the course, students experiment with how theory can be brought to bear on contemporary political struggles around education--and, conversely, how the practices of activism can inform scholarship and pedagogy. Students co-design and co-teach the second, inquiry-oriented part of the course, by selecting a set of four “problem areas” to investigate collectively. Activism Beyond the Classroom covers a broad range of issues, including: the school as a site of political struggle for diverse interests, school-community relations, and local, national, and global policies. It also encompasses other timely contemporary matters such as the school-to-prison pipeline, student protests, school closures, critical pedagogies, queer theories in schooling, among others. The working groups that form around each problem area develop a set of resources to guide our exploration over a two-week period, and identify community-based organizations or local experts that are working in this area. Among these grassroots networks, we invite local experts to a class meeting to dialogue further about their work. Each working group also develops an episode of ABC Podcast related to the problem area, which will introduce the topic to a wider audience. Class participants participate in or observe two local community actions around an issue of their choosing. Past community engagements have included: public demonstrations, neighborhood association meetings, community or student organization meetings, art shows, among others. A major objective of the course is for class participants to explore methods of public scholarship. To this end, in addition to the class podcast, class participants each craft an op-ed article intended for broad consumption.
UC 545-006: Activism Beyond the Classroom
FNAR 585 | Performance Studio
Dr. Sharon Hayes
This course supports the individual and collaborative production of performance works. As the medium of performance consists of diverse forms, actions, activities, practices and methodologies, the course allows for an open exploration in terms of material and form. Students are invited to utilize technologies, materials and methodologies from other mediums and/or disciplines such as video, photography, writing and sound. In addition to the production component, the course will examine multiple histories of performance through readings, screenings and directed research.
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