CEE | Center for Experimental Ethnography
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COURSES
Fall 2024
Footage Films, or Narrating a Dataset
ANTH 6668
Instructors: CAMP ; Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran
Instructors: CAMP ; Shaina Anand and Ashok Sukumaran
We begin this course with a moratorium on audio-video capture. A hundred days without your own images:) We will attempt instead to collectively and then sequentially author a set of video essays that engage with material that we are already deeply enmeshed in. That are typically too vast, "thin", that either overflow or flow beneath representational or affective media. Examples of what we could make here would be: a video essay on the Wikileaks dataset of global US Embassy shopping lists, a film made from the Radia phone taps, and so on. This course draws on CAMP's learnings from running an open-access footage archive, Pad.ma and related projects, since 2007. Pad.ma asked: what is the ethical and political relation between the category footage ("found", shot in large quantities, with good intentions, left in shoe boxes or dying hard disks) and the category "film". Footage is the raw material, but does it also tell us how film is made, and whether it is beautiful on the inside.
That film is made from footage, seems tautological. But in the process we will follow, any simple relation between footage and film is shattered into a multitude of moves by imagers, sounders, writers, editors, narrators and materials. We are inspired by Elizaveta Svilova, editor of "Man with the Movie Camera" carefully indexing, splicing and assembling pieces of film (intercutting them with images of women's work - patching phone lines, sewing, or painting fingernails), and that of her contemporary, Esfir Shub who was foraging cellars, gathering, restoring and compiling footage into films, a hundred years ago. Extending the footage metaphor to other media, we enter a vast terrain of over-collected materials. Health, insurance and other management databases, surveillance data, cctv streams, most of what the modern media industry is made of and which Matt Fuller and Andrew Goffey called Evil Media. Archive or be archived, we said in 2010. But the questions have moved beyond archival ones, to questions of what can be done with archives by situated subjects.
We begin by identifying footage collections or datasets that we can situate ourselves in, individually or as a group. We evolve narrative and editorial strategies within a Pad.ma - like interface via group annotations in a process called three-ing. In the second half of the course the participants develop a series of video essays. We see this as a counter-AI process of assimilation. At the end, we may also recognise that there are missing images - and if there is need for us to film, and if so why, with whom, and how. This prepares participants ethically and formally to go forth in the world to create really new images. The course is interdisciplinary and open to graduate students who have interests in film, ethnography, film studies, digital archives and contemporary art, and who like to work collectively and processually to realise ambitious projects.
That film is made from footage, seems tautological. But in the process we will follow, any simple relation between footage and film is shattered into a multitude of moves by imagers, sounders, writers, editors, narrators and materials. We are inspired by Elizaveta Svilova, editor of "Man with the Movie Camera" carefully indexing, splicing and assembling pieces of film (intercutting them with images of women's work - patching phone lines, sewing, or painting fingernails), and that of her contemporary, Esfir Shub who was foraging cellars, gathering, restoring and compiling footage into films, a hundred years ago. Extending the footage metaphor to other media, we enter a vast terrain of over-collected materials. Health, insurance and other management databases, surveillance data, cctv streams, most of what the modern media industry is made of and which Matt Fuller and Andrew Goffey called Evil Media. Archive or be archived, we said in 2010. But the questions have moved beyond archival ones, to questions of what can be done with archives by situated subjects.
We begin by identifying footage collections or datasets that we can situate ourselves in, individually or as a group. We evolve narrative and editorial strategies within a Pad.ma - like interface via group annotations in a process called three-ing. In the second half of the course the participants develop a series of video essays. We see this as a counter-AI process of assimilation. At the end, we may also recognise that there are missing images - and if there is need for us to film, and if so why, with whom, and how. This prepares participants ethically and formally to go forth in the world to create really new images. The course is interdisciplinary and open to graduate students who have interests in film, ethnography, film studies, digital archives and contemporary art, and who like to work collectively and processually to realise ambitious projects.
Fellows courses spring 2024
Crafting an Ethnography of Vulnerability
ANTH 3666/6666 | CIMS 3666/6666
Instructor: Ernesto Pujol |
Wednesdays,
1:45 pm-4:44 pm |
What if we could practice a radical ethnography of vulnerability because we believe that truly democratized, ethical engagement requires the unconditional vulnerability of the ethnographer: the relinquishing of all academic, professional, and project power bullying through a humble transparency and personal permeability that immediately triggers trust by de-enshrining the intellectual, by bravely including the emotional and spiritual life of the empathic ethnographer. Most of reality is invisible; the deeper communal paths are psychic. I am a veteran, multi-disciplinary social choreographer who has intuitively employed ethnographic tools and strategies for the past 30 years, collectively producing transformative performative portraits of threatened communities. For this graduate and undergraduate seniors workshop, I wish to invite students into my field process, in terms of my readings and roamings through the world. The workshop experience will culminate in a field trip to San Juan under the auspices of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico, to visit historic colonial sites and contemporary model projects such as El Departamento de la Comida, a queer farming collective. Travel over the week of spring break is required for our course, with airfare, in-country travel, room and board covered completely for all students (thanks to generous support from the Padeia program).
Advanced Documentary Storytelling // One Land, Two Cinemas
ANTH 3667/6667 | CIMS 3667/6667
Instructor: Ra'anan Alexandrowicz |
Thursdays
1:45 pm-4:44 pm |
The seminar will be structured as collaborative research in which the class, functioning as a research team, will explore both the historical facts and the cinematic representations of these facts. Provoked by films and clips we screen; we aspire to familiarize ourselves with the roots of the conflict, learn the facts about key events; deconstruct and evaluate narratives and myths that enable it and address the core questions that it raises. At the same time, we will study and scrutinize the cinematic representation of the historical events and ask ourselves if cinema is a reflection of the painful reality of the conflict or one of the drivers of it? Was it used to create myths or rather to undo them, or did both? The outcome of the course will be a collectively written paper about Israeli and Palestinian Cinema to which each student will contribute a chapter.
Fellows courses FALL 2023
Fables from the Flesh: Black feminist thought and performance composition
Black Feminst Thought and Performance Composition
The class is a process based, creative incubator thinking through the possibilities of performance compositions through the lens of Black feminist thought. Informed by theories of time, space, presence, and the body, the class works from movement-based investigations prompted by a range of Black feminist texts and performances to position creative practice as a site of research, intervention, ritual, and protest. We will read texts spanning from essays to fables, including works by M. Jacqui Alexander, June Jordan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiyah Hartman, and Christina Sharpe. We will also look to a number of performance works informed by Black feminist thought, including works by Ntozake Shange, Jennifer Harge, Jaamil Olwale Kosoko, Fana Fraser, and mayfield brooks.
In this weekly 3-hour seminar, students will be expected to create and present movement studies at least 4 times throughout the semester to investigate any ideas and/or materials introduced in a course unit that have particular resonance for them. Studies are meant to provide opportunities to instigate movement research around a theme, a problem and/or a question that has arisen in conversation with assigned readings, artistic works, and our classroom community. In the context of this class, movement is a wide container working in relation to space, time, energy, and other forms. To that end, the studies may very well intersect with sound, text, video, or whatever else is necessary. Students will also be expected to lead or co-lead one workshop during the semester in response to the class content. Students are strongly encouraged to center their own creative practices in the context of the workshop.
The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort.
This class is particularly suited for students interested in movement, performance, and compositional strategies through the lens of Black feminist thought. While there is a strong emphasis on movement, no prior dance experience is necessary.
The class is a process based, creative incubator thinking through the possibilities of performance compositions through the lens of Black feminist thought. Informed by theories of time, space, presence, and the body, the class works from movement-based investigations prompted by a range of Black feminist texts and performances to position creative practice as a site of research, intervention, ritual, and protest. We will read texts spanning from essays to fables, including works by M. Jacqui Alexander, June Jordan, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiyah Hartman, and Christina Sharpe. We will also look to a number of performance works informed by Black feminist thought, including works by Ntozake Shange, Jennifer Harge, Jaamil Olwale Kosoko, Fana Fraser, and mayfield brooks.
In this weekly 3-hour seminar, students will be expected to create and present movement studies at least 4 times throughout the semester to investigate any ideas and/or materials introduced in a course unit that have particular resonance for them. Studies are meant to provide opportunities to instigate movement research around a theme, a problem and/or a question that has arisen in conversation with assigned readings, artistic works, and our classroom community. In the context of this class, movement is a wide container working in relation to space, time, energy, and other forms. To that end, the studies may very well intersect with sound, text, video, or whatever else is necessary. Students will also be expected to lead or co-lead one workshop during the semester in response to the class content. Students are strongly encouraged to center their own creative practices in the context of the workshop.
The room will be grounded in practices of Black fellowship, moving between study group, kickback, ceremony, cypher, and incubator. We will oscillate between these formats depending on the needs of the course and the cohort.
This class is particularly suited for students interested in movement, performance, and compositional strategies through the lens of Black feminist thought. While there is a strong emphasis on movement, no prior dance experience is necessary.
Documentary Ethnography For Museums and Exhibitions
This course will investigate research modalities that center around documentary storytelling in the museum context. During the semester, we will examine research strategies that collaborate with curatorial experts. e class will utilize cinematic techniques that investigate cultural narratives revolving around cultural heritage sites, rituals and ceremonies, artifacts, materials and living traditions. Students will engage Solomon's process of her creation of the new digital and in-gallery content that will reframe the Metropolitan Museum’s African art galleries. The semester will culminate in students creating their own short film content that will screen publicly in the gallery at the end of the semester.
SPRING 2023: FELLOWS COURSES
Embodied Ethnographies: Performance Art, Ritual Performance and Poetic Praxis
AFRC3663401, AFRC6663401, ANTH6663401, GSWS3663401, MUSC6663401
Instructor: Imani Uzuri
Led by composer, vocalist, librettist, experimental ethnographer and conceptual artist Imani Uzuri (she/they), this course will investigate embodied research modalities (from mundane to ethereal), performance praxis centering Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness and cultural practices outside of the western eurocentric gaze embedded with the politics of agency, marginality, identity, mythmaking, subversiveness and sacredness. During the semester, we will discuss practitioners of these modalities - both emerging and established, well-known and obscured - including artists such as Victoria Santa Cruz, Adrian Piper, Spider Woman Theater, Tehchieng Hsieh, Lorraine O' Grady, Marsha P. Johnson, Gladys Bentley, Ben Patterson, Aida Overton Walker, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Juliana Huxtable, Marina Abramović, Cindy Sherman, Robert Ashley, Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Allison Janae Hamilton, Sister Gertrude Morgan, David Hammons, and Carrie Mae Weems. Students will also engage Uzuri's own ritual performances, sound art and interdisciplinary works, which often deal with themes of ancestral memory, magical realism, liminality, Black American vernacular culture, spirituality and landscape (including her/their projects Wild Cotton, Come On In The Prayer Room, Hush Arbor: Wade (1, 2 &3), The Haunting of Cambridge, I Am Here (Black Madonna) and Conjure Woman). The semester will culminate in students creating their own short ritual performances and/or experimental works using aspects of the various methodologies, healing modalities, research modes, multivalent texts and performance praxis explored throughout the semester. No performance experience is necessary.
AFRC3663401, AFRC6663401, ANTH6663401, GSWS3663401, MUSC6663401
Instructor: Imani Uzuri
Led by composer, vocalist, librettist, experimental ethnographer and conceptual artist Imani Uzuri (she/they), this course will investigate embodied research modalities (from mundane to ethereal), performance praxis centering Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness and cultural practices outside of the western eurocentric gaze embedded with the politics of agency, marginality, identity, mythmaking, subversiveness and sacredness. During the semester, we will discuss practitioners of these modalities - both emerging and established, well-known and obscured - including artists such as Victoria Santa Cruz, Adrian Piper, Spider Woman Theater, Tehchieng Hsieh, Lorraine O' Grady, Marsha P. Johnson, Gladys Bentley, Ben Patterson, Aida Overton Walker, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Juliana Huxtable, Marina Abramović, Cindy Sherman, Robert Ashley, Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Allison Janae Hamilton, Sister Gertrude Morgan, David Hammons, and Carrie Mae Weems. Students will also engage Uzuri's own ritual performances, sound art and interdisciplinary works, which often deal with themes of ancestral memory, magical realism, liminality, Black American vernacular culture, spirituality and landscape (including her/their projects Wild Cotton, Come On In The Prayer Room, Hush Arbor: Wade (1, 2 &3), The Haunting of Cambridge, I Am Here (Black Madonna) and Conjure Woman). The semester will culminate in students creating their own short ritual performances and/or experimental works using aspects of the various methodologies, healing modalities, research modes, multivalent texts and performance praxis explored throughout the semester. No performance experience is necessary.
Autoethnography in the Age of Online Profiles and Selfies
ANTH6662401, CIMS3662401, COMM3662401, COMM6662401, FNAR3662401
Instructor: Wazhmah Osman
What drives people to make work about themselves? What qualifies as autoethnography, and what distinguishes autoethnography from other forms of autobiographical storytelling? We all have stories to tell. Long before people curated semi-public and public personas through selfies and online profiles on numerous corporate digital platforms, marginalized people were driven to make visual media about themselves that circulated via mail and festivals. Media becomes autoethnographic when media-makers connect their personal experiences and life trajectories with larger societal and global issues, understanding themselves to be implicated in broader historical processes. Autoethnography is an activist performance of the self that seeks to destabilize imposed forms of identity and dominant representations. Historically subaltern groups have used autoethnographic filmmaking to challenge negative representations and power dynamics. This course provides a hands-on approach to learning the ethics, practices, and methods of autoethnographic filmmaking in conjunction with a survey of the history of the genre, including how it has evolved in the digital age. We will interrogate the power dynamics inherent in the filmmaking process and knowledge production more broadly, focusing specifically on the roles and relationships of filmmakers, researchers, and subjects. We will explore the possibilities and pitfalls of representing others and ourselves (and our communities) publicly. Course readings will draw from the growing literature on how to establish researcher/activist partnerships, as well as from case studies that exemplify the controversies, debates, and pivotal moments in the history of non-fiction film. Students will develop and produce their own autoethnographic films, while learning to think critically about the stakes of this kind of media-making. These films will be showcased at the end of the semester.
SPRING 2023 COURSES
Taught by affiliated faculty and counting towards CEE Graduate Certificate
Jeanne Lieberman and Shari Hersh.
Building Environmental Justice in Philadelphia: Participatory Action Research Seminar with Mural Arts
Using art as a point of entry into environmental justice, students in this seminar will contribute to a citywide (Philadelphia) campaign to end short-dumping, the illegal dumping of waste. This campaign is being launched by Mural Arts’ Environmental Justice Department together with environmental justice partner organizations across Philadelphia...
Jennifer Joan Thompson
On the Stage and in the Streets: An Introduction to Performance Studies
What do Hamilton, RuPaul’s Drag Race, political protest, TikTok Ratatouille, and Queen Elizabeth’s funeral have in common? They all compose repertoires of performance. From artistic performances in theatres, galleries, and concert halls to an individual’s comportment in everyday life, to sporting events, celebrations, courtroom proceedings, performance studies explores what happens when...
Regina Austin, Juan Castrillón, and Alissa Jordan
Critical Qualitative Research and the Intentional Torts (Proseminar)
This course is designed to introduce professional school students to critical multimodal qualitative research in two ways. First, the course will consider the value of qualitative research to the analysis of contemporary social justice controversies that are the subject of actual intentional torts cases.
Francesca Ammon
Topics in Historic Preservation: Photography and the City
This seminar concentrates on a selected topic in the social and cultural history of the built environment. Past themes have included photography and the American city and the relationship between cities and sound.
Peter Decherney
Virtual Reality Lab
In this collaboration between Penn and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), students will work with with curators to create virtual reality projects connected to the museum's collections. This course mixes virtual reality theory, history, and practice.
Margit Edwards
The Black Arts Movement: Theatre and Performance
This course examines the Theatre and Performance practices of the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.The Black Arts Movement (BAM) emerges in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia among other locations, as a cultural component of the Black Power Movement, and its legacy continues to this day.
Toorjo Ghose & Aaron Levy
Art and Social Work: Art and the Ecology of Justice
How can the arts help us build a more just society? How can the arts transform social structures and systems? Public health crises involving clean water (Flint), police violence (Baltimore), and a lack of economic and educational opportunity following reentry (Philadelphia) make legible the need for a new visual language that critiques these conditions and challenges entrenched structural inequalities.
Grace Sanders Johnson and Deborah Thomas
Sighting Black Girlhood
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have..
Kristina Lyons and Marilyn Howarth
Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities
Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, medical practitioners, and engineers, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, social scientists, and legal fields. This course is inspired by the need to attend to….
Jairo Moreno
Audiovisual Climate Research
In this course, you will collaborate with your peers to create a public-facing, digital exhibit that communicates research about a local problem posed by the climate crisis. First you will encounter theories for communicating climate research in sounds, images, and embodied practices.
Brooke O’Harra and Heather Love
Queer Archives, Aesthetics, and Performance
This course focuses on questions of how to represent the queer past, which it approaches from several angles: through training in archival methods and in scholarly debates about historiographical ethics (or, in the words of David Halperin, "how to do the history of homosexuality"); through engagement with the work of artists...
Building Environmental Justice in Philadelphia: Participatory Action Research Seminar with Mural Arts
Using art as a point of entry into environmental justice, students in this seminar will contribute to a citywide (Philadelphia) campaign to end short-dumping, the illegal dumping of waste. This campaign is being launched by Mural Arts’ Environmental Justice Department together with environmental justice partner organizations across Philadelphia...
Jennifer Joan Thompson
On the Stage and in the Streets: An Introduction to Performance Studies
What do Hamilton, RuPaul’s Drag Race, political protest, TikTok Ratatouille, and Queen Elizabeth’s funeral have in common? They all compose repertoires of performance. From artistic performances in theatres, galleries, and concert halls to an individual’s comportment in everyday life, to sporting events, celebrations, courtroom proceedings, performance studies explores what happens when...
Regina Austin, Juan Castrillón, and Alissa Jordan
Critical Qualitative Research and the Intentional Torts (Proseminar)
This course is designed to introduce professional school students to critical multimodal qualitative research in two ways. First, the course will consider the value of qualitative research to the analysis of contemporary social justice controversies that are the subject of actual intentional torts cases.
Francesca Ammon
Topics in Historic Preservation: Photography and the City
This seminar concentrates on a selected topic in the social and cultural history of the built environment. Past themes have included photography and the American city and the relationship between cities and sound.
Peter Decherney
Virtual Reality Lab
In this collaboration between Penn and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), students will work with with curators to create virtual reality projects connected to the museum's collections. This course mixes virtual reality theory, history, and practice.
Margit Edwards
The Black Arts Movement: Theatre and Performance
This course examines the Theatre and Performance practices of the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.The Black Arts Movement (BAM) emerges in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia among other locations, as a cultural component of the Black Power Movement, and its legacy continues to this day.
Toorjo Ghose & Aaron Levy
Art and Social Work: Art and the Ecology of Justice
How can the arts help us build a more just society? How can the arts transform social structures and systems? Public health crises involving clean water (Flint), police violence (Baltimore), and a lack of economic and educational opportunity following reentry (Philadelphia) make legible the need for a new visual language that critiques these conditions and challenges entrenched structural inequalities.
Grace Sanders Johnson and Deborah Thomas
Sighting Black Girlhood
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have..
Kristina Lyons and Marilyn Howarth
Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities
Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, medical practitioners, and engineers, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, social scientists, and legal fields. This course is inspired by the need to attend to….
Jairo Moreno
Audiovisual Climate Research
In this course, you will collaborate with your peers to create a public-facing, digital exhibit that communicates research about a local problem posed by the climate crisis. First you will encounter theories for communicating climate research in sounds, images, and embodied practices.
Brooke O’Harra and Heather Love
Queer Archives, Aesthetics, and Performance
This course focuses on questions of how to represent the queer past, which it approaches from several angles: through training in archival methods and in scholarly debates about historiographical ethics (or, in the words of David Halperin, "how to do the history of homosexuality"); through engagement with the work of artists...
Fall 2022: FELLOWS COURSES
We Emerge at the Sunset of Your Ideology
ANTH 3660 | Fridays 12PM - 3PM
Instructor: Saya Woolfalk (Fall 2022 CEE Fellow)
This is an undergraduate level production class that takes students through the process of creating a public facing artwork made in response to the ideas explored in my newly commissioned multimedia work for the exhibition Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America at PAFA.
My practice takes seriously the idea that ideological and symbolic systems can be re-imagined and activated through collaboration, imaginative play and masquerade. I blend fiction and fact, and the results of collaboration are captured and presented in large scale polychromatic multimedia installations. I use these science-fiction based projects to undermine stable conceptions of identity and examine how hybrid identities emerge and evolve through biological, cultural and technological contact.
Over the course of the semester, we will work together, from conception to completion, to create a series of activations to be staged in my installation at PAFA in the Spring. Students will engage in research (including site visits and field trips), concept development, iteration, production, as well as preparation for the final presentation at the Museum. I produce immersive, interactive experiences out of interdisciplinary collaboration (science, art, dance, emerging technology, and music) that try to unhinge clear categories, and in this class, I invite the students to help co-create these new possibilities with me. The class will be limited to eight students, and those interested should submit responses to a questions below to [email protected]
ANTH 3660 | Fridays 12PM - 3PM
Instructor: Saya Woolfalk (Fall 2022 CEE Fellow)
This is an undergraduate level production class that takes students through the process of creating a public facing artwork made in response to the ideas explored in my newly commissioned multimedia work for the exhibition Rising Sun: Artists in an Uncertain America at PAFA.
My practice takes seriously the idea that ideological and symbolic systems can be re-imagined and activated through collaboration, imaginative play and masquerade. I blend fiction and fact, and the results of collaboration are captured and presented in large scale polychromatic multimedia installations. I use these science-fiction based projects to undermine stable conceptions of identity and examine how hybrid identities emerge and evolve through biological, cultural and technological contact.
Over the course of the semester, we will work together, from conception to completion, to create a series of activations to be staged in my installation at PAFA in the Spring. Students will engage in research (including site visits and field trips), concept development, iteration, production, as well as preparation for the final presentation at the Museum. I produce immersive, interactive experiences out of interdisciplinary collaboration (science, art, dance, emerging technology, and music) that try to unhinge clear categories, and in this class, I invite the students to help co-create these new possibilities with me. The class will be limited to eight students, and those interested should submit responses to a questions below to [email protected]
- Please tell me your year and department/school at Penn, your undergraduate major or minor emphasis, and any relevant training in or involvement with creative writing, art, image, sound, or exhibition.
- Please tell me if you are already engaged or soon planning to engage in multimedia research and practice for your thesis or dissertation work, and how/why deeper training in film/art production/media can best support your work at this time. Feel free to add a URL or portfolio of any sort to your response.
Filming the Future of Philadelphia
ANTH 3661/6661 | Thursday 3:30-6:30
Instructor: Damani Partridge (Fall 2022 CEE Fellow)
IThis workshop is a rare opportunity to learn to use film to engage Philadelphia and its future from personal, political, social, and historical perspectives. Over one semester, we will simultaneously think, learn, and imagine Philadelphia through music, dance, anthropology, art, theater, architecture, literature, history, night life, day life, school life, social life, and life after school. We will read, we will write, and we will learn how to make films with an anthropologist. We will also approach Philadelphia from the perspectives of race, gender, sexuality, wealth, democracy, urban life, suburban life, job prospects, creative projects, industrial boom, post-industrial decline, activism, police violence, and gentrification. In thinking about the future, we will think about the extent to which Philadelphia is representative of American futures more broadly, and to what extent it is an exceptional city. We will also examine Philadelphia’s place in the world. This project will be a collaboration between activists and artists from Philadelphia, and students from Penn. It will end in public screenings on campus and in the city. To enroll in the class, please submit responses to the questions below to [email protected]
ANTH 3661/6661 | Thursday 3:30-6:30
Instructor: Damani Partridge (Fall 2022 CEE Fellow)
IThis workshop is a rare opportunity to learn to use film to engage Philadelphia and its future from personal, political, social, and historical perspectives. Over one semester, we will simultaneously think, learn, and imagine Philadelphia through music, dance, anthropology, art, theater, architecture, literature, history, night life, day life, school life, social life, and life after school. We will read, we will write, and we will learn how to make films with an anthropologist. We will also approach Philadelphia from the perspectives of race, gender, sexuality, wealth, democracy, urban life, suburban life, job prospects, creative projects, industrial boom, post-industrial decline, activism, police violence, and gentrification. In thinking about the future, we will think about the extent to which Philadelphia is representative of American futures more broadly, and to what extent it is an exceptional city. We will also examine Philadelphia’s place in the world. This project will be a collaboration between activists and artists from Philadelphia, and students from Penn. It will end in public screenings on campus and in the city. To enroll in the class, please submit responses to the questions below to [email protected]
- Please tell me your year and department/school at Penn, your undergraduate major or minor emphasis, and any relevant training in or involvement with creative writing, art, image, sound, or exhibition.
- Please tell me if you are already engaged or soon planning to engage in multimedia research and practice for your thesis or dissertation work, and how/why deeper training in film/art production/media can best support your work at this time. Feel free to add a URL or portfolio of any sort to your response.
FAll 2022 COURSES FOR CEE CREDIT
The Planets in my Pen: Experiments in Writing, Visual Art & Performance
ENGL 3608 Instructor: Ricardo Bracho The Planets in my Pen is a multi-genre creative arts workshop constellated around experimentation. We will be looking at innovative writing, visual art and film as models for the making of poetry, fiction, memoir, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, plays and performance. The genres, techniques and movements of science fiction, surrealism, performance art and the political essay will be key with an emphasis on feminist, queer, left and anticolonial models of art and world making... >>KEEP READING<< Is This Really Happening? Performance and Contemporary Political Horizons FNAR 086 | ENGL 125 Instructor: Sharon Hayes and Brooke O'Harra This class addresses the meeting points inside of and between a range of resistant performance practices with a focus on artists using performance to address political and social encounters in the contemporary moment. Performance, a chaotic and unruly category that slides across music, dance, theater and visual art, has long been a container for resistant actions/activities that bring aesthetics and politics into dynamic dialogue. Embracing works, gestures, movements, sounds and embodiments that push against and beyond the conventions of a given genre, performance can't help but rub uncomfortably against the status quo... >>KEEP READING<< Anthropology of Voice: Sound, Embodiment, and Technological Mediation ANTH 1031 Instructor: Nooshin Sadeghsamimi How do people come to find their voice? What differentiates voice from sound? And how does voice mediate the social personhood we want to cultivate? In this course, we will examine these questions within a broader discussion that draws on semiotic, anthropological, and multimodal dimensions of voice and voicing. The course will be conducted in the form of a seminar, and requirements will include reading responses... >>KEEP READING<< Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s) Instructor: Kristina Lyons ANTH 541 This course places science studies in conversation with counterforensic and ethnographic methodologies, decolonial and feminist approaches, data and environmental justice, critical race and disability studies, and conflict medicine, 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... >>KEEP READING<< Taking Down the Prison Industrial Complex SWRK 798 Instructor: Toorjo Ghose The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country, and more than any nation has ever done in history. The racial disparities that mark this carceral regime have led scholars to describe the prison industrial complex as a new form of Jim Crow. Philadelphia has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, and one of the largest populations on parole and probation. Utilizing a daily workshop format that incorporates members of the Philadelphia decarcerate landscape, students will be trained in direct and macro practice, to engage with people and the carceral systems they are embedded in... >>KEEP READING<< Participatory Community Media, 1970-Present Instructor: Karen Redrobe, Louis Massiah ENGL 2970 What would it mean to understand the history of American cinema through the lens of participatory community media, collectively-made films made by and for specific communities to address personal, social and political needs using a range of affordable technologies and platforms, including 16mm film, Portapak, video, cable access television, satellite, digital video, mobile phones, social media, and drones? What methodologies do participatory community media makers employ, and how might those methods challenge and transform the methods used for cinema and media scholarship? >>KEEP READING<< Television and New Media Instructor: Peter Decherney CIMS 1030 | ARTH 1070 | COML 1031 | ENGL 1950 This is an introductory survey course and we discuss a wide variety of media technologies and phenomena that include: cloud computing, Internet of Things, trolls, distribution platforms, optical fiber cables, surveillance tactics, social media, and race in cyberspace. We also examine emerging mobile phone cultures in the Global South and the environmental impact of digitization. Course activities include Tumblr blog posts and Instagram curations. >>KEEP READING<< August Wilson and Beyond Instructor: Herman Beavers, Suzana Berger ENG 2325 The purpose of this course is to engage students in the rigorous process of mining experiences for material that can be transformed into a public performance piece. In-class writing, group discussions, and field work in the Philadelphia area. >>KEEP READING<< Public Art and Issues of Spatial Production Instructor: Ken Lum FNAR 3110 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. >>KEEP READING<< The Future of Arts Audiences Instructor: Arthur Cohen ARTH 5970 Demographic, political, social and generational changes in the U.S. have given rise to new and often unprecedented changes in the expectations audiences have for the role cultural organizations should play in society. >>KEEP READING<< |
Course Meetings
Tuesday 1:45 PM-04:45 PM |
SPRING 2022: FELLOWS COURSES
Performing Parables: Ragas and Sagas of the Sundarban
ENGL 149 [3654] | ANTH | THAR | FNAR
Instructors: Amitav Ghosh, Ali Sethi, and Brooke O'Harra
In this course writer Amitav Ghosh invites Penn students to engage his ongoing collaboration with the musician/performer Ali Sethi to stage his newest book Jungle Nama. Ghosh’s book Jungle Nama employs dwipdipoyar verse form and the popular folk tale of Bon Bibi the guardian spirit of the Sundarban to address the eroding ecosystem of the Sundarban. In this course students will work in a short intensive collaborative process with the artists to realize a lyric and musical performance of Jungle Nama.
The class employs both academic research and performance methodologies to guide students through histories of traditional Indian performance and folk takes and a thorough examination of Ghosh’s source materials and influences (including studies of the Sundarban and its ecostystem). The course is co-taught with Director Brooke O’Harra. O’Harra, Ghosh and Sethi will lead students in a rigorous process of research, development and rehearsal, culminating in a public performance of a musical version of Jungle Nama. All levels and experience are welcome. Performance roles will be cast based on individual interests. In addition to performance roles, students will assume responsibility for other aspects of the process and production. In advance of registration, students are asked to audition and/or interview for the course depending upon initial interest. Actors, singers, dancers, musicians, artists and scholars are all encouraged to apply. Auditions to be held in November, contact Brooke O’Harra for details.
Course specifics: The course will run until March 3 with an intensive 4-week rehearsal and development period that culminates in a live performance. Space is limited. Permission required.
ENGL 149 [3654] | ANTH | THAR | FNAR
Instructors: Amitav Ghosh, Ali Sethi, and Brooke O'Harra
In this course writer Amitav Ghosh invites Penn students to engage his ongoing collaboration with the musician/performer Ali Sethi to stage his newest book Jungle Nama. Ghosh’s book Jungle Nama employs dwipdipoyar verse form and the popular folk tale of Bon Bibi the guardian spirit of the Sundarban to address the eroding ecosystem of the Sundarban. In this course students will work in a short intensive collaborative process with the artists to realize a lyric and musical performance of Jungle Nama.
The class employs both academic research and performance methodologies to guide students through histories of traditional Indian performance and folk takes and a thorough examination of Ghosh’s source materials and influences (including studies of the Sundarban and its ecostystem). The course is co-taught with Director Brooke O’Harra. O’Harra, Ghosh and Sethi will lead students in a rigorous process of research, development and rehearsal, culminating in a public performance of a musical version of Jungle Nama. All levels and experience are welcome. Performance roles will be cast based on individual interests. In addition to performance roles, students will assume responsibility for other aspects of the process and production. In advance of registration, students are asked to audition and/or interview for the course depending upon initial interest. Actors, singers, dancers, musicians, artists and scholars are all encouraged to apply. Auditions to be held in November, contact Brooke O’Harra for details.
Course specifics: The course will run until March 3 with an intensive 4-week rehearsal and development period that culminates in a live performance. Space is limited. Permission required.
SPRING 2022 COURSES FOR CEE CREDIT
TAUGHT BY CEE & AFFILIATED FACULTY
Sighting Black Girlhood
ANTH 334401 | AFRC334401 | AFRC634401 Instructors: Deborah A Thomas and Grace Sanders Johnson The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have come to recognize the suffering of Black boys and men as acute and eventful, Black girls’ suffering has remained largely invisible, a slow confluence of violences that too often go unaddressed. As one way to bring the issues facing Black girls globally to public attention, and to celebrate and support Black girls, this course will provide a background for understanding the challenges faced by Black girls in Philadelphia, Jamaica, and South Africa. We will frame these challenges historically and geopolitically, drawing attention to the issues that contribute to the invisibility of the ordinary Black girl in diverse sites, as well as the resources that will begin to address them. This course also aims to equip students to understand the relationships between research and creative work, and to see artistic production as a catalyst for community-building and critical thinking and action. Toward this end, we will work with a number of partners in Philadelphia, including the Colored Girls Museum and Black Lives Matter-Philly. A similar course will be offered simultaneously at the University of Johannesburg under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Race, Class, and Gender, and taught by Victoria Collis-Buthelezi and documentary filmmaker Zethu Matebeni. We plan for the two groups of students to meet together (via zoom), when possible. The course is supported by the Paideia Program, and by a Making a Difference in Global Communities Grant. The class is part of a broader multi-year project that is designed to address the gendered dimensions of broader social inequalities. The course was inspired by the exhibit and portrait campaign recently mounted by the Colored Girls Museum, founded and directed by Vashti Dubois. It was designed to see Black girlhood as a sacred space, and to offer the portrait of the ordinary Black girl as a monument and a ritual of care. The project was envisioned as a traveling experience through which the portraits would cross boundaries and move around the world, developing the company of other Black girls in other places, who would then travel along with them. Our broader project will be one vehicle of this travel, as students from the seminar will accompany faculty and community partners to Jamaica (summer 2022) and South Africa (summer 2023) to develop locally-relevant iterations of “The First Time…”. Over two weeks, students will engage with both artists and community partners who have been involved in civil society and legal organizing related to girls, women, and community development. Through these engagements, they will also learn about both the continuities and specificities of issues facing black girls in different diasporic locations. For more information about the class, and about the project as a whole, listen to this podcast, recorded by the Paideia Program: https://snfpaideia.upenn.edu/political-empathy-place-space-and-positionality/ |
Course Meetings
Tuesday 1:45 PM-04:45 PM |
Contemporary Artists in Conversation: Reckoning and Repair
ANTH 597-401 | ANTH 397-401 Instructors: Alissa Jordan In this project-based learning course, students will develop skills in interviewing, oral history, and podcast production by hosting a series of conversations with contemporary artists, curators, and community organizations who are part of a transformative multi-site Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) and African American Museum of Philadelphia (AAMP) exhibit "Rising Sun–Artists and an Uncertain America". During the installation and run of the exhibit, PAFA will empty its museum of all current collections in order to reserve the entire space for “Rising Sun”. The exhibit will also be used to inform how the institution reinstalls and thinks through its historic collection. At AAMP, artists will be given unprecedented access to collections and will be displaying their new works both within and outside of the walls of the museum. Students in ANTH 597 are invited to participate in this massive endeavor by recording one-on-one conversations with the artists and communiteis involved. As part of the external programming for “Rising Sun”, students in ANTH 397/597 will produce podcast episodes to complement the exhibit and deepen engagement with questions of reckoning and repair in contemporary US society, and specifically in the practice of making responsive art, exhibiting it, and responding to social calls through collection practices. The course is designed to be fruitful for students with all levels of experience, including beginners with no prior audio/media experience. Each student will be tasked with interviewing and moderating a conversation with an artist(s) or organizer, showcasing how individual artists and organizers intervene into social challenges in their practice. The central goal of the course is for students to develop an understanding of artistic practice in conversation with anthropology, using the themes of reckoning and repair---How do contemporary artists and community organizations confront the troubling canonical history of the United States? How can art practice speak to (and enact) re-appraisal, reformation, reckoning, and repair during critical social moments (such as those we find ourselves in now)? Over the course of the class, students will treat contemporary art as a method of scholarship complementary to ethnography, and students will gain hands-on, real-world experience in developing collaborative, ethical, and engaged work at the frontier of ethnography and art. Interested students are encouraged to contact the instructor with information about their artistic/anthropological interests, so they can be paired with artists/organizations that complement them. |
Course Meetings
Mon & Wed 10:15 AM-11:45 AM |
FALL 2021 FELLOWS COURSES
Surrealism in Americas: A Creative and Critical Writing and Performance Workshop
ANTH-596-401 I GSWS-398-401 I LALS-596-401 I FNAR-596-401 Instructors: Ricardo Bracho Surrealism in the Americas is a workshop focused around the reading, writing and production of surrealist manifestos, plays, performances, poems and fiction. Taking the stance that surrealist literary production is at its base a left aesthetic engagement with form and politics, the course will survey North American, South American and Caribbean engagements with what is largely misunderstood as a European aesthetic and movement. The works of Aime Cesaire, Adrienne Kennedy, Leonora Carrington, Martin Ramirez, and Grupo Etcetera, among many others, will be studied and used as models for students' own writing and performance. Work will be both individually and collectively generated and the opportunity to work on public performances of surrealist plays will be part of the workshop. |
Course Meetings Thursday
03:30 PM- 06:30 PM EDT |
Getting Caught: A Collaboration On and Off Stage Between Theater and Anthropology
ANTH-588-401 I FNAR-388-401 I FNAR-588-401 ITHAR-388-401 Instructors: Greg Pierotti and Cristiana Giordano Our workshop is an exploration of and a cross pollination between research and narrative practices in theater and anthropology. By creating a dialogue between these disciplines in a laboratory format, we hope to pose questions and engage techniques in ways that will enrich our engagement with anthropological questions and performative productions. We recognize the value of the work of Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, and Erving Goffman in their exploration between anthropology and performance studies. This is not, however, a workshop on the anthropology of theater nor an experiment in performing ethnographies, but rather a lab where we use theatrical techniques to engage empirical questions and material. Rather than enacting our research, we put the elements of the stage (lights, sets, objects, sound, bodies etc.) into conversation with our research material. This generates surprising and often more affective analyses. We explore how anthropologists can take from theater a more visceral posture towards research, and a more performative understanding of narrative that can translate into either a new kind of texts (essays, plays, short stories, installations, etc.), or into a revitalized existing practice of academic writing. On the other hand, theater makers and other artists can learn from anthropology a more nuanced understanding of political and cultural contexts, how to approach the different discourse formations around events and social issues, and to pay attention to the complexities of worlds and their grammars. We use the practice of Affect Theater. This theatrical devising technique is a practice for working with non-theatrical source material (interviews, archival documents, medical and legal reports, various media sources, etc.) to construct narratives for the stage. The practice of theatrical devising departs from traditional theater in that a finished script is not the starting point for the staging and direction of a play. Devising emerged as a means to revitalize how theatrical texts are created. It is a collaborative process involving the members of a company devising and writing together. Our workshop aims at extending this way of writing to other disciplines and their forms of textual production (books, articles, essays, installation, exhibits, etc.). We encourage participants to include their own empirical data as a part of the source material we utilize in our devising practices. This creates the opportunity for students and faculty to shift their relationship to their research through this collaborative engagement. |
Course Meetings Wednesday
10:15 AM-01:15 PM EDT |
The Portrait as/in Ethnography
ANTH 674 | CIMS 674 | COMM 808 | FNAR 608 Instructor: Jenny Chio When cameras are ubiquitous and millions of people post pictures of themselves online, what counts as a portrait today? In an age of selfies, surveillance, biometric “smart” identity cards, and movements like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and indigenous decolonization, can the portrait do a different kind of representational work? How do visual portraits (whether photographic, painted, drawn, or sculpted) operate differently from textual portraits (such as biographies, life histories, or profiles)? This seminar aims to resituate and rethink the portrait in ethnography, and by extension, the practice of portraiture as an ethnographic method, by exploring portraiture as a culturally conditioned, socially resonant form of knowledge production. All portraits, even self-portraits, rely upon a relationship: between the portrayed and the portrayer, the sitter and the artist, the interlocutor and the ethnographer. We will interrogate how portraits have shaped identity politics, and how portraiture, as a scholarly and artistic act, can radically re-theorize forms of social engagement. Drawing on multimodal and decolonial turns in anthropology, seminar participants will produce portraits of their own, using whatever medium/media might be best suited for their interpretive work. NOTE: Registration is by permission of instructor. If you are interested in registering for this course, please complete the Registration Questionnaire (download below) and return it to Jenny Chio ([email protected]) by January 3, 2020.
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Course Meetings
Thursdays, 3:30-6:30 |
Kinesthetic Anthropology
AFRC 368, ANTH 668, COMM 368, FNAR 368 Instructor: Reggie Wilson & Deborah Thomas This class, team-taught by CEE Visiting Fellow Reggie Wilson and Deborah Thomas, investigates various forms of contemporary performance in relationship to Africanist forms and functions of dance, movement and action. We will concern ourselves with how the body knows, and with how we learn to identify the structures of movement that provide context, meaning and usefulness to various Africanist communities across time and space. Grounding ourselves within a history of ethnographic analyses of the body in motion, and within Africana theorizing about the affective power of the body, we will consider what people are doing when they are dancing. In other words, we will train ourselves to recognize the cultural values, social purposes, and choreographic innovations embedded in bodily action and motion. While we will attend to these phenomena in a range of locations throughout the African diaspora, we will also highlight aspects of the Shaker and Black Shout traditions in Philadelphia. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material (both text and video) and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). NOTE: Registration is by permission of instructor. If you are interested in registering for this course, please complete the Registration Questionnaire (download below) and return it to Deborah Thomas ([email protected]) by January 3, 2020.
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Course Meetings
Tuesdays, 1:30-4:30 |
Black Speculative Futures
ANTH 377/677 | AFRC 377/677 | ANTH 677 | ENGL 500 Instructor: Christina Knight Why do black cultural producers turn to the speculative? What, in turn, is speculative about blackness? These questions frame this seminar’s exploration of how black artists, theorists, and activists imagine different futures, often in the service of critiquing power asymmetries and creating radical transformation in the present. We will explore how the speculative works differently across black literature, visual culture and performance. Additionally, inspired by the multi-disciplinary work that we encounter in the course, we will experiment with crafting our own embodied speculative art in order to better understand its function as both art practice and politics. The course will be divided between discussions centered on close reading of primary and secondary material and creative writing/movement exploration (no previous movement experience necessary). Occasional guest lectures with visiting artists will provide additional fodder for our critical and creative work. |
Course Meetings
Tuesdays, 1:30-4:30 |
Anthromedialities: Experimental Theory and Practice ANTH 576 Instructor: Steven Feld In recent years much has been made of the “beyond text” turn in anthropology, specifically the need to re-evaluate the singular authority of “writing culture.” Several new approaches advocate for non-textual medialities, with representations originating in both sonovisual media and performance. Less, however, has been theorized and advocated about intermediality and the multicompositional practices of transmediality and plurimediality, specifically their more transgressive multisensory epistemology. This course will examine these radical approaches to interacting textual, visual, sonic and performative mediations, theorizing their epistemic and ethical implications, collaborative potentials, affordances in narrative and non-narrative representation, and political and aesthetic investments. Students will both critically engage histories of transmedial anthropology, and produce projects that are multicompositional. |
Course Meetings: Wed. 2-5p Lab & Office Hours: Wed. 6-9p |
FACULTY COURSES 2020-2021
Critical Ethnography
AFRC-550-401/ANTH 560-401 Instructor: Jasmine Johnson This graduate course introduces students to theories, practices, and critiques of critical ethnography. Ethnography — an approach to the study of culture which anthropologist James Clifford described as a process that “translates experiences into text” — will have our full attention. This process of translation, although seemingly straightforward, requires layers of interpretation, selection, and the imposition of a viewpoint or politics. While ethnography is often narrowly conceived of as a methodology, this course considers ethnography as a mode of inquiry, as a philosophy, as an ongoing question and performance. We wrestle with notions of “the self” and “the other” at the intersection of imbricated cultural and performance worlds. Together we’ll ask: How is ethnography both critical and performative? What is the relationship between theory and method? How can we evaluate ethnographic work? And finally, what kinds of ethnographers do we want to be? This course considers a range of ethnographic examples in order to analyze both the craft and the stakes of “translat[ing] experiences into text.” |
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Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities
ANTH 310 Instructor: Kristina Lyons & Marilyn Howarth Emergent trans-disciplinary fields, such as the environmental humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists medical practitioners, and engineers, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, social scientists, and legal fields. The course is co-taught by faculty from the School of Arts and Sciences (Kristina Lyons) and the School of Medicine (Marilyn Howarth). Through their different lenses, they will bring together the arts and sciences with a focus on urban air pollution, soil remediation, deforestation, and water contamination among other environmental health problems. A comparative exploration of environmental justice in both Colombia and the US will be infused into the course. |
Course Meetings: Tue. 1:30-4:30 pm |
Bodies of Water: Conflicts and collaborations arounds wetlands and watersheds
ANTH 322 Instructor: Kristina Lyons Water connects human beings to the world around them. From drying aquifers and polluted oceans to the 70% of the adult human body that is water, we are all bodies of water. The objective of this seminar is to interrogate the kinds of conflicts an collaborations that emerge around diverse relations to water and to think about the ways our human bodies are inseparable from the natural world and the multiple bodies that compose it. Over the semester, we will ask and attempt to answer a series of questions: In what ways do bodies of water transcend administrative jurisdictions and pose challenges to territorial ordinance plans? What are the legal, political, and ethical debates surrounding the granting of "rights to nature," especially rights associated with bodies of water? What do indigenous communities mean when they say that it is necessary to think and act like a watershed? What particular conflicts are occurring around the human right to water and the management of river and wetlands? This seminar asks students to reflect on these issues through the lenses of ethnography, feminist science studies, legal philosophy, and environmental anthropology in different US and global contexts, including Philadelphia, Flint Michigan, South Africa, Costa Rica, Colombia and Brazil. The final project for the course will involve multi-modal and public engaged research methods. |
Course Meetings: Mon. 2-5p |
Making Space and Public Art
FNAR 330 Instructor: 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. |
Twice weekly lecture course
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Duchamp is my Lawyer
CIMS 142 Instructor: Peter Decherney & Kenneth Goldsmith This course examines the impact of copyright law on artists and creative industries. Looking at publishing, music, film, and software, we will ask how the law drives the adoption of new media, and we will consider how regulation influences artistic decisions. A mix of the theoretical with the practical, this course will be using UbuWeb (the largest and oldest site dedicated to the free distribution of the avant-garde) as our main case study. The course will cover both the history of copyright law and current debates, legislation, and cases. We will also follow major copyright stories in the news. Readings cover such diverse topics as the player piano, Disney films, YouTube, video game consuls, hip hop, the Grateful Dead, file sharing, The Catcher in the Rye, and many more. We will also examine the critical role of "shadow libraries" (free culture hubs) in regards how the cultural artifact is produced and distributed in the digital age, alongside today’s gatekeepers of algorithmic culture, such as Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify. |
Thursday
1:30-4:30pm |
FELLOWS COURSES 2019-2020
Audio Ethnography
Listening Lab Tuesday 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Thursday 1:30-4:30 p.m.
Instructor: Ernst Karel
This is an intensive, graduate-level, practice-based course in which students will record, edit, and produce anthropologically informed audio works that record and interpret culture and lived experience. Projects in this class will look beyond conventional linguistic or musical codes to sounds whose semiotic or affective value may be less immediately evident. Through the process of making location recordings, analyzing those recordings, composing them into autonomous works, and critiquing every step of the way, this course will engage with questions of ethnographic representation through the medium of sound. In parallel with contextualizing readings and sound projections, throughout the semester students will work intensively on audio projects, receiving training on recording techniques, audio editing, and basic post-production techniques. The course is an opportunity to open up the question of what might constitute 'audio documentary' or 'ethnographic audio'. Presentation strategies for final projects will be discussed and decided on individual bases. Projects will be situated in relationship to cognate fields, including the anthropology of the senses, interdisciplinary sound studies, ethnomusicology, ethnographic cinema, sound art, sound mapping, soundscape composition, and experimental nonfiction media practices which involve location recording. Through weekly sound projections and home listening, students will also gain a familiarity with existing genres and uses of nonfiction audio in anthropology and related fields.
Background photo courtesy Ernst Karel
Listening Lab Tuesday 6:00-9:00 p.m.
Thursday 1:30-4:30 p.m.
Instructor: Ernst Karel
This is an intensive, graduate-level, practice-based course in which students will record, edit, and produce anthropologically informed audio works that record and interpret culture and lived experience. Projects in this class will look beyond conventional linguistic or musical codes to sounds whose semiotic or affective value may be less immediately evident. Through the process of making location recordings, analyzing those recordings, composing them into autonomous works, and critiquing every step of the way, this course will engage with questions of ethnographic representation through the medium of sound. In parallel with contextualizing readings and sound projections, throughout the semester students will work intensively on audio projects, receiving training on recording techniques, audio editing, and basic post-production techniques. The course is an opportunity to open up the question of what might constitute 'audio documentary' or 'ethnographic audio'. Presentation strategies for final projects will be discussed and decided on individual bases. Projects will be situated in relationship to cognate fields, including the anthropology of the senses, interdisciplinary sound studies, ethnomusicology, ethnographic cinema, sound art, sound mapping, soundscape composition, and experimental nonfiction media practices which involve location recording. Through weekly sound projections and home listening, students will also gain a familiarity with existing genres and uses of nonfiction audio in anthropology and related fields.
Background photo courtesy Ernst Karel
Museums, Colonialism, and the Question of Property
It was the Law at the Time
Instructor: Wayne Modest
Current discussions about who owns cultural property, especially in relation to objects acquired under and during Europe’s colonial project, form their arguments, limits and possibilities around international legal instruments such as UNESCO’s conventions on cultural property. Like broader claims for reparations by formally colonized peoples, legal demands for reparations or restitution with regard to cases of colonial injustice often run up against responses such as ‘it was the law at the time’ or ‘it was a long, long time ago and therefore there are no legal venues for claimants today’. The CARICOM-claim regarding reparations for slavery submitted by a number of Caribbean states, as well as demands regarding cultural treasures looted in the late 19 th century in different parts of Africa and elsewhere, are clear examples of this phenomenon. Proposed solution for these conflicts almost always circumvent questions of ownership [at the time] or other legal possibilities. They are sought in extra-legal ways.
Increased attention for these and similar cases have fueled new research into the histories of slavery and colonialism, and into the provenance of colonial cultural objects in Western museums. Similarly there is an increasing number of research projects that explore, for example, the fate of colonial objects in Europe, in relation to the fate of Nazi-looted art. While the legal limits of current claims form part of the investigation of many of these studies, they often fail to pay serious attention to the relationship between the law and the colonial project itself. Importantly, they also fail to explore the relationship between the law, questions of property and the ‘creation’ of the colonized subject. The Seminar Legal Philosophy 2018-2019 aims to focus on precisely this nexus and will interrogate the role of law within the colonial era, especially with regard to the legal fashioning of hierarchies of colonial subjects and colonial objects. In what ways is the law implicated the colonial project itself, and what role did it place in the fashioning of colonial subjects and colonial objects? Moreover, what role should an attentiveness at the law play in today’s debates around reparation or restitution/ These are some of the key questions that the course will explore.
Bringing together readings from legal and political philosophy, material culture and critical heritage studies, this course explores some of the key debates and texts surrounding questions of law, philosophy, colonialism and questions around reparations or restitution of cultural objects. Students will be introduced to the works of some of the key thinkers on which contemporary notions of ownership, the legal subject and (cultural) property are based, probing their genealogy in relation to the racial hierarchies established under the colonial project. We will explore both the history and application of legal frameworks that governed colonial subjects and (cultural) objects alike and their basis in legal philosophy. Is there reason to rethink the role of law within debates around reparations and restitution? And, last but not least: are there reasons to rethink the idea of property itself? What other genealogies of the law can we trace to think differently about ownership of (cultural) property?
It was the Law at the Time
Instructor: Wayne Modest
Current discussions about who owns cultural property, especially in relation to objects acquired under and during Europe’s colonial project, form their arguments, limits and possibilities around international legal instruments such as UNESCO’s conventions on cultural property. Like broader claims for reparations by formally colonized peoples, legal demands for reparations or restitution with regard to cases of colonial injustice often run up against responses such as ‘it was the law at the time’ or ‘it was a long, long time ago and therefore there are no legal venues for claimants today’. The CARICOM-claim regarding reparations for slavery submitted by a number of Caribbean states, as well as demands regarding cultural treasures looted in the late 19 th century in different parts of Africa and elsewhere, are clear examples of this phenomenon. Proposed solution for these conflicts almost always circumvent questions of ownership [at the time] or other legal possibilities. They are sought in extra-legal ways.
Increased attention for these and similar cases have fueled new research into the histories of slavery and colonialism, and into the provenance of colonial cultural objects in Western museums. Similarly there is an increasing number of research projects that explore, for example, the fate of colonial objects in Europe, in relation to the fate of Nazi-looted art. While the legal limits of current claims form part of the investigation of many of these studies, they often fail to pay serious attention to the relationship between the law and the colonial project itself. Importantly, they also fail to explore the relationship between the law, questions of property and the ‘creation’ of the colonized subject. The Seminar Legal Philosophy 2018-2019 aims to focus on precisely this nexus and will interrogate the role of law within the colonial era, especially with regard to the legal fashioning of hierarchies of colonial subjects and colonial objects. In what ways is the law implicated the colonial project itself, and what role did it place in the fashioning of colonial subjects and colonial objects? Moreover, what role should an attentiveness at the law play in today’s debates around reparation or restitution/ These are some of the key questions that the course will explore.
Bringing together readings from legal and political philosophy, material culture and critical heritage studies, this course explores some of the key debates and texts surrounding questions of law, philosophy, colonialism and questions around reparations or restitution of cultural objects. Students will be introduced to the works of some of the key thinkers on which contemporary notions of ownership, the legal subject and (cultural) property are based, probing their genealogy in relation to the racial hierarchies established under the colonial project. We will explore both the history and application of legal frameworks that governed colonial subjects and (cultural) objects alike and their basis in legal philosophy. Is there reason to rethink the role of law within debates around reparations and restitution? And, last but not least: are there reasons to rethink the idea of property itself? What other genealogies of the law can we trace to think differently about ownership of (cultural) property?
Modalities of Black Freedom and Escape: Ships
Instructor: Grace Sanders & Emily Carris & Joanne Douglass
The course circulates around ships and boats. The course combines methods from environmental humanities, visual arts and history to consider multi-modal practices of black freedom and escape. 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 study, amend and create new narratives regarding the Clean Water Act. Third, the course participants will craft a sail that responds to the immediate concerns and aspirations regarding water and black escape and freedom in Philadelphia. 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 (this does not require getting on a boat).
FACULTY COURSES 2019-2020
Dancing the African Diaspora | AFR 245
Instructor: Jasmine Johnson
This seminar/studio course introduces students to theories, debates, and critical frameworks in African Diaspora Dance Studies. It asks: What role does dance play throughout the African diaspora? What makes a dance 'black'? How do conceptualizations of gender and sexuality inform our reading of dancing bodies? Using African diaspora, critical dance, performance, and black feminist frameworks, we will examine the history, politics, and aesthetics of "black dance". Through a keywords format, we'll construct both a vocabulary: a body of words used to describe a phenomena, and a grammar: a body of rules that lay bare the operations between terms. This course recognizes the fluidity of meaning between words depending on the context, geography, and circumstance of their evocation. Our key terms will allow us to examine a number of dancers, choreographers, companies, and movement practices. Moving across an African diasporic map, this course explores the politics of black choreography, and the political significance of black bodies in motion.
Instructor: Jasmine Johnson
This seminar/studio course introduces students to theories, debates, and critical frameworks in African Diaspora Dance Studies. It asks: What role does dance play throughout the African diaspora? What makes a dance 'black'? How do conceptualizations of gender and sexuality inform our reading of dancing bodies? Using African diaspora, critical dance, performance, and black feminist frameworks, we will examine the history, politics, and aesthetics of "black dance". Through a keywords format, we'll construct both a vocabulary: a body of words used to describe a phenomena, and a grammar: a body of rules that lay bare the operations between terms. This course recognizes the fluidity of meaning between words depending on the context, geography, and circumstance of their evocation. Our key terms will allow us to examine a number of dancers, choreographers, companies, and movement practices. Moving across an African diasporic map, this course explores the politics of black choreography, and the political significance of black bodies in motion.
Performance Studio | FNAR 585
Instructor: 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.
Instructor: 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.
Visual Legal Advocacy | LAW 979-001
Instructor: 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.
Instructor: 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.
Ethnographic Film Pt. II | EDUC 586 | ANTH 583
Instructor: Kathy Hall & 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, 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. This is an ABCS course, and students will produce short ethnographic films with students in Philadelphia high schools as part of a partnership project with the School District of Philadelphia. Due to the time needed for ethnographic film production, this is a year-long course, which will meet periodically in both the fall and spring semesters.
Instructor: Kathy Hall & 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, 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. This is an ABCS course, and students will produce short ethnographic films with students in Philadelphia high schools as part of a partnership project with the School District of Philadelphia. Due to the time needed for ethnographic film production, this is a year-long course, which will meet periodically in both the fall and spring semesters.
Critical Engagements with Science(s) and Justice(s) (ANTH 541)
Tuesday 1:30-4:30 pm
Instructor: Kristina M. Lyons
This course places science studies in conversation with counterforensic and 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 the natural and social sciences, humanities, the arts and School of Design, and biomedical fields 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.
Tuesday 1:30-4:30 pm
Instructor: Kristina M. Lyons
This course places science studies in conversation with counterforensic and 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 the natural and social sciences, humanities, the arts and School of Design, and biomedical fields 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.
FELLOWS COURSES 2018-2019
Films of Utility: Analysis, Argument and Building Block (ANTH 610)
Instructor: Louis Massiah
This course explores non-fiction film as a tool in creating discourse and catalyzing progressive social change. Our specific purpose will be to understand how non-fiction filmmaking - documentary and the essay film - can be used as a cultural strategy to affect political movement. Screening and analyzing a wide range of contemporary independent films, many produced in community settings outside the commercial entertainment marketplace, class participants will explore the forms and methods of these films of utility. Part of the course work will involve applying these filmmaking approaches to a short film project in support of a movement of importance to the student participant.
Instructor: Louis Massiah
This course explores non-fiction film as a tool in creating discourse and catalyzing progressive social change. Our specific purpose will be to understand how non-fiction filmmaking - documentary and the essay film - can be used as a cultural strategy to affect political movement. Screening and analyzing a wide range of contemporary independent films, many produced in community settings outside the commercial entertainment marketplace, class participants will explore the forms and methods of these films of utility. Part of the course work will involve applying these filmmaking approaches to a short film project in support of a movement of importance to the student participant.
Multi-Modal Ethnography: Black Women Moving (ANTH391-301)
Instructor: Aimee Meredith Cox
In this course we explore the theory and methods employed by Black women ethnographers, artists, and activists invested in transforming the traditional norms of the academic disciplines and creative contexts in which they operate. These boundary erasing, rule breaking women challenge us to think expansively and act courageously in our efforts to not only dream a new world but bring that world into fruition.
The life and work of anthropologist/dancer/choreographer/activist Katherine Dunham (1909 – 2006) provides the framework through which we think through the strategies contemporary scholar-artists employ in their social justice practices, while the concept of MOVEMENT is our theoretical and methodological foundation for engaging with the work of historical and contemporary Black women change agents. We will ask how movement functions in the work of Dunham and these contemporary scholar-artists in terms of: the moving and/or dancing body; movement and migration across geographic territories and imagined space; and participation in social movements. Inspired by the techniques these women have developed for re-imagining the possibilities for moving as an act of social change, we will experiment with creating our own embodied artistic practices and research methods.
Students who register for this class should anticipate a holistic experience that requires an openness to physical activity and choreography (accessible to all) as one of our primary tools for both analyzing the multi-media course texts, as well as constructing our own boundary crossing projects.
Instructor: Aimee Meredith Cox
In this course we explore the theory and methods employed by Black women ethnographers, artists, and activists invested in transforming the traditional norms of the academic disciplines and creative contexts in which they operate. These boundary erasing, rule breaking women challenge us to think expansively and act courageously in our efforts to not only dream a new world but bring that world into fruition.
The life and work of anthropologist/dancer/choreographer/activist Katherine Dunham (1909 – 2006) provides the framework through which we think through the strategies contemporary scholar-artists employ in their social justice practices, while the concept of MOVEMENT is our theoretical and methodological foundation for engaging with the work of historical and contemporary Black women change agents. We will ask how movement functions in the work of Dunham and these contemporary scholar-artists in terms of: the moving and/or dancing body; movement and migration across geographic territories and imagined space; and participation in social movements. Inspired by the techniques these women have developed for re-imagining the possibilities for moving as an act of social change, we will experiment with creating our own embodied artistic practices and research methods.
Students who register for this class should anticipate a holistic experience that requires an openness to physical activity and choreography (accessible to all) as one of our primary tools for both analyzing the multi-media course texts, as well as constructing our own boundary crossing projects.
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