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LIBS650 Critical Theory and Practice I: Aesthetics And Politics

Course Name: 
Critical Theory and Practice I: Aesthetics And Politics
LIBS650

This two-semester course is a cross-disciplinary investigation of the various intersections of the realms of the aesthetic and the political, and engages in questions of humanity, power, and representation. We will discuss how orderings of social relations become manifest in the world and how the political becomes ‘sensible’. Through the discussion of assigned readings, we will develop an understanding of the ways in which visual cultural production provides the very frameworks for what becomes perceptible and legible. We will consider how works of art can produce encounters that slow our perceptual operations and reading capabilities in a world of easily disseminated, readymade perspectives in service of dominant values and worldviews. Assigned texts will bridge and interrogate the discourses of class, race, gender, disability, art, and the social realm. We will discuss how artists and theorists have responded to the representational politics of the present moment in order to locate individual prac- tices within the larger cultural and socio-political environment. Our goal will be the development of individual, subjective voices within a collective, collaborative, and relational process.