Spring 2024 Middle East GR6631 section 001

Media Materialisms

MEDIA MATERIALISMS

Call Number 12924
Day & Time
Location
T 2:10pm-4:00pm
207 Knox Hall
Points 4
Grading Mode Standard
Approvals Required Instructor
Instructor Debashree Mukherjee
Type SEMINAR
Method of Instruction In-Person
Course Description This graduate seminar offers a survey of debates on materiality and object-oriented ontologies that are currently revitalizing the humanities and social sciences. How does the physical world of objects and things affect our social and perceptual reality? Is it possible to imagine a world with the non-human at its center? Should we learn to study a “thing in itself” or is it better to approach matter as always-already entangled in networks and relations? In this interdisciplinary seminar we will keep media objects and contexts at the center of our study and travel through a long history of critical interest in materialism. The seminar begins with foundational debates from Marx to McLuhan and gradually moves through modules on materialism as understood vis-a-vis things, actors, relations, bodies, images, infrastructures, aesthetics, and ecologies. Weekly sessions combine historical and philosophical approaches to media forms and their material lives. A special emphasis is placed on complicating dominant disciplinary frameworks with theories and case studies from the South and insights from feminist theory. This is an interdisciplinary weekly course that will be relevant to students interested in media, film, cultural history, material culture, object histories, infrastructure studies, and environmental humanities.
Web Site Vergil
Department Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies
Enrollment 10 students (15 max) as of 9:06AM Sunday, December 8, 2024
Subject Middle East
Number GR6631
Section 001
Division Interfaculty
Section key 20241MDES6631G001