Junior Colloquium: Visual Culture Studies and Violence
AMST 208
Fall 2020 not offered
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| Course Cluster and Certificates: Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory Certificate, Disability Studies |
In this course, students will gain important foundational knowledge of the field of visual cultural studies. We will cover theories of the gaze, photographic sight, film and media, spectatorship and witnessing, museums and exhibitions, and trauma and memory, among others. Particular attention will be paid to issues of power, complicity, and resistance as we consider what it means to be "visual subjects" in historical and contemporary contexts. We will address how different media--from photography, to television, to film, to the Internet--transform our understanding of images and what it means to both "look" and "be seen."
As a primary case study, this course will interrogate the politics of violence, focusing on the relationship between the production of visual culture(s) and acts of individual, collective, and state aggression. We will ask, How have images served to propagate climates of violence against marginalized persons? What are the ethics of looking at pain, torture, and exploitation? Do such images help us to work toward social change or create attitudes of indifference? How do images of war, prisons, pornography, death, crimes, famine, and disease shape our understandings of citizenship, nationality, and identity? Finally, how does the representation of difference--race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability--inform and/or transform conceptions of violence and its place in the visual field? |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
SBS AMST |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Graded |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (AMST)(CSCT) |
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