WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2022-2023       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
Unsettling Times: Clocks for Ghosts, Monsters, and Aliens
SISP 301
Fall 2022
Section: 01  
This course may be repeated for credit.
Crosslisting: IDEA 301

Tracking the rhythms, cycles, and ruptures of collective life is essential for studies of sociocultural and environmental dynamics. Yet such studies are mostly undertaken with the unquestioned assumption that Western apparatuses of time reckoning and historical periodization can be applied as universal and stable frames of reference for all kinds of phenomena. Temporal units of years, months, days, minutes are used, rendering insensible relations that do not align with such metrics. These simplifying moves limit our capacity to understand continuity and change, and places countless lives and landscapes at great risk.

This seminar draws from the social and natural sciences, humanities, and arts to unsettle these simplifications. Through readings and audio/video screenings, we will consider how apparatuses for time keeping (or clocks, broadly defined) become power tools, creating haunted, monstrous, and alienated subjects. Through exercises and field walks throughout the semester, students are invited to notice, record, and engage with multiple temporalities of more-than-human worlds. The final project will involve research and design of a speculative clock for futures otherwise.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS SISP
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Requirement for: (IDEA-MN)(IDEA)
Past Enrollment Probability: 50% - 74%

Last Updated on NOV-21-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459