Department: School of Critical Studies

Code Name Description
CCIS100 Introduction to Critical Studies Introduction to Critical Studies is a dynamic BFA 1 cohort class designed to introduce you to the practices of inquiry and critique that shape key debates in the visual, performing, and literary arts, to prepare you to enter into the larger Critical...
CCRW204 Introduction to Bizarro Fictionn What is Bizarro fiction? How do we define it and what is its significance? Bizarro has been called the equivalent to the cult section of a video store, Adult Swim shows in book form, and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for adults. In this class, we...
CCRW214 Adventures in Form and Chaos This course is designed both for students who have taken previous poetry writing classes and for those who have not. It approaches the writing of poems through an examination of the ways in which some recent North American poets (such as Hoa Nguyen...
CCRW221 Science Fiction for Architects Slipstream: Science Fiction Writing for Architects This creative writing class familiarizes students with the art of making the strange familiar or the familiar strange. Students are introduced to genre works, ranging from pre-cyberpunk SF to the pr...
CCRW246 Worldbuilding This course explores narratives that engage in explicit acts of worldbuilding, a term first used to describe science fiction and fantasy writers' invention of languages, geographies, cultures, histories, and mythologies. We will focus on worldbuildin...
CCRW262 Latinx Literature and Writing In this course we will immerse ourselves in literature written by Latinx authors in the U.S., exploring fiction, nonfiction and poetry genres. In line with most recent literary developments and topical concerns such as climate catastrophe, social jus...
CCRW266 The Ugly/Beautiful: Poetry Workshop The Ugly/Beautiful: Poetry Workshop Disability justice activist Mia Mingus once posed the challenge: "Where is the Ugly in you? What is it trying to teach you?" In "The Ugly/Beautiful" creative writing workshop, we will read and write poetry that con...
CCRW273S Fiction As Witness Fiction as Witness: Trauma, Transformation, and Black Women's Writing In this course, we will explore the writerly idea that writing can be a healing practice for coping with both lived experience and the ambient violence of the world around us. We...
CCRW311 Poetry Workshop This creative writing class will operate like a conventional workshop in which student-writers produce works-in-progress to offer for group critique. In a supportive environment, we will give constructive criticism to each other in order to become be...
CCRW317 Entre Mundos: Other-Worldly Latin Americ In this course, we will dive into Latin American and Latinx literature and art in the surreal, magical, gothic traditions. This course will introduce you to the historical and cultural contexts in which these traditions flourished. Exploring this tog...
CCRW338 Poetry, Bars, Lyrics This class will be a generative space to write new poems and/or lyrics. We will start with the lyric poem, exploring key forms and possibilities, and share new work in a supportive setting. We will read and discuss work by a wide range of poets, lyri...
CCRW352 How Poets Play Dead Necrosocial Poetry: How Poets Play Dead Poets past and contemporary have often used the social space of the poem as one in which to 'play dead.' In this poetry writing course, we will do the same. Many of the poets we will read in this class, whose t...
CCRW358 Experimental Science Fiction Writing This creative writing class familiarizes students with a wide range of science fiction. Students are introduced to genre works, ranging from weird writing, golden era science fiction, the new wave, cyberpunk, to slipstream, cli-fi, bizarro fiction an...
CCRW367 Letters & Conversations In the era of the internet, what can a letter do? What new forms of letters circulate? How has social media changed dialogue and conversation? What words can we exchange and how? Drawing on a range of critical and creative practices, this creative wr...
CCRW385 Short Story Workshop This is a workshop devoted primarily to writing and workshopping short stories, with several opportunities to share your work and receive feedback on it over the course of the semester. In addition, students will read assigned short stories and will...
CCRW425 Science Fiction Science Fiction & Modern Fantastic. Open to BFA-3 and BFA-4 students only. This creative writing class focuses on contemporary cross-genre works of science fiction, horror and fantasy. Students are introduced to genre works, ranging from turn of the...
CCRW432 Letters & Conversations In the era of the internet, what can a letter do? What new forms of letters circulate? How has social media changed dialogue and conversation? What words can we exchange and how? Drawing on a range of critical and creative practices, this creative wr...
CCRW448 Source & Archive In this class, each student will create a *sourcebook*--an archive of artistic inspirations. Which texts, works, methods, memories or experiences have served as the source of your creative practice? Which artists and thinkers have most influenced yo...
CCRW457 Feminist Poetics Using an intersectional feminist lens, we will explore how writers and artists navigate relationships between writing, identity, culture, politics and art making. We will ask, how might feminist poetics be a strategy for envisioning and re-visioning...
CCRW462 Writing Climate Breakdown Climate Breakdown poses great challenges to all aspects of human life - biological, technological, economic, political, spiritual, cultural, etc. It challenges human beings to rethink their conceptions of what might be proper forms of earthly existen...
CCRW464 Writing & Performing the Self What is a self? How might writing and performance together help forge or express its possibilities? Drawing on creative writing, performance art, literature, art criticism, cultural studies, and black feminist theory, this class will open space for C...
CCRW489 Tiny Fictions This workshop will focus on extremely short pieces as a way in to writing narrative and non-narrative prose. We'll read flash fiction, sudden fiction, blast fiction, short-shorts, microfiction, minimalist fiction, prose poems, microessays. We might l...
CCRW525 Science Fiction Science Fiction & Modern Fantastic. This creative writing class focuses on contemporary cross-genre works of science fiction, horror and fantasy. Students are introduced to genre works, ranging from turn of the century horror to contemporary fabulist...
CCRW532 Letters & Conversations In the era of the internet, what can a letter do? What new forms of letters circulate? How has social media changed dialogue and conversation? What words can we exchange and how? Drawing on a range of critical and creative practices, this creative wr...
CCRW544 Memory, Media & the City Memory, Media and the City. After studying how collective memory operates within cities, and its relationship to literature and cinema, students develop their own stories, or film scripts, essays, cultural histories, plays, installations, where the s...
CCRW548 Source & Archive In this class, each student will create a *sourcebook*--an archive of artistic inspirations. Which texts, works, methods, memories or experiences have served as the source of your creative practice? Which artists and thinkers have most influenced yo...
CCRW557 Feminist Poetics Using an intersectional feminist lens, we will explore how writers and artists navigate relationships between writing, identity, culture, politics and art making. We will ask, how might feminist poetics be a strategy for envisioning and re-visioning...
CCRW562 Writing Climate Breakdown Climate Breakdown poses great challenges to all aspects of human life - biological, technological, economic, political, spiritual, cultural, etc. It challenges human beings to rethink their conceptions of what might be proper forms of earthly existen...
CCRW564 Writing & Performing the Self What is a self? How might writing and performance together help forge or express its possibilities? Drawing on creative writing, performance art, literature, art criticism, cultural studies, and black feminist theory, this class will open space for C...
CCRW589 Tiny Fictions This workshop will focus on extremely short pieces as a way in to writing narrative and non-narrative prose. We'll read flash fiction, sudden fiction, blast fiction, short-shorts, microfiction, minimalist fiction, prose poems, microessays. We might l...
CCSE001 Artspeak 1: English for the Arts The Artspeak course series provides instruction for multilingual students in the linguistic and cultural conventions of art school. As students studying in the United States, English use is part of your overall development as artists/designers/practi...
CCSE002 Artspeak 2: English for the Arts The Artspeak course series provides instruction for multilingual students in the linguistic and cultural conventions of art school. As students studying in the United States, English use is part of your overall development as artists/designers/practi...
CCSE015 Artspeak 4A: English for the Arts The Artspeak course series provides instruction for multilingual students in the linguistic and cultural conventions of art school. As students studying in the United States, English use is part of your overall development as artists/designers/practi...
CCSE055 Artspeak 4A: English for the Arts The Artspeak course series provides instruction for multilingual students in the linguistic and cultural conventions of art school. As students studying in the United States, English use is part of your overall development as artists/designers/practi...
CCSE456 Artspeak 4B: Reading/Writing ArtSpeak 4B is a reading/writing course designed for MFA students and upper-level BFA students that focuses on the conventions of critical writing and reading practices in a North American classroom setting. The course is designed to support multilin...
CCSE556 Artspeak 4B: Reading/Writing ArtSpeak 4B is a reading/writing course designed for MFA students and upper-level BFA students that focuses on the conventions of critical writing and reading practices in a North American classroom setting. The course is designed to support multilin...
CCST115 Fairy Tales, Myths and Fables Fairy Tales, Myths, and Fables: Now vs. Then Special Topics course for BFA-1 students only. This course will look at fairy tales, myths and fables, both in terms of the way that they were historically told or presented and at how they've changed in...
CCST181 Gangsters Geeks & Spies—Asians in the US Gangsters Geeks & Spies - Asians in the US Special Topics course for BFA-1 students only. During the height of Covid-19, Asians in the U.S. experienced a surge of hate crimes that seemed to conflate their race with the pandemic itself. The language d...
CCST202W Antiquity in Song China and Meiji Japan In this course, we will engage in an in-depth study of the concept of antiquity in the intellectual and artistic context of Medieval China and Modern Japan. We will devote one week to Meiji Japan and the second to Medieval China. The two weeks can be...
CCST207 Radical Black Freedom & Its Discontents The struggle for Black freedom is as old as Black oppression. The battle took place on plantations, in burning towns and hosed-down public streets, in prisons, but it has also taken place in newspaper editorials, in scholarship and in art. This cours...
CCST218 Visions of Utopia Visions of Utopia: Regional Diversity and Continental Integrity in Latin American Culture This course serves as an introduction to the rich traditions and cultures of Latin America, from the period before the arrival of the Europeans, up to the prese...
CCST224 The End: a Cross-Cultural Look At Death One of the only certain universal experiences for all human beings is death. However, nearly every aspect of that experience varies from culture to culture. How do we respond to the dying? How do we mark their passing? What is done with the body? How...
CCST242 Direction: Utopia This is a course on the concept of utopia, the history of U.S. utopian practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the theme of utopia in art, music and literature. Is utopia always shadowed by dystopia? And is it worth pursuing anyway?...
CCST242S Imaging Culture Imaging Culture: Representation and Visual Anthropology. As the discipline originally chartered to classify 'races of man,' images and their interpretation have long been important components of anthropology. From early anthropometrics and photograph...
CCST263 Feminist Text and Textile Practices What is a feminist practice? How can texts and textiles inform it? Drawing on literature, creative writing, critical theory, visual arts/crafts, and feminist theory, we will explore how texts and textiles have been interwoven in the formation of femi...
CCST264 Asian American Genres How might reading across genres within contemporary Asian American popular culture help us understand "Asian American" as itself a pan-ethnic umbrella term that contains many "genres" of Asianness? What might seemingly unrealistic Asian American genr...
CCST276 The High Tech, Low Life of Cyberpunk The outsider 'net addicted hackers of cyberpunk served as a neon-soaked prism refracting dystopian anxieties of the 1980s. Megacorps ruled the world. Most of humanity had been left to languish in sprawling sky-high slums. And the tragic, alienated pr...
CCST283 Fairy Tales, Myths and Fables Fairy Tales, Myths, and Fables: Now vs. Then This course will look at fairy tales, myths and fables, both in terms of the way that they were historically told or presented and at how they've changed in our contemporary era. We'll do this as a way...
CCST285 Trap Music and the Black Arts Trap Music and the Black Arts This course puts "Trap Music" i.e. contemporary hip hop from Black lumpenproletariat/underclass cultures into conversation with poetry, plays and film from the Longue dure Black Arts/Black Power movement -- a Black cultu...
CCST293 Poetics & Politics of Queer Temporality Queerness of the Ancients: The Poetics and Politics of Queer Temporality This course introduces, examines and interrogates queer artistic and literary production of two underexamined areas in relation to critical studies and queer studies: ancient li...
CCST301 In Pursuit of Community: Migration Today In Pursuit of Community: The 20th Century African American Migration and the Meanings of Citizenship. This is a course on the discourse and rhetoric of citizenship, migration, and of the migrant. We will begin by inquiring into the nature of citizen...
CCST303 Global Queer Cinema Chocolate Babies, Handmaidens, and Kuchus: Decoding Global Queer Cinema "Chocolate Babies, Handmaidens and Kuchus..." closely examines films that challenge the reflex to center whiteness that we see in a lot of mainstream Western queer cinema and cu...
CCST312 At the Intersections Feminist Practices & Politics At the Intersections: Economy, Body, Identity In her poetic-prose work Schizophrene, Bhanu Kapil writes, "An economy is a system of apparently willing but actually involuntary exchanges." What are these economic systems...
CCST319 Asian American Text + Image Asian American Text + Image Desire, Power, Flight: Intimacies of the Political Body in Asian American Text + Image The title of this course borrows from Asian American filmmaker, writer, and theorist, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and her text, Woman Native Oth...
CCST330 Walking Places Walking Places: Pedestrian Activity and Spatial Politics "A walk can exist like an invisible object in a complex world." ?Hamish Fulton Walter Benjamin famously reflected on the architectural spaces of Paris through the figure of the flaneur, a me...
CCST343W Palestine, Art, and Dissent This winter session course offers an opportunity for students to join a creative weeklong crash course in the history, politics, and activism of Palestine that preceded the violence of October 7th and the unfolding humanitarian crisis in the current...
CCST345 Black Queer Black Black/Queer/Black: A Survey of Pop Culture's Fiercest Tributary This course is a close study of the multi-layered Black queer center of '80s and '90s House music culture via literature, film, music, music videos, and critical essays by the likes of...
CCST351 Buying & Selling the Fantasy of L.A. Buying and Selling the Fantasy of Los Angeles. Buying and Selling of LA. How did Los Angeles become the capital of boosterism and global marketing-- the city of the social imaginary? A social history of power, promotion and social conflict in LA. Wha...
CCST354 History of Simulation History of Simulation and Interactive media. In this course, we focus on the social history of fantasies that have been built in real space, and the narratives they deliver, choosing examples from theater, film, urban planning, theme parks, world's f...
CCST372 Infrastructure and the Climate Imaginary This class will investigate sites of presumed stability located between landscape and architecture, looking to infrastructure to activate a number of questions related to climate change. How is the built environment shaped by water, power, waste dis...
CCST374 Mestizajes: Latin Am. & Latino/a USA This is a cross-disciplinary course exploring various histories and cultures in Latin America, focussing on diverse intersections between history, politics, social struggles, popular cultural practices and the arts, The course fosters awareness of th...
CCST378 Contemporary Cyberfeminism + Coding The most popular tools for building a website require zero to minimal coding knowledge. Dragged and dropped content in the colorful back-ends is published on the website's front-end in no time. All you have to do is click Publish. But this web design...
CCST378S Pursuing Happiness Pursuing Happiness: From Buddha to Positive Psychology From a self-help craze to government funded scientific research, the pursuit of happiness has become a 'hot topic' in both popular culture and multiple fields of social science inquiry and resear...
CCST384 Environmental Justice, Activism Environmental Justice, Activism, and Reimagining the World Together, we will learn terms and concepts central to environmental justice and activism. What is the anthropocene and how is it different from what theorists are calling the capitalocene? Wh...
CCST391 Memory, Media & the City Collective memory (as well as collective forgetting or repression) is essential to understanding urban culture and politics. By journeying through various cities, we identify how literature, cinema, urban planning, politics, and the rhythms of everyd...
CCST439 Feminist Surveillance Studies "How is information used as a tool of oppression?" is this course's motivating question. This class uses an intersectional feminist perspective to question the values of transparency, access, and spectatorship embedded in surveillance aesthetics. It...
CCST444 Archaeologies of the Present Archeologies of the Present. Open to BFA-4 students. A seminar that studies the past fifty years-- how culture meets politic; including our historical crises and economic changes. The history of our present crisis begins essentially in 1973, with ma...
CCST446 Parallel Worlds Parallel worlds: Fiction and Imaginary Futures, 1850-Present. Open to BFA-3, BFA-4 and Graduate students only. A workshop and discussion class on how to use tools broadly related to science-fiction "worlds"-- as in tales about parallel worlds tales,...
CCST459 Sounding Resistance in Indian Country Sounding Resistance in Indian Country Throughout Turtle Island (present-day North America), songs have been an essential form of Indigenous expression for millennia. In fact, most activities in Native communities, from the gathering of traditional fo...
CCST473 Representations of Black Supplication "From Uncle Tom to Colin Kaepernick: Representations of Black Supplication" This course explores the history and contemporary uses of the figure of the supplicant Black man. It traces the figure's late 18th, early 19th century emergence through white...
CCST483 Algorithms, Enclosures Algorithms, Enclosures: Digital Infrastructure and the Technlogical Imagination This class will investigate the increasingly interconnected digital networks that shape and reshape the global economy. Considering the material, ecological and politica...
CCST492 Social Reproduction Social Reproduction: Gender, Race and Care under Capitalism In the writings of Marx, the term 'social reproduction' refers to the ways that the capitalist system reproduces itself as a whole. In this class, we will consider a rich body of literature...
CCST539 Feminist Surveillance Studies "How is information used as a tool of oppression?" is this course's motivating question. This class uses an intersectional feminist perspective to question the values of transparency, access, and spectatorship embedded in surveillance aesthetics. It...
CCST543W Palestine, Art, and Dissent This winter session course offers an opportunity for students to join a creative weeklong crash course in the history, politics, and activism of Palestine that preceded the violence of October 7th and the unfolding humanitarian crisis in the current...
CCST544 Archaeologies of the Present Archeologies of the Present. Open to Graduate students. A seminar that studies the past fifty years-- how culture meets politics The history of our present crisis begins essentially in 1973, with massive shifts in the role of the nation state, in the...
CCST546 Parallel Worlds Parallel worlds: Fiction and Imaginary Futures, 1850-Present. Open to BFA-3, BFA-4 and Graduate students only. A workshop and discussion class on how to use tools broadly related to science-fiction "worlds"-- as in tales about parallel worlds tales,...
CCST573 Representations of Black Supplication "From Uncle Tom to Colin Kaepernick: Representations of Black Supplication" This course explores the history and contemporary uses of the figure of the supplicant Black man. It traces the figure's late 18th, early 19th century emergence through white...
CCST583 Algorithms, Enclosures Algorithms, Enclosures: Digital Infrastructure and the Technlogical Imagination This class will investigate the increasingly interconnected digital networks that shape and reshape the global economy. Considering the material, ecological and politica...
CCST592 Social Reproduction Social Reproduction: Gender, Race and Care under Capitalism In the writings of Marx, the term 'social reproduction' refers to the ways that the capitalist system reproduces itself as a whole. In this class, we will consider a rich body of literature...
CHMN105 Feminist Poetics Feminist Poetics Special Topics course for BFA-1 students only. Through the lens of feminist poetics, we will explore how writers and artists navigate relationships between writing, identity, culture, politics, and art making in their work. We will...
CHMN149 Animal, Vegetable or Digital? PHF Special Topics course for BFA-1 students only by permission of instructor. In this course we will read, analyze and write about fiction that reaches beyond the human for its narrators, characters, plots and preoccupations. How do these stories, which...
CHMN208 Digging Up California What does it mean for a place to continually be dug up by people, natural forces, and myth? How can we use what we dig up in California such as history and topography to craft familiar and not so familiar narratives? This class will examine how these...
CHMN214 What is Called "Thinking"? What is Called "Thinking"? Materiality, Asbtraction, Expression In this course we propose to interrogate how different modes of cultural production across human history explore the relation between thinking and materiality, and by extension the plac...
CHMN219W Quilting We will look into the quintessentially U.S. American tradition of quilting, looking at historical examples and particular artists, such as the AIDS quilt, Gee's Bend, Faith Ringgold, among others. We will visit the Huntington Library, Museum and Gard...
CHMN226 The Art of Games The Art of Games: The Philosophy of Games and Game Design. Games look to be the dominant art form of the 21st century. From an economic perspective, the video game industry is now larger than both films and music combined, and there is a large segmen...
CHMN231 What Is Philosophy? An introductory course in philosophical methods as well as contemporary issues. Philosophy is both an historical product of the Western tradition and a critical tool of inquiry that changes over time and within different contexts. This course will be...
CHMN237 Say It Loud Say It Loud: The Rhetoric of American Social Movements This course examines the rhetorical strategies of twentieth century American social movements: the speeches, manifestos, essays, graphics, films and music that helped shift the terms of politica...
CHMN239 Feminist Theory, Practice, Politics In her book, Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed writes, "Feminism as a collective movement is made out of how we are moved to become feminists in dialogue with others." In this spirit, we will think of our class as a conversation with one another, an...
CHMN268 Black Women's Creative Work This course surveys Black women's autobiographical archival work and writing throughout the diaspora. We'll survey how Black women artists, writers, and performers have responded to the erasure of black women's identities and experiences throughout t...
CHMN271 Latin.x.o.a.@:i.d. & entities This is 200-level cross-disciplinary course explores the history, cultures and contemporary dynamics of Latinx communities, especially in greater L.A., aimed at both self-identifying Latinx and others. We begin with some canonical examples of Latinx...
CHMN277 The Attractions of Modern Horror Taking inspiration from Fred Botting's notion of "the Disneygothic", this course will examine the transformations of Horror and Gothicism as they've saturated American markets, defined identities, and remixed transgressive, and at times status-quo, p...
CHMN294 Borges and the Political Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was an author widely but wrongly regarded as a-political. Although he was not a political writer in the conventional sense of the word, his texts nevertheless constantly engaged in the indirect interrogation of our...
CHMN305 Ungovernable: Poetry Against the State UNGOVERNABLE SUBJECTS: POETRY AGAINST THE STATE. "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," argues Audre Lorde, a provocation that still reverberates even now, inviting us to critique our relationship to power, the state, and the i...
CHMN307 Introduction to Ethics Introduction to Ethics - Spinoza, Kant - An Experimental Moral perspective (introductory/intermediate levels): This class is a review of key philosophical issues in ethics and meta-ethics in both historical and conceptual perspectives. Starting wit...
CHMN310 Unexceptional Art This course proposes the notion of aesthetic exceptionalism to capture the widespread belief that art and artists are exceptional. The course will seek to challenge that belief in view of the political exceptionalisms that many in the art world would...
CHMN312 Ethnic Public Intellectual This course takes the figure of the public intellectual as central to the history of ethnic American experience, politics, and representation. How have the ongoing realities of American race relations placed particular political pressures on ethnic A...
CHMN317 Anahuac's Ghosts: Literature of America Anahuac's Ghosts: The Literature of America del Norte, 1524-2018 This interdisciplinary course will take us through a survey of fiction, poetry, theatre, film, testimony, and theory haunted by the myth of "Mexico." We will read texts from the period...
CHMN320 Necrosociality in Amer. Poetry San Francisco anarchist poet Jack Spicer once wrote, in one of his letters to the then already deceased Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, "this is how we dead men write to each other." Spicer famously conceived of the speaker of a p...
CHMN327 Cultural Memory Fredric Jameson argued that in an age of postmodernity "the very function of the news media is to relegate . recent historical experiences as rapidly as possible into the past." This course will consider the bold proposition that art and literature,...
CHMN333 Pataphysics This course takes Alfred Jarry's utopian notion of an 'imaginary science' as the model for just such a vision. We begin with Jarry's invention of 'Pataphysics, a practice whose aim is to bring exceptions into being. We start by focusing on the three...
CHMN335 Queer Books Queer Books. What makes a book gay or lesbian Or queer? Or even indecent? Is queer writing literature by gays and lesbians or about gays and lesbians? Is there such a things as "gay style"? This course looks at contemporary gay/lesbian and "othe...
CHMN336 Pornography, Sex, & Writing Pornography and Sex Writing. While the contemporary meaning of "pornography" suggests primarily the visual representation of sex, the roots of the word are in language: pornography means "the writing of harlots." This course traces literary sex writi...
CHMN353 Feminism & Science Fiction In her book, Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed writes, "Feminism as a collective movement is made out of how we are moved to become feminists in dialogue with others." In this spirit, we will think of our class as a conversation with one another, an...
CHMN355 Art-Words: How to Talk About Art Art-Words: How to Talk About Art in the 21st Century Is Art a form of work, or play? Research, or expression - of a self, or other things? Can it be a way of exploring the world outside human subjectivity, or perhaps even a method for constructing o...
CHMN362 Race and Erasure: Black Literature Race and Erasure: Black Literature in the Age of Ferguson. Open to BFA2, BFA3, and BFA4 students only. This course will explore a question suggested by Kenneth Warren in "What Was African American Literature": What, exactly, is the "black" in African...
CHMN364 Who Comes After the Human? In recent years, "posthumanism" has been coined as a term to capture work by critical thinkers and artists that explores the limits of the human. Those limits can be traced back to the origins of Western modernity in the Renaissance and the Enlighten...
CHMN367 Fissure and Multiplicity Course not open to BFA1 students. A Collision of Voices: Fissure and Multiplicity in Latin American Literature will look at a wide range of diverse works in translation-manifestos, oral history, revolutionary accounts, poems, autobiographies, short s...
CHMN375 The Monstrous and the Terrible: Horror Course not open to BFA1 students. The Monstrous and the Terrible: Horror Since Hawthorne and Poe, American fiction has flirted with horror. This class will look at horror as a mode, thinking about how it operates differently in fiction and in film....
CHMN382W Magic Circles: Art Without an Audience Magic Circles: Art Without an Audience Of Nordic Larp, Elvia wilk writes that the "Magic Circle" can be "defined as a 'membrane' that circumscribes virtual worlds. Once you step into the magic circle, you have committed to suspension of disbelief. Y...
CHMN408 Matter and Materialisms Matter and Materialisms: The concept of matter from Presocratic Philosophy to New Materialism Materialism is all the rage in contemporary political and art theory, be it the renewal of Feuerbach's anti-idealist materialism in the Marxist tradition (e...
CHMN409 Art, Critique, Power This lecture and seminar based course explores the question of art's power in contemporary and historical (Modern) societal contexts. Art's power can be correlated to its ability to effect social change, to construct new possibilities for life, as we...
CHMN415 Nonsense This course approaches the limits of Sense (and the senses) from many angles, including philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, visual art, mythology, religious studies (including mysticism and the Dionysian) literature, film, and crit...
CHMN423 Unexceptional Art This course will seek to identify key traits of Western aesthetic thought, consider the politics of such thought, and explore alternatives to it. Taking as a central point of reference Walter Benjamin's classic essay on "The Work of Art in the Era of...
CHMN435 The Making of Everyday Life: Fluxus Art This course explores the Fluxus art movement of the nineteen sixties and seventies alongside theories of the 'everyday' put forward by Erving Goffman, Michel de Certeau and others. Why were these theorists and artists compelled to theorize and transf...
CHMN436 Vision and Visuality Philosophy of Vision and Visuality. Open to BFA-2, BFA-3, and BFA-4 students only. In recent decades, the study of vision and perception has merged with the study of visuality and cultural production. This course departs from Walter Benjamin's theor...
CHMN439 Lessons on Being & Becoming Open to BFA3 and BFA4 students only.
CHMN444 Capitalist Theology Capitalist Theology and the Magic of the State For generations now, it has been much remarked upon by scholars from a wide range of disciplines that capitalism and the modern nation state are characterized by elements that have a distinctly religiou...
CHMN447 Feminist New Materialism This course is a feminist exploration of materialism. In recent years feminist thought has turned to matter as a site of political urgency, agency and aesthetics. This course asks, what does feminism has to do with matter and materiality? We consider...
CHMN452 Experimental Literature Wallace Stevens once said that all poetry is experimental poetry. However that may be the case, some literary works are more experimental than others. In this class we will study a variety of texts-in printed books and in digital forms online-that ag...
CHMN461 On Curating This course considers curation as a critical social practice. Students from across the institute are invited to engage with specific issues within curatorial studies, such as site specificity, globalization, social engagement and aesthetics. We invit...
CHMN466 Genres of the Human Whilst 'Man' has long been the measure and figure of human subjectivity, many now argue that we need new figures to adequately characterize the varietous forms in which humanity manifests today. This course examines a range of theories that bring int...
CHMN470 Revolution, Change, Difference Revolution, Change, Difference Marxism, Accelerationism, Realism/Materialism, Khun, Fish, Brassier, Negarastani, Brandom. A revolution is a violent rupture that asks us to redefine, revise and re-think what we perceive to be the natural conditions o...
CHMN483 Becoming Latin America Becoming Latin America: Universalism and Regionalism in The New World from the 19th - 21st Century. In this course, students shall explore various theoretical, historical and literary discourses through which authors conceived of the complementarity...
CHMN484 Figures of the New World: Coloniality... This course explores the historical development of Latin American cultures since the pre-Columbian era, through the colonial and republican periods, and until the present. It studies how colonialism operates as a historical force in the continent thr...
CHMN491 Introduction to Affect Theory This course will introduce students to the social, political, and aesthetic history of what is often known today as "affect theory." While the recent "affective turn" is largely associated with poststructuralist theory, this course seeks to broaden t...
CHMN498 Silent Music What happens when an artwork puts its status as object into question? This is a question that runs deep in Chinese art and philosophy and stands in some tension to the central presuppositions of much, if not most, Western thought. To engage with this...
CHMN508 Matter and Materialisms Matter and Materialisms: The concept of matter from Presocratic Philosophy to New Materialism Materialism is all the rage in contemporary political and art theory, be it the renewal of Feuerbach's anti-idealist materialism in the Marxist tradition (e...
CHMN509 Art, Critique, Power This lecture and seminar based course explores the question of art's power in contemporary and historical (Modern) societal contexts. Art's power can be correlated to its ability to effect social change, to construct new possibilities for life, as we...
CHMN523 Unexceptional Art This course will seek to identify key traits of Western aesthetic thought, consider the politics of such thought, and explore alternatives to it. Taking as a central point of reference Walter Benjamin's classic essay on "The Work of Art in the Era of...
CHMN535 The Making of Everyday Life: Fluxus Art This course explores the Fluxus art movement of the nineteen sixties and seventies alongside theories of the 'everyday' put forward by Erving Goffman, Michel de Certeau and others. Why were these theorists and artists compelled to theorize and transf...
CHMN536 Vision and Visuality Philosophy of Vision and Visuality. In recent decades, the study of vision and perception has merged with the study of visuality and cultural production. This course departs from Walter Benjamin's theorizing on culture, which was proceeded by Theodor...
CHMN539 Lessons on Being & Becoming An upper level course introducing students to modern philosophy through a selection of readings from works by Hume, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Bergson, Wittgenstein, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Levinas and Derrida. The course follows the th...
CHMN544 Capitalist Theology Capitalist Theology For generations now, it has been much remarked upon by scholars from a wide range of disciplines that capitalism and the modern nation state are characterized by elements that have a distinctly religious quality despite the secul...
CHMN547 Feminist New Materialism This course is a feminist exploration of materialism. In recent years feminist thought has turned to matter as a site of political urgency, agency and aesthetics. This course asks, what does feminism has to do with matter and materiality? We consider...
CHMN552 Experimental Literature Wallace Stevens once said that all poetry is experimental poetry. However that may be the case, some literary works are more experimental than others. In this class we will study a variety of texts-in printed books and in digital forms online-that ag...
CHMN561 On Curating This course considers curation as a critical social practice. Students from across the institute are invited to engage with specific issues within curatorial studies, such as site specificity, globalization, social engagement and aesthetics. We invit...
CHMN570 Revolution, Change, Difference Revolution, Change, Difference Marxism, Accelerationism, Realism/Materialism, Khun, Fish, Brassier, Negarastani, Brandom. A revolution is a violent rupture that asks us to redefine, revise and re-think what we perceive to be the natural conditions o...
CHMN583 Becoming Latin America Becoming Latin America: Universalism and Regionalism in The New World from the 19th - 21st Century. In this course, students shall explore various theoretical, historical and literary discourses through which authors conceived of the complementarity...
CHMN584 Figures of the New World: Coloniality... This course explores the historical development of Latin American cultures since the pre-Columbian era, through the colonial and republican periods, and until the present. It studies how colonialism operates as a historical force in the continent thr...
CHMN591 Introduction to Affect Theory This course will introduce students to the social, political, and aesthetic history of what is often known today as "affect theory." While the recent "affective turn" is largely associated with poststructuralist theory, this course seeks to broaden t...
CHMN598 Silent Music What happens when an artwork puts its status as object into question? This is a question that runs deep in Chinese art and philosophy and stands in some tension to the central presuppositions of much, if not most, Western thought. To engage with this...
CMAP621 Contemporary Aesthetic Theory This course theorizes the connections between art, aesthetics, and politics in the contemporary world. Students will explore how institutions, mediums, and technologies shape our understanding of what art is and can be. With readings from key theoris...
CMAP622 Contemporary Political Thought Contemporary Political Thought. Required for all MA Aesthetics & Politics students. Other graduate students by permission of instructor only, space permitting. The premise for this course is: what would Herbert Marcuse teach? The first dean of Criti...
CMAP623 Critical Discourse in Arts Critical Discourse in the Arts and Media. This course is required for all MA Aesthetics & Politics students. Other graduate students by permission of instructor only, space permitting. This course will focus on the question of media and democracy....
CMAP624 Critical Discourse in Arts Critical Discourse in the Arts and Media. This course is required for all MA Aesthetics & Politics students. Other graduate students by permission of instructor only, space permitting. Critical Discourse in the Arts and Media. This course is requi...
CMAP625 A&P Thesis Seminar Aesthetics and Politics Thesis Seminar. This course is required for all MA Aesthetics & Politics students. Open to the MA A&P Program only. This seminar aims to guide students from pre-writing to writing: it intends to accompany them through the prep...
CMAP626W Theorist in Residence This one to two-week course is taught by the MA Aesthetics and Politics program's Theorist in Residence and covers a key issue in aesthetico-political thought. Students are required to attend public lectures by the Theorist in Residence either at Cal...
CMAP635O Critical Discourse in Arts - Online This course is required for all second-year MA Aesthetics & Politics students taking the "virtual" option. The course is a year-long lecture and event series that ranges from political debates to film screenings and performances, as well as conversat...
CMAP636O Critical Discourse in Arts - Online This course is required for all second-year MA Aesthetics & Politics students taking the "virtual" option. The course is a year-long lecture and event series that ranges from political debates to film screenings and performances, as well as conversat...
CMAP670W Research Seminar Aesthetics of Politics Research Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics. In this course, we will read and analyze key conceptual contributions of Jewish/German/American political thinker Hannah Arendt, and American philosophers Judith Butler and Linda Zerilli to the field of...
CMAP696 Directed Study - Thesis The course is a directed study of the student's thesis project with their mentor. This course will deliver methodology and critical training to prepare students for the development of their independent thesis work. Students will select an independen...
CMWP601 Writing Now First Year Seminar In this class, MFA students will gain exposure to diverse visiting writers. In the first term, we will meet once a week to read and discuss cutting edge work, paying specific attention to narrative voice, sentence structure, and the use of figurative...
CMWP602 Writing Now Reading Series This course is required of all MFA Creative Writing Students. It will consist of 4-6 visiting writers presenting their work.
CMWP603 Visiting Writers This course is required of 2nd year MFA Creative Writing Program students. It will consist of four visiting writers including the Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence.
CMWP604 Sex, Writing, & Pornography Sex, Writing, & Pornography With the exception of pornography, our sexuality, our sex lives, our sexual fantasies, rituals, and practices are rarely represented or examined by writers. We might start by asking what is more fundamental and universal t...
CMWP608 Screenwriting Workshop In developing, outlining and executing their own, original screenplays, students will learn the fundamental principles of screenwriting, screenplay structure, and the primary rules of storytelling. Over the course of the class students will write a...
CMWP611 Teaching Practicum Graduate Teaching Practicum. This two-hour weekly seminar will develop pedagogical skills and classroom strategies for teaching assistants who are engaged in leading discussion sections. The course will cover a range of pragmatic issues related to te...
CMWP614 Poetry Writing Workshop This is a graduate level poetry writing workshop offered within the Creative Writing MFA program. Primarily aimed at students in the graduate writing program, it may also be open-if space exists-to experienced graduate-level (MA/MFA) writers from aro...
CMWP617 Poetics and Practice Poetics and Practice: Projects, Translations, Interventions, Rupture, Static This course will explore the interplay between the context and the poem, between place and craft, poem as intervention. Craft not as a pound of product but as process or fl...
CMWP619 Poet/Critics: a Seminar To cite the program webpage, "The Creative Writing MFA was designed to get over the division between 'creative' and 'critical.'" In the spirit of this commitment, this reading-focused seminar will be devoted to distinguished poet/critics who write ac...
CMWP629 Fantasty, SF, and Spec Fiction Workshop Speculative Fiction Workshop: Fantasty, Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction Workshop This workshop focusses on Speculative Fiction and its genre subcategories: fantasy, science fiction, the weird, and horror: work, in short, that works under a di...
CMWP634 The Novel This workshop is devoted primarily to developing your novel projects, with opportunities to share your work and receive feedback from participants several times over the course of the semester. A few novels by contemporary writers will be assigned an...
CMWP637 Thesis Workshop Thesis Workshop. Course open to MFA2 Creative Writing students only. Required of all 2nd year students in their graduating year. The course is devoted to editing, critiquing, and completing the thesis project. The thesis defense and graduation revie...
CMWP639 Juicy Memoir Juicy Memoir: Personal Narratives of Culture, Body & Soul In this class, we will read, discuss, and write juicy memoirs--personal narratives that reveal, reflect, and trace the self in relation to family, society, history, culture, memory, body, and...
CMWP641 Translated Bodies Translated Bodies: Reading & Writing Literary & Cultural Translations In this class, we will consider translated bodies¬-bodies that shift/ have been shifted from one state to another. We will read and discuss non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and perfo...
CMWP646 Short Fiction Workshop Short Fiction Workshop. Open for all MFA Creative Writing Program students. Other graduate students by permission of instructor only, space permitting. This course focuses on the writing of short fiction across a range of traditions, styles and app...
CMWP650 Writing the Braided Essay Writing the Braided Essay The braided essay is the name gifted to a form of essay writing that weaves together multiple threads of though--memory, critical analysis, cultural commentary, and other art form--to create this contentious form we call "th...
CMWP653 Documentary Poetics Consider the following recent writing projects-a poet travels to her home state of Indiana in search of remaining traces of the Underground Railroad; another reproduces newspaper excerpts about mining disasters in China, interleaving them with photog...
CMWP656 Resonance: Writing, Culture & Sound Writing, Culture & Sound In this seminar, we'll explore sound and sonic phenomena across genres, disciplines, and soundscapes. We'll read texts that depict music, voices, and ambient sound with remarkable precision. We'll listen to performers, produc...
CMWP658 Parafiction (Biblio-Memoir) How does anyone dare to write? Mostly beside oneself, and in the investigation of these sites of "besided-ness" lies the focus of this class. We can speak of many para-"sites": para-phrase, para-normal, para-legal, para-military, para-medic, para-lys...
CMWP660 Exit Strategies Exit Strategies: Professional Development for Writers According to Ye Olde Wikipedia, an exit strategy is "a means of leaving one's current situation, either after a predetermined objective has been achieved, or as a strategy to mitigate failure. An...
CMWP662 Feeling and Theory This course addresses the crisis in feeling-in emotion and affect-in the wake of the so-called "death of theory" and "end of the subject." What remains for writers of a critical perspective on the emotions they deploy, portray, and animate in their...
CMWP667 The Enduring Long Poem While we may be accustomed to working on a poetry book one single lyric poem on a page at a time, this course will invite us to look at the enduring long poem, one that spans multiple pages, and which may transform the trajectory of a larger poetry p...
CMWP668 Long Form Fiction Workshop Long Form Fiction Workshop: Writing Very Long Stories, Novellas, and Novels This course will focus on writing longer forms of fiction. We will read a selection of longer stories, novellas and at least one novel as a way of thinking about what make...
CMWP675 POETRY, FORM, AND RESISTANCE POETRY, FORM, AND RESISTANCE This course is first and foremost a poetry workshop. We will draft new poems and share them in a supportive setting that will prioritize process and possibility over polish. The poems we will study, and the prompts and ex...
CMWP681 Letters and Conversations At this transforming moment of pandemic and uprising, what can letters and conversations do? What forms of letters can we circulate? What conversations do we need? Grounded in black feminist texts and pedagogy, this creative writing class invites stu...
CMWP682 Translingual Poetics We are currently living in what Yasemin Yildiz calls "linguascapes" of globalization: a multilingual din amplified by mass migration, the movements of refugees, and technologies like machine translation. Uncommon combinations of language are constant...
CMWP684 Tiny Fictions This workshop will focus on extremely short pieces as a way in to writing narrative and non-narrative prose. We'll read flash fiction, sudden fiction, blast fiction, short-shorts, microfiction, minimalist fiction, prose poems, Anne Carson's short ta...
CMWP687 Queer Entanglements Queer questions have been in the air for over a generation, beginning with resistance to binaries of male and female or gay and lesbian, and extending to anyone who refuses heteronormativity. As an embrace of the vital position of the outsider, queer...
CMWP688 Writing & Performing the Self What is a self? How might writing and performance together help forge or express its possibilities? Grounded in creative writing and drawing on performance art, literature, art criticism, cultural studies, and black feminist theory, this class will o...
CMWP689 Good, Bad, Better, Otherwise "Poetry Workshop: The Good, the Bad, the Better, and the Otherwise." This course will function primarily as a poetry workshop, which is to say we will produce new writing to share for supportive group critique. In this way, we will strengthen our cr...
CMWP692 Experiments in Experience: Non-Fiction Nonfiction has the potential to be something more than what readers expect, and every writer has a variety of choices to make in determining what shape to craft their work depending on the subject. A profile of an artist may include the author's inte...
CMWP696 Directed Thesis Study This is a directed study of the student's thesis project with their mentor. This is required of all MFA Creative Writing students in their 2nd year.
CMWP711 SUBLEVEL Magazine SUBLEVEL is an online literary magazine devoted to the nexus of literature, poetics, art, criticism, philosophy, culture, and politics based in the CalArts MFA Creative Writing Program, in The School of Critical Studies. SUBLEVEL inherits and reflect...
CSCM125 There's a Gene for That? Genes & Society Genetics has revolutionized the way we understand who we are, and where we came from. Modern genetics has opened the door to exciting and controversial new pathways that can guide where humanity might be going. This course begins with the fundamental...
CSCM207 Human Sexuality: Scientific Evaluation Human Sexuality is a comprehensive and integrated approach to the science of human sexuality. This course is an evaluation of scientific knowledge regarding sexual behaviors and attitudes in contemporary society and includes the physiological basis...
CSCM241 Env Sci: Intro to Problems & Solutions Environmental Science: An Introduction to the Problems and the Solutions. This course provides an introduction to the interactions between the physical and biological impacts human have had on the Earth's environment. Through a series of lectures, we...
CSCM256 What Is Mathematical Thinking Creative Experimentation and Reasoning in the History of Mathematics In arts and humanities, mathematics is often thought as a rigidly formal discipline. The aim of this course is to portray mathematics in a different light as a field where intuitiv...
CSCM265 Number, Numeral, Shape & Structure Number, Numeral, Shape and Structure. This course explores the nature of mathematics starting with how the human brain conceptualizes numbers and how human cultures have represented numbers through the use of oral and written language. Through a ser...
CSCM271 Human Body Food to Function Human Body: Food to Function. Through a series of lectures, demonstrations and readings, we will survey the human body from a molecular level. This course will begin with a discussion of atoms, the building blocks of food, and will end with how a...
CSCM271S Human Body Food to Function Through a series of lectures, demonstrations and readings, we will survey the human body from a molecular level. This course will begin with a discussion of atoms, the building blocks of food, and will end with how a complete human body senses the w...
CSCM277 Matter & Molecules: From the Eve of Atom Matter and Molecules: From the Eve of Atoms. There have been many ideas about what the physical universe is made of. Through lectures and readings, we will consider a range of ideas from the history of chemistry. This is a history that spans alchemic...
CSCM322 Biodiversity and Conservation This course examines the ways in which biodiversity is conceptualized, measured, and valued. This is also a course that explores how biodiversity is threatened by human activity and how humans are trying to prevent and even restore biodiversity. Basi...
CSCM328 Practical Economics The course is aimed to introduce concepts and tools of basic economic analysis at both micro and macro levels. This course provides a non-technical introduction to the basic concepts in economics, with a focus on the United States. It will provide in...
CSCM331 How Food Makes the Human Body This course examines molecules as the fundamental building blocks of the human body. The course begins with the basics of atoms and chemical bonds. You will then learn how molecules are put together to form basic nutrients which are the building bloc...
CSCM347 Finding Signals From the Noise FIn this course, we will examine how to ask and answer questions through the analysis of data. Through a set of lectures, you will become familiar with the basic principles and methodologies of statistics. This will allow you to make comparisons, tes...
CSCM355 Sex and Death Sex and Death: Biology From Beginning To End. Biology is the scientific study of life. An individual's life begins through a process of reproduction. Reproduction may be either asexual or sexual, and in some species both may occur. Regardless of mo...
CSCM355S Sex and Death Sex and Death: Biology from Begining To End Biology is the scientific study of life. An individual's life begins through a process of reproduction. Reproduction may be either asexual or sexual, and in some species both may occur. Regardless of modal...
CSCM373 Fuzzbox Physics and Popular Distortion Fuzzbox Physics and Popular Distortion This is a hands-on exploration of sound amplification and distortion. Through this course, students will understand the relationship between human perception and acoustic media. The course explores acoustic inst...
CSCM409 Signals in the Noise: Data Science Signals in the noise: Data Science. In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of how to ask and answer questions through the analysis of quantitative data. Data science has become increasingly important as organizations, both commercial and non...
CSCM425 Biology of Politics "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" is the famous quote and title of an essay by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky to address the highly politicized debates over the teaching of evolution in the 1970's. In...
CSCM428 "..With Some Degree of Certainty" The course provides an introduction to economics through the primary method of economic reasoning: the conceptual model. Models are deliberate simplifications and abstractions used to develop clarity and insight into real world processes. This course...
CSCM509 Signals in the Noise: Data Science Signals in the noise: Data Science. In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of how to ask and answer questions through the analysis of quantitative data. Data science has become increasingly important as organizations, both commercial and non...
CSCM525 Biology of Politics "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" is the famous quote and title of an essay by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky to address the highly politicized debates over the teaching of evolution in the 1970's. In...
CSCM528 "..With Some Degree of Certainty" The course provides an introduction to economics through the primary method of economic reasoning: the conceptual model. Models are deliberate simplifications and abstractions used to develop clarity and insight into real world processes. This course...
CSOC121 Democracy in the Americas Democracy in the Americas Special Topics course for BFA-1 students only by permission of instructor. The Americas-both North and South America-are a socially, politically, and culturally diverse region of the planet. But the region nonetheless shares...
CSOC128 Revolutions in America Revolutions in America Special Topics course for BFA-1 students only. What is a revolution? Originally related to the cyclical movement of celestial bodies, the notion has now become central to our thinking of bodies down here on earth: that of body-...
CSOC156S Mother Tongue: Applied Linguistics Intro An introduction to applied linguistics and language study, MOTHER TONGUE focuses on the theory, practice, methods of enquiry, understanding, and empathy necessary for language acquisition, effective inter/cross cultural communication, and artistic co...
CSOC203 Indigenous Aesthetics Indigenous Aesthetics: The Art of Resistance. This course will explore multiple forms of Indigenous expression from throughout Turtle Island (present day United States and Canada) with a particular focus on works that have fueled and/or embody resist...
CSOC209 Introduction to Study of Human Cultures Observing Ourselves: An Introduction to the Study of Human Cultures This course is an introduction to cultural anthropology which brings a global comparative perspective to the study of human beings. We will compare and contrast cultural practices re...
CSOC220 Introduction to Psychology Introduction to Psychology. This course is designed to give students an understanding and appreciation of the scientific approach to human behavior, thought and action, and to provide the basic conceptual framework for studying the cognitive, emotion...
CSOC231W Cities in California: Fake and Temporal (Part one of this course will look at one set of materials and part two will look at another set of materials.) Fake cities can be defined by many aspects such as movie sets, caricature towns like Little Tokyo, theme parks, ghost towns, temporary cit...
CSOC232W Cities in California: Fake &Temporal 2 Part two of this course will look at another set of materials.) Fake cities can be defined by many aspects such as movie sets, caricature towns like Little Tokyo, theme parks, ghost towns, temporary cities, and sets left in and around Los Angeles tha...
CSOC235 Topics in Intersectional Transfeminisms Spring 2023 Topic: In response to the 2022 Supreme Court reversal on Roe v. Wade and its immediate and widespread impact on access to abortion and reproductive care in much of the US, our class will focus on the history, politics, activism and art su...
CSOC242 Imaging Culture Imaging Culture: Representation and Visual Anthropology. As the discipline originally chartered to classify 'races of man,' images and their interpretation have long been important components of anthropology. From early anthropometrics and photograph...
CSOC242S Imaging Culture Imaging Culture: Representation and Visual Anthropology. As the discipline originally chartered to classify 'races of man,' images and their interpretation have long been important components of anthropology. From early anthropometrics and photograph...
CSOC265 Food for Thought Food for Thought: The Anthropology of Eating. Using an anthropological approach, this course is an eclectic inquiry into the study of food and eating practices among multiple cultural groups. Everyone eats, but what we eat, who we eat with, where, w...
CSOC277 Human Sexuality This course offers a comprehensive and integrated approach to human sexuality. Explores psychological, biological, and sociological aspects of human sexual behavior, including sexual values, roles and lifestyles. Includes contraception, pregnancy, se...
CSOC283 Abnormal Psychology Abnormal Psychology is a branch of psychology that deals with psychopathology and abnormal thoughts and behaviors, often in a clinical context. The term covers a broad range of disorders, from mood and anxiety disorders to personality disorders to p...
CSOC291 Engagement by Design: the Social Turn ENGAGEMENT BY DESIGN: The social turn in architecture and design This class will investigate recent and contemporary design that puts social and political questions at the center of its practice. Moving beyond the Modernist maxim "form = functio...
CSOC294 Being Vulnerable We are living in a time of increased vulnerability. From safe spaces to trigger warnings and cancel culture, drone wars to global warming and mass migrations, Black Lives Matter to #MeToo and the "great replacement" conspiracy theory of the alt-right...
CSOC300 Artist As Educator Artist as Educator: Pedagogy, Planning, and Practice. Participants will learn how to effectively and ethically engage with the diverse communities of K-12 students-including English Learners and students with special needs-as artists and educators....
CSOC301S Pedagogy of the Oppressed: Radical Ideas How do you best learn? Who were the teachers that inspired you? Who were the teachers that made you give up? In this class, we will discuss how educational environments can be oppressive and what we can do as artists and aspiring educators to create...
CSOC302 The Political & Latin America The Political & Latin America. The Political is not just politics. Politics, on the one hand, is the set of practices and institutions that organize conflicts and disagreements in those societies that have developed a specific milieu for the staging...
CSOC305 Activating / Art-Making / Activism How can we activate art-making for the current moment? How can we engage activism in new creative ways? In this critical/ creative laboratory, we will read, write, discuss, create, and harness experimental art strategies for social change. We will re...
CSOC322 How Maps Lie This course explores how maps and mapping have evolved in the age of digital technologies. The key concepts of "critical cartography" and "cognitive mapping" will be our guides, two practices that allow us to see the relations of power and the subjec...
CSOC328 Moments in Modern Economic History The course provides an introduction to modern economic history by looking into emblematic moments from the past that have created the contemporary experience. By focusing on moments of crisis, transformation, and debate an historicized perspective on...
CSOC332 Engagement by Design Engagement by Design: The Social Turn in Architecture and Design. This class will investigate recent and contemporary design that puts social and political questions at the center of its practice. Moving beyond the Modernist maxim form = function to...
CSOC336 Ethnography of the Particular Ethnography of the Particular: Exploring Culture Through Life Story. In order to understand life in another culture, anthropologists observe and interact with individual people, often recording individual life stories. However, as noted by David Mac...
CSOC354 Political Theory in Latin America Political thought, or political theory, is a culturally situated practice. The word "theory," etymologically, takes us to the idea of "looking at" or of "having a vision of." To theorize is thus to reach for the other side of the visible-for "its" in...
CSOC363 Decolonizing Justice Decolonizing Justice: art and the mythic narratives of modern law This course considers what if any relationship can be drawn between the discourses of art and law. All manner of artists and cultural producers have had run-ins with the law in one...
CSOC378 Pursuing Happiness From a self-help craze to government funded scientific research, the pursuit of happiness has become a 'hot topic' in both popular culture and multiple fields of social science inquiry and research. In particular, the field of positive psychology is...
CSOC407W Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics This year's Research Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics will focus on six books, six authors, and three theoretical dialogues on the aesthetic-as opposed to the theological or epistemic-understanding of politics in general and of democracy in part...
CSOC414 Political Theory in Latin America Political thought, or political theory, is a culturally situated practice. The word "theory," etymologically, takes us to the idea of "looking at," or of "having a vision of," something. To see, to have a vision, is to reach for the other side of the...
CSOC418W R. Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics In this year's edition of the Research Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics we will engage in an in -depth reading of two different but deeply intertwined aesthetico-political authors: French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jewish-German Ameri...
CSOC428 Carceral Logic, Abolitionist Imaginaries This class will examine the transformation of the prison, policing and surveillance systems in the United States following the 1960's through an in-depth look at the experiences of prisoners, including modes of self-expression and resistance and thro...
CSOC461 Aesthetics & Politics in China Aesthetics and Politics in China. Open to BFA-4 students only. 'I thought it would be terrible to live in this world and not know what another part of the world was like.' Robert Rauschenberg. In modern China, politics have been conducted not simp...
CSOC464 Race, Erasure, inequality Race, Erasure, Inequality: Studies in Theory and Resistance This course examines the roots and history of racism in the United States, from the era of slavery during the country's early days as a revolutionary liberal democratic republic, to today,...
CSOC466 Queer Representability Queer Representability: The Politics of LGBT Visual Culture. Open to BFA-3 and BFA-4 students only. What makes an image a queer image-the content, producer, mode of production, a certain sensibility, a set of politics, or simply the eye of the behol...
CSOC474 Muñoz: Queer Worldmaking Muñoz: The Theory and Practice of Queer Worldmaking This class will be devoted to an in-depth exploration of the work and lasting impact of a single author: writer, scholar, and critical theorist José Esteban Muñoz. Through this central focus on Muñ...
CSOC481 The World in the Model The World in the Model : The Model in the World For at least the last two hundred years modeling has been the principle activity of the economist. A casual observer might think that the economist's mania is focused on quantifying experience but the...
CSOC484W Borges and Political Philosophy In this year’s Winter Session, we will engage in an in -depth reading of Argentine fiction writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges, an author widely but wrongly regarded as "a-political." In the course, we will reveal the way in which his "fictions" we...
CSOC487 Borges' Aesthetics of Politics This course will not be just about Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges; but it will all happen in the inconceivable Borgesian pluriverse. The course is about the aesthetics of politics, and doubly so. On the one hand, it is about the way in which art...
CSOC493W Aesthetics of Politics Research Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics. In this year's edition of the Research Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics we will engage in an in -depth reading of two different but deeply intertwined aesthetico-political authors: Argentine fictio...
CSOC507W Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics This year's Research Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics will focus on six books, six authors, and three theoretical dialogues on the aesthetic-as opposed to the theological or epistemic-understanding of politics in general and of democracy in part...
CSOC514 Political Theory in Latin America Political thought, or political theory, is a culturally situated practice. The word "theory," etymologically, takes us to the idea of "looking at," or of "having a vision of," something. To see, to have a vision, is to reach for the other side of the...
CSOC516 Human Rights and Wrongs Human Rights and Wrongs: Social Justice and Media in Global Perspective This course explores one of the most important issues of our time - human rights. We will study the theory and practice of human rights and wrongs by examining key debates that h...
CSOC518W R. Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics In this year's edition of the Research Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics we will engage in an in -depth reading of two different but deeply intertwined aesthetico-political authors: French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jewish-German Ameri...
CSOC528 Carceral Logic, Abolitionist Imaginaries This class will examine the transformation of the prison, policing and surveillance systems in the United States following the 1960's through an in-depth look at the experiences of prisoners, including modes of self-expression and resistance and thro...
CSOC564 Race, Erasure, inequality Race, Erasure, Inequality: Studies in Theory and Resistance This course examines the roots and history of racism in the United States, from the era of slavery during the country's early days as a revolutionary liberal democratic republic, to today,...
CSOC566 Queer Representability Queer Representability: The Politics of LGBT Visual Culture. What makes an image a queer image-the content, producer, mode of production, a certain sensibility, a set of politics, or simply the eye of the beholder? What are the social, linguistic, an...
CSOC574 Muñoz: Queer Worldmaking Muñoz: The Theory and Practice of Queer Worldmaking This class will be devoted to an in-depth exploration of the work and lasting impact of a single author: writer, scholar, and critical theorist José Esteban Muñoz. Through this central focus on Muñ...
CSOC581 The World in the Model The World in the Model : The Model in the World For at least the last two hundred years modeling has been the principle activity of the economist. A casual observer might think that the economist's mania is focused on quantifying experience but the...
CSOC584W Borges and Political Philosophy In this year's Winter Session, we will engage in an in -depth reading of Argentine fiction writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges, an author widely but wrongly regarded as "a-political." In the course, we will reveal the way in which his "fictions" we...
CSOC587 Borges' Aesthetics of Politics This course will not be just about Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges; but it will all happen in the inconceivable Borgesian pluriverse. The course is about the aesthetics of politics, and doubly so. On the one hand, it is about the way in which art...
CSOC593W Aesthetics of Politics Research Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics. In this year's edition of the Research Seminar on the Aesthetics of Politics we will engage in an in -depth reading of two different but deeply intertwined aesthetico-political authors: Argentine fictio...