Explores how certain African American visual artist and dramatists interpret historical experience. Raises theoretical questions of representation, visualization, intertexuality, interdisciplinarity, and politics and the aesthetics of portrayal, focusing on the work of Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, August Wilson, Adrienne Kennedy.
Examines the diversity of African-Canadian artistic production, literature in particular, but also film and visual art, seeking to develop theoretical and critical frameworks in which to situate contemporary work within Canadian, as well as the African Diasporic discourse.
This course analyzes the gendered nature of modern Western scientific culture. It draws on literary, historical and philosophical sources, films and contemporary feminist writings.
Examines from a humanist perspective the shifting relationships between social and cultural practices and technologies. It explores several key interfaces, including structures of belief, aesthetic practices and identity formation.
Explores various moral, political, psychological, and metaphysical issues surrounding our nature as embodied beings, utilizing works of science fiction (novels, short stories, and films) as "thought experiments" by which we vary some aspect of our embodiment and ask what consequences would follow. Topics include: gender, personal identity, perception, emotion, the nature of mind, and posthumanism.
Addresses illness as a narrative device in film and other forms of media and by so doing, raises social and cultural concerns regarding the body, protest, transcendence and healing, as well as gender/sexual politics.
Explores how the creative arts, including poetry, fiction, drama, film and the visual arts, take up issues related to human rights.
Explores contemporary craft traditions and innovations in their social, political and artistic contexts. Theoretically, the course will draw from such areas as craft theory, cultural studies, popular culture, critical theory, craft culture and the history of technology.
An exploration of how a unique Canadian sensibility manifests itself in contemporary cultural forms. Students are encouraged to attend contemporary plays, movies , readings, art shows and concerts to supplement reading materials.
Surveys historical and contemporary approaches to the texts and contexts of fiction, film, television, music, folklore and fashion. Themes include the industrialization of culture; changing definitions of the popular; genre and gender; the politics of style; nature and other utopias.