Winter 2024
Dream/Work (Chan)
We’ll track the ubiquitous figure of the creator–be it the artist, author, activist, or casual social media user–as a worker who is transformed by technology, creativity, and social struggle. What does dream work (the formal and informal aesthetic labor of transposing dreams into reality) reveal about our desires, aspirations, agency and the material conditions of contemporary capitalism? What are the politics and perils of rendering the psychic content of our dreams and nightmares into textual or multisensory content? And how do we re-imagine our own life’s work (broadly defined) so that it aligns with the worlds of which we dream?
The Crafting of Elsewhere: Black Speculative Fiction Through Black Feminist and Queer Theories (Frantece)
We will engage Black feminist methods of world and community building— as methods of finding authentic life, love, kinship, and care. We will also engage queer theories’ experiments with reality, relationality, and time. How can a critical study of speculative fiction and art lead us to the ecstatic engagement of material conditions existing elsewhere? We will engage works by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, NK Jemisin, Cauleen Smith and others. Assignments will be weekly in-class discussions, 2 short public-facing papers (around 500 words each), and a final multimodal project meant for public audience.
Spring 2024
CHID 205/AFRAM 350/ENGL 358: Black Speculative Fiction through Black Feminist and Queer theories: The Crafting of Elsewhere (Frantece)
In this course, we consider how Black speculative fiction allows us to be meditative of alternative ways of existing so that we can experience a reality that may not be like any pre-existing one. We will work with Black feminist methods of world and community building, as methods of finding life, love, kinship, and care and with queer theory’s experimenting and playing with reality, relationality, and time. Both fields articulate the persistence of anti-Blackness and heteronormativity but also articulate that there is a need to develop new modes of knowledge production, transforming the way we think about time, relationality, space/place, and imagination. How can a critical study of speculative fiction lead us to the ecstatic engagement of material conditions existing elsewhere? We will center our discussion around short texts: the poetry of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan; the art work of Cauleen Smith and Wangechi Mutu; and short stories by Octavia Butler and NK Jemisin. The writers, artists, and filmmakers we interrogate distort, disrupt, and destroy our material realities to bring us to another place that comes off as obscure, irrational, impossible, and nonsensical. Throughout the course, students will workshop multimodal projects in response to the readings.
CHID 480: The Unconscious, Online: Dreaming with(out) Algorithms (Chan)
Therapy chatbots, uncannily targeted advertising, and the algorithmic extraction of our most subliminal data: this course asks how psychoanalytic logics of the unconscious mind cryptically haunt our devices, platforms, and network technologies–and how these animate our nightmares and dystopian visions of the future. Perhaps more importantly: we’ll also use these discussions to identify opportunities for justice, subversion, and free play through technology. We’ll approach texts from cultural studies, critical design, STS, and Black feminist, postcolonial, and queer critiques–alongside histories of psychoanalytic thought and its deployments in contexts across time and space. We’ll observe how artists, hackers, critics, and everyday users across intersectional axes speak back to algorithmic apparatuses as a challenge to automated discrimination, hegemonic arrangements, Big Tech’s logics of extraction, and the encroaching and unequal digital surveillance and manipulation of our bodies, affects, and desires. We’ll ground our discussions by workshopping our own quarter-long media projects and (auto)ethnographically observing the places our dreams and nightmares interface with algorithms, databases, and the world writ large.