GSFS 401-002 Special Topics 1: Practices and Perspectives in Contemporary Media and Theory
Instructor: Nicole De Brabandere (Postdoctoral Fellow, IGSF and MIRL, McGill University)
Schedule: W 11:35-2:25 PM in Peel 3487 Seminar Room
How we think about the difference between the animate and the inanimate is a question of increasing importance with the current expansion of A.I. and big data in figuring and transforming human and non-human bodies. This course will examine animacy as concept and practice for thinking across the divide between objects and bodies traditionally categorized as animate and inanimate, while problematizing normative conceptions of gender, species and corporeality. Animacy will be engaged through the media form of animation, but also as belonging to sensory apparatuses and cultural epistemologies at the intersection of the material and the experiential proposed by feminist, queer, critical race and art theory. Throughout the course we will develop practices of experimentation in a variety of media, to situate and enliven these concepts, giving new contours to more-than-human, heterogeneous and transversal world-making possibilities. Some examples of topics and media include A.I, automation, social media, photography, affect, line, movement, toxicity, reproduction, plasticity, surface, light and institutionality.
GSFS 402 Special Topics 2: Ethnographies of Love, Sex, and Intimacy in Asia
Instructor: Maria Hwang (IGSF and East Asian Studies, McGill University)
schedule: TR 2:35 - 4:25 PM in Peel 3487 Seminar Room
This course examines how cultural, political, economic, and technological transformations shape our most intimate acts and practices. It also seeks to understand how desires, pleasures, and emotions circulate in a globalizing Asia.