Cultural Studies @ UNC

Comm 852—Information Machines: Media beyond Content

nathant — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 05:37:22 +0000

Comm 852—Information Machines: Media beyond Content

Ken Hillis and Sarah Sharma, Spring 13, Thursday 6-9 PM

This course is team taught by Dr. Ken Hillis and Dr. Sarah Sharma. Combining cultural, philosophical, and political economic approaches, we focus on the materiality of media-technologies. The course situates this materiality within historical contexts and definitions of history themselves bound up within the social diffusion of different media forms. We begin by looking at seminal/canonical texts by theorists of technology. While these theorists have been critiqued as determinist, essentializing and hyperbolic, it is telling that recent new media theory increasingly borrows and extends aspects of these individuals’ thought.

We understand that studying the materiality of media-technology is a critical practice of relevance and one that takes place across disciplinary boundaries. This form of study offers robust ways of understanding relationships, physical, discursive, actual and virtual, among technologies and: gender; labor; media/mediation; mobility; information networks and alternative political formations; and space/time.

Readings include:

Innis, Harold (excerpts)
McLuhan, Marshall. 1995. Essential McLuhan.
Baudrillard, Jean (excerpts)
Langdon Winner. 1986. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology.
Heidegger, Martin. 1982. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays.
Virilio, Paul. 2009 [1986] War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception.
_____. 2012. The Great Accelerator.
Carey, James 1988 Communication as Culture (excerpts)
Peters, John Durham. 1999. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication.
Parks, Lisa. 2005. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual.
Hillis, Ken et al. 2013. Google and the Culture of Search.
Haraway, Donna (excerpts)
Anne Balsamo (excerpts)
Bell, Shannon, 2010. Fast Feminism.
Fuller, Matthew and Andrew Goffey. 2012. Evil Media.
Kember, Sarah and Joanna Zylinska. 2012. Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process.

Spring 2013: Comm 412: Critical Theory

Allison Schlobohm — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:02:36 +0000

Critical Theory with Professor Lawrence Grossberg

Meets Tuesday/Thursday 9:30-10:45am

• An introduction to the history and development of “THEORY” as the foundation for THINKING in the humanities and social sciences
• A survey of modern and contemporary “continental” philosophy—from KANT, SPINOZA, HEGEL and NIETZSCHE to HEIDEGGER, DERRIDA, FOUCAULT and DELEUZE
• An investigation of different PHILOSOPHIES as responses to the changing faces of MODERNITY

For more information email Dr. Larry Grossberg at docrock@email.unc.edu

Spring 2013: Geography 813: Political Ecology

Allison Schlobohm — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 15:48:47 +0000

GEOG 813 Political Ecology with Dr. Gabriella Valdivia

Meets Thursdays, 4:00-6:30pm

Power structures, circulation and value, assemblages, networks and meshworks, apparatuses and government, imaginaries and embodiments, more-than-humans and cyborgs. This is a short-list of the explosion of concepts and approaches that characterize the multiverse of political ecology. How do political ecologists make sense of these concepts and their associated projects? What conceptual and ethical work do these concepts do? If the hallmark of political ecology is qualitative and ethnographic research, how do we bring theory and field into productive conversation? This seminar involves a critical exploration of theories and themes related to nature, political economy, and culture –fundamental themes in political ecology. Our exploration will consist of reading how theories about nature-society relations inform fieldwork and ethnographic writing and how the field informs intellectual and ethical engagements. Readings will include “fundamental” texts in geography concerned with the politics and materialities of environmental change, Marxist theorizations of value, post-structural and post-colonial approaches, and post-humanist works. This effort will involve reading selections of texts by Marx, Gramsci, Smith, Foucault, Latour, Deleuze, Haraway, and Ingold, among others, and putting them in conversation with some of their interlocutors in political ecology, some of which include Wainwright, Watts, Moore, Li, Henderson, Peluso, Robbins, Gandy, Swyngedouw, Prudham, Gidwani, Braun, Guthman, Agrawal, Kull, Whatmore, Bobrow-Strain, Nast, Auyero, and Escobar.

Please contact Gabriela Valdivia (valdivia@email.unc.edu) if you are interested in enrolling in this seminar and have questions.

Queer Latin@ American Migration and Performance Studies

Allison Schlobohm — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 20:07:08 +0000

Queer Latin@ American Migration and Performance Studies

http://sites.duke.edu/qlamp/

A Duke-UNC inter-institutional Working Group currently recruiting members.

The objective of this working group is to unite scholars and artists around issues of queerness and queer theory, performance studies and performance as research, and Latin American Studies/Latino Migration Studies through dialogue, writing, performance, workshops, presentations, and collaborations across multiple disciplines. The group will seek to bring in some of the leading scholars and artists in these fields to expose those involved in and/or interested in the group to the current work being done around these issues. They will also seek to expose the larger UNC and Duke communities to these artists and scholars.

Group Coordinators/Contacts:

Professor Jules Odendahl-James (Department of Theatre Studies, Duke, jules.odendahljames@duke.edu), Professor Joseph Megel (Department of Communication Studies, UNC, megel@email.unc.edu), Professor Thomas DeFrantz (Dance Program and Department of African & African American Studies, Duke,t.defrantz@duke.edu), Brittany Chavez (UNC, bchavez@email.unc.edu) and Raul Ferrera-Balanquet (Department of Romance Studies, Duke,raul.ferrera.balanquet@duke.edu)

Send us your Courses!

Allison Schlobohm — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:45:44 +0000

If you are teaching/know of a course that would be of interest to undergraduates or graduates within Cultural Studies please tell us about it! Email uncculturalstudies@gmail.com or fill out the Contact Us form with all the important info (instructor, course title,…

Coming Soon!

Allison Schlobohm — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 18:00:25 +0000

Check back in the future for posts in this category.

Past Course Lists

Allison Schlobohm — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 17:37:44 +0000

Past Course Lists

CSA Conference, Chicago, May 2013

Allison Schlobohm — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 17:22:19 +0000

Beyond Interdisciplinarity: Interventions in Cultural Studies and the Arts

http://culturalstudiesassociation.org/conference-page

May 23-26, 2013

Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL

Key Dates:

Open for Proposal Submissions: 7 January 2013
Deadline for Proposals: 11 February, 2013
Notification of Acceptance: 18 March 2013
Early Conference Registration: 4 March 2013 – 22 April 2013
Deadline for Inclusion in the Conference Program: 13 May 2013

The Cultural Studies Association (CSA) invites participation in its eleventh annual conference. The theme of this year’s conference, Beyond Disciplinarity: Interventions in Cultural Studies and the Arts, encourages submissions that reflect on the nature, limits, and merits of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practices across the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. This theme refers to the historic role of cultural studies as a field that intervenes in social and intellectual modes of disciplinarity from a variety of critical locations. The conference aims to attract work that meets those challenges by willfully reorganizing and redistributing the sensibilities and knowledges of disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations.

Fall 2012 – COMM 824: Seminar in Feminist Studies

J Beckham — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 23:06:58 +0000

COMM 824: Seminar in Feminist Studies Kumi Silva/Fall 2012 Thurs: 6-8:50 p.m. This course engages with the complexity of transnational feminist thought by focusing on its diversity. Through various themes—from postcolonial theory to popular culture—we map the relationships that emerge…

Fall 2012 – Managing medical work: Technologies, instrumentalities and institutions

J Beckham — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:00:22 +0000

This course explores the anthropology of biomedicine from the standpoint of social practice. It examines the production of medical care, that is, medical work, by sampling a variety of ethnographic, historical, social and cultural studies. We will focus particularly on two theoretical approaches— the “actor-network” theories articulated in studies of science and technology and the “practice theory” of Pierre Bourdieu—in order to analyze the interplay of medical technologies, instrumentalities (standardized and routinized modes of activity) and discourses that informs contemporary medicine. The course follows a telescoping order of scale—from clinical encounters and procedures to national health care systems—in which social practices combine forms of imagination and material relations to create the cultural settings—work worlds—that affect the meaning and experience of medicine. Besides the theoretical groundwork, readings and discussion emphasize an aspect of medicalization to which medical anthropology has recently devoted much attention: the changing face of “late capitalism.” Biomedical work is informed by such innovations as flexible means of production and distribution, new managerial techniques and strategies, forms of professional “self-regulation” and governance, and new public / private relationships. The course looks to place and thus to understand biomedicine within its larger institutional field, the bureaucracies and economies of human services. It is intended for those students in medical anthropology and anthropology, public health, allied health sciences, and the social and human sciences with interests in the cultural politics and political economies of professional work in contemporary societies.

ANTH 897-052
William S. Lachicotte
11:00-1:45 Monday
308 Alumni Building