51³ÉÈËÁÔÆæ

Course Description

Summary

In this 4000-level course, students will develop an understanding of the ways in which visual media functions on the practices of archives that document the history of institutions including asylums, hospitals and schools. We will engage with archival sources through interdisciplinary approaches to media studies, drawing on visual culture studies, art history, and material culture studies. We will mobilize collections, photographs, commercials, print journalism, propaganda, television shows, films, radio shows, blogs, and objects, to better understand how visual and audiovisual media inform a historical understanding of institutional practices. Our focus will be primarily on North Africa and the colonial archive. Students will create independent research projects from a context within the scope of the course. Visual and haptic media bear the marks of multiple agents simultaneously. As we analyze histories of patient internment, this course understands media as central to the negotiation of power in the colonial institution. Beyond a focus on what media does or doesn’t show or represent, we will consider the affective and inter-relational dimensions of sources. Collective agents that inhabit multiple temporalities and corporealities simultaneously exist within an institutional context and before and after their activation in a record. In emphasizing the social body, making, and bonds between human and non-humans within the institutional landscape, this course offers ways to map decolonization and conceptualize alliances with matter and media as communicable and deeply political.