Course Listings for the 2024-2025 Academic Year
Please note: students are responsible for ensuring that their selected courses meet the program requirements stated in the Calendar. If, however, you feel that you need additional information or guidance please contact us. These course descriptions are in process of being updated – check back regularly.
Fall 2024 Courses
CLMD 6101T (CRN 31176)
Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory
Instructor: Paul Théberge
This course will address the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies of culture. Attention will be paid to those themes and issues in cultural theory of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that inform contemporary interdisciplinary work in literature, film, music, art and new media. This course is continued in the second semester.
CLMD 6900T (CRN 31181)
Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Instructor: Peter Hodgins
The primary goal of this year-long, workshop-based course for second-year doctoral students is to help students prepare for the second comprehensive examination and dissertation research. The class will offer students a supportive space in which to workshop their second comprehensive examination lists and their preliminary dissertation proposals. Students will work together to develop and exchange ideas about their teaching fields and dissertations with their peers and to benefit from constructive criticism. Be prepared to engage with other students’ scholarship fully and constructively as we discuss, develop and refine plans for future research.
The second major goal of the course is to foster practical skills and knowledge necessary for academic success at the doctoral level and beyond. The course will help students master various aspects of the academic profession including: writing OGS and SSHRC plans of study, becoming acquainted with library resources, academic publishing, conference paper presentations, research ethics and other professional concerns. Further topics will be introduced in response to student need. This course is continued in the second semester.
CLMD 6102F (CRN 31177) / ARTH 5112F / MGDS 5002F
Issues in Transnationalism: Sovereignties of the Imagination: Worlding and Visual Activism
Instructor: Ming Tiampo
This course takes Barbadian writer George Lamming’s Sovereignty of the Imagination (2004) as a starting point for imagining more just and equitable worlds through making that would challenge hegemonic conceptions of Being worlded from the European Enlightenment (Wynter). It considers how new vocabularies of freedom, of the freedom to be, have been produced through acts of refusal and resistance, by artists and other makers from the multiple geographies of the global majority. We are interested in practices such as beadwork, inkpainting, calligraphy, pottery, textiles, protest, music and dance that propose new imaginations of what is possible by making and remaking the modern world through objects, artworks and discourses in the context of various degrees of unfreedom. It is through these condensations of cultural feelings or art practices that new sensibilities emerge, which articulate modes of fashioning possible possibles (Escobar), for being otherwise in structures of impossibility. Reimagining modernities other than those which centre progress and a liberal world order, Sovereignties explores the possibilities and limitations of projects that articulate new and wayward worlds (Hartman). The course is being taught in collaboration with Wayne Modest, Director of Content, Wereldmuseum, and Professor, Vrije University Amsterdam. It is part of a larger project, which includes exhibitions, seminars, performances, reasonings, and publications.
CLMD 6103F (31178) /ARTH 5218 /CDNS 5003A
Issues of Cultural Mediation and Representation: Indigenous Curation: Critical Applications
Instructor: Carmen Robertson
Indigenous curators have formulated new ways to display Indigenous arts through applications of Indigenous ways of knowing. This cross-listed graduate-level course charts not only directions in Indigenous curation explored from weeks one through six, it also involves a hands-on curatorial experience by mounting an exhibition based on a premier collection of Indigenous art for the final six weeks of this course. The major focus of the course involves the curating of an exhibition of works from the Permanent Collection of the Indigenous Art Centre at the CIRNAC gallery in Gatineau who has expressed ongoing interest in working with me and our students on another exhibition.
CLMD 6902F (31183) / ENGL5900H / LAWS 5904F
Special Topics: Worlding Law & Literature
Instructor: Philip Kaisary
When it emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature cast itself as a “movement.” This seminar takes up the stakes of that claim. First, we will pay close attention to the field’s formation, goals, situation, theoretical investments, and ideological thrust. Second, we will draw on recent debates within world literary studies and the critical tradition of cultural materialism to explore whether these offer Law and Literature a way to live up to not only the claim, but also the responsibility, of being a movement. We will consider a diverse corpus of primary materials (spanning literature, film, visual arts, case law, and constitutional law) drawn from both “peripheral” and “core” global locations (likely locations include Brazil, Canada, Congo-Brazzaville, Cuba, Great Britain, Haiti, and the United States). This seminar is open to graduate students in Cultural Mediations, Law, and English. No prior knowledge of law is required.
CLMD 6105F (31179) / FILM 5002
Issues in the Technology of Culture: Media and Emotion
Instructor: Aubrey Anable
Please also register in CLMD 6105 FF (31180)
This graduate seminar will consider the ways that emotion figures in theoretical and historical accounts of film and related audio-visual media. Questions about emotion and “affect” are at the root of contemporary debates about identity, subjectivity, politics, and representation. Yet, the body—its sensual capacities and vulnerabilities—is often figured as that which media technologies and those who study them must overcome or entirely deny. Our primary concern will be tracing this intellectual history and the ways contemporary media culture and recent theoretical shifts reframe the relationship between media and emotion. We will use screenings and readings as materials to think (and feel) with.
Winter 2025 Courses
CLMD 6101T (CRN 11106)
Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory
Instructor: Aubrey Anable
This course is a continuation of CLMD 6101 in the first semester. It will address the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies of culture. Attention will be paid to those themes and issues in cultural theory of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that inform contemporary interdisciplinary work in literature, film, music, art and new media.
CLMD 6900T (11110)
Research and Professional Development: Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Instructor: Peter Hodgins
This course is a continuation of CLMD 6900 in the first semester. See above for course description.
CLMD 6104W (11107) /DIGH 5902A /FILM 5002W
Issues in Cultural Politics: Digital Humanities, Media & Social Justices
Instructor: Laura Horak
This course will introduce students to the theories and methods of intersectional feminist, Black, Indigenous, queer, and trans digital humanities (Lothian and Phillips 2013; Bailey 2015; Risam 2015; Bailey et al. 2016; Wernimont and Losh 2018). It will bring together the insights of critical race studies, Indigenous studies, feminism, queer, and transgender studies with new digital methods, and explore the ways that scholars are using new digital tools to work collaboratively for social justice. We will investigate the ways that colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, and ableism shape the digital technologies we use our everyday lives (e.g. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.) as well as how Indigenous, Black, queer, and trans scholars and activists are using digital tools to reconnect with ancestors, reveal unseen patterns governing everyday life in the past and the present, and create new forms of community.
We will examine a range of digital humanities projects through the lens of intersectional digital humanities, examining how they work in terms of: power (e.g. What kinds of power do team and community members bring to the table? Who is not in the room? How is the project governed?); labor (e.g. Who does what kind of labor? How are they recognized? How fairly and quickly are they compensated? How sustainable are these ways of working?); value (e.g. Who benefits?); credit (e.g. Who get credit for their labor? Who is cited?); privacy (e.g. What kind of things should not get put online? What are the appropriate protocols for sharing things with various people?); and harm (e.g. Does the work leave people vulnerable to harm? Does it gravely misrepresent them?). We will also explore the challenges of capturing the complexities of identity in data structures..
CLMD 6105W (11108) / CDNS 5301B / ENGL 5900Y
Issues in the Technology of Culture: Canadian Cultural Studies
Instructor: Orly Lael Netzer
In this course we will explore cultural studies on Turtle Island from their inception vis-a-vis the Canadian nation-making project to their de-colonizing trajectories and aims. Our discussions will be guided by asking what does it mean to research and practice cultural studies in socially responsible ways (responsible to whom and how)? what can cultural studies offer at times of relational crises? and how / can cultural studies make relations between communities, or rather, make relations right? To begin answering these questions, we will attend to the state’s pivotal role in shaping Canada’s national industries and identity, historicize the study of culture in/about Canada, and examine contemporary and emerging theories and approaches in cultural studies (from multiculturalism, to critical refugee studies, Indigenous literary nationalism, black feminism, ecocriticism, ethics of care, memory, performance, and queer studies).
CLMD 6106W (11109) / ENGL 5004W / MGDS 5002D
Issues in History and Culture: Memory and Migration
Instructor: Sarah Casteel
This course explores the relationship between memory, migration, and aesthetic representation. We will consider the role of particular literary and artistic genres in producing, preserving, and circulating migrant memories. How do diasporic writers and visual artists negotiate between personal or familial memory and official, state memory? How do they reconstruct memories that have been disrupted, fragmented, or lost as a result of forced or voluntary migration? What is the role of creativity and the imagination in these acts of mnemonic recovery? Among the literary genres and artistic mediums we will address are memoir, graphic memoir, fiction, poetry, installation art, photographic portraiture, and photomontage.
CLMD 6903W (11112) / ENGL 5900W
Special Topics in Cultural Mediations: Co-writing the Climate Crisis
Instructor: Barbara Leckie
This course offers an interdisciplinary approach to the climate crisis through the lens of co-writing. The idea of co-writing will be treated capaciously: writing through and with other voices, conversations, people, places, and things. It will envision writing as a kind of craft or making in which we think out loud together. With respect to the climate crisis, humans write on and with land and climate; this course will, accordingly, ask if co-writing can broaden our sense of what writing means.
The course will approach questions of cowriting via three interconnected categories: conversation; correspondence; and cohabitation. While each of these terms have a bearing on the larger questions of climate and the planetary that the course will address, they will also be approached, more narrowly, in relation to talking, writing, and teaching, respectively. Our discussions will be underpinned by the ways in which ideas of the co-, in general, help us to rethink the individual, the nation, and the land. Overall, we will read the work of Judith Butler, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, Anna Tsing, and Sylvia Wynter, among others, to consider more closely how disciplines in the humanities can contribute to climate action.
CLMD 6904W (11113) / ENGL 5002W
Special Topic in Cultural Mediations: Pleasure, Pathos and Pathology
Instructor: Stuart Murray
This course will explore the interdisciplinary remit of “pleasure” and its genres. How is pleasure variously aestheticized and politicized, felt (pathos) and pathologized? We’ll begin in the first weeks by staging an encounter between pathos, pathology, and politics. Introductory course texts will include those that theorize the aesthetic in relation to the political, and vice versa (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Barthes, Rancière), as well as theoretical texts that address pleasure as such (e.g., Freud, Foucault, as well as select texts on hedonism and libertinism). Armed with this theoretical apparatus, in later weeks the course will turn to “case studies” of texts that are ostensibly “pathographic” (e.g., fine art, literature) and some that are explicitly political and yet nonetheless aestheticized (e.g., manifestos). Addressing their own areas of research and/or creation, students will be encouraged to study the ways that aesthetic and rhetorical forms are variously pleasurable, pathological, and political.