Course Listings for the 2023-2024 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.
Courses for Fall 2023
CLMD 6101T (CRN 31184)
Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory
Instructor: Paul Keen
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
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 31186)
Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Instructor: Peter Hodgins
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
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 31185) / ARTH 5112F
Issues in Transnationalism: Worlding, Diaspora, and Difficult Histories
Instructor: Ming Tiampo
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
This interdisciplinary course is situated at the intersection of Critical Global Studies and Diaspora Studies. The course will provide an overview of recent theoretical discourses, examining and distinguishing terms and concepts such as world (music, art, literature), global, diaspora, worlding, pluriversal, postcolonial, decolonial, and post-imperial and investigate how they can be productively put into conversation. The course will consider how we configure ideas of the global on four levels—as scale, as actor theory, as method, and as temporal practice. We will investigate multiple intellectual models of theorizing the global and the diasporic, and also consider their limits in a number of disciplines in the humanities, with some focus on art history.
CLMD 6104F (CRN 35773) / ENGL 5610 F
Issues in Cultural Politics: Documentary and Crisis
Instructor: Franny Nudelman
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
This course considers crisis documentary from 1945 to the present. We will study documentary filmmakers, photographers, and writers who respond to the unanticipated and often incomprehensible crises of their age and, in the process, create new forms of documentary expression. Taking an expansive view of the field, we will consider documentary texts that deal with war, forced migration, climate emergency, poverty, gendered violence. We will ask: How do documentarians represent what they cannot yet fully understand? What role does literary and visual culture play in making disruptive change real? How have documentarians helped to define an ethics of witnessing? How are the methods and aims of documentarians transformed by new technologies and alternative forms of collectivity? Throughout, we will explore the power of documentary to respond to catastrophic events and uncharted social conditions as they unfold.
CLMD 6902F (31188) / ENGL5900G / LAWS 5904F
Special Topics: Directions and Dead Ends in the ‘Law & Literature’ Movement
Instructor: Philip Kaisary
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
This graduate seminar will critically analyze themes, approaches, and debates in the ‘Law and Literature’ movement and the related field of ‘Law, Culture, and the Humanities’ (LCH). The first half of the seminar will begin by tracing the formation of the ‘Law and Literature’ movement from c. 1965 to the present day, paying particular attention to its goals, purview, situation, theoretical investments, and ideological thrust. In the second half of the seminar, we will undertake a series of experimental readings of primary materials (novels, films, legal texts) drawn from both ‘core’ and ‘peripheral’ global locations. This will constitute our collective effort to develop a materialist and worldly approach to ‘Law and Literature’ / LCH.
CLMD 6903F (31189) / FILM 5002
Special Topics in Cultural Mediations: Media and Emotion
Instructor: Aubrey Anable
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students. Please also register in CLMD 6903 FF (31190)
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 2024 Courses
CLMD 6101T (CRN 11151)
Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory
Instructor: Paul Keen
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
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 (11154)
Research and Professional Development: Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Instructor: Peter Hodgins
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
This course is a continuation of CLMD 6900 in the first semester. See above for course description.
CLMD 6103W (11152) /ARTH 5210 /CDNS 5003A
Issues of Cultural Mediation and Representation: Defining Beauty/Towards Indigenous Aesthetics
Instructor: Carmen Robertson
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
Pathways toward articulating Indigenous aesthetics emerge from deep considers of cultural epistemologies and ontologies with regard to contemporary Indigenous arts. Because this is an emergent area of study within the Academy, few scholarly readings exist and as a result we will consider written texts from a variety of sources. Together, we will develop new understandings of how to consider aesthetics through Indigenous perspectives and visual culture. Through a series of interdisciplinary readings, observations, and oral narratives, notions of Indigenous aesthetics in relation to contemporary and traditional art expressions will be addressed. Connections to land and to story are key components of this seminar and will help formulate new research directions. We will also consider ethics, methods and consider other challenges related to conducting such research. The outcomes of research in this course will be a combination of oral and written assignments that focus on building concepts related to Indigenous aesthetics.
CLMD 6902W (11156) / CDNS 5301 A (10878
Special Topics in Cultural Mediations: Canadian Cultural Studies
Instructor: Orly Lael Netzer
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
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 6903W (11157) / ENGL 5900X
Special Topics in Cultural Mediations: Co-writing the Climate Crisis
Instructor: Barbara Leckie
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
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 (11158) / MUSI 5004W
Special Topic in Cultural Mediations: Sound Studies and Beyond
Instructor: Paul Théberge
Method of delivery: in-person, not suitable for online students
Sound Studies is a relatively new, but well-established interdisciplinary field that includes a diverse range of objects of study addressed through an equally diverse range of disciplinary concerns and methodologies; in recent years, some of its foundational works and epistemologies have been critiqued from the perspectives of race, sexuality, disability, and decolonization. While “music” falls within the range of social and cultural phenomena investigated within sounds studies, music is neither its primary focus nor the termination point of much of the theorizing within the field. Nevertheless, adopting some of the theoretical perspectives within sound studies (and their critiques) is useful in challenging how we think about music and, conversely, music may allow us to discuss and analyze some of the limits of sound studies as it has come to be defined.