As the room began to fill up before her lecture, film studies professor Malini Guha wanted to test the AV for the film she’d be screening – The Last Angel of History directed by John Akomfrah and produced by the Black Audio Film Collective.
The film flashed across the screen, and for a moment, there was a familiar voice singing the blues.
“Are we watching a documentary about Robert Johnson?” music student Mubarak Farah enthusiastically called out from the back of the classroom. “He’s the best singer of all time.”
“Sort of!” replied Guha. “The music students in the room will like this one. It’s a film about music.”
The course, titled Race and Representation in the Arts, took place in the fall of 2023 and was co-taught by School for Studies in Art and Culture Professors Malini Guha (Film Studies), Gül Kale (Art and Architectural History), and Kathy Armstrong (Music).
It used an interdisciplinary approach to equip students in and outside arts programs with skills to examine representation in the arts and influence positive change in their future career endeavors.
Guha, sharing her vision for the course, expresses, "By resisting the traditional boundaries of ‘discipline’, our course opens up space for students and instructors alike to share their existing knowledge on these topics as represented across music, architectural history, and film while also learning from each other."
The lectures were split into three-week segments taught by Armstrong, Kale, then Guha. Students engaged in cross-disciplinary and collaborative work along the way, building a portfolio of their work together in small groups, and exploring everything from city soundscapes, to race in modern architectural discourse, to Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism.
"It is our hope that what students learn through these experiential activities is the ability to translate class concepts into material practices, a skill that they can carry with them long after the class has ended," says Guha.
Armstrong, a percussionist who studies Ghanaian music and participatory music-making, underscores the course's impact by pointing out how students, right from the first class, spoke to one another about personal experiences.
"Many of the students have remarked that they now see Ottawa with new eyes, having explored themes relating to race and representation through the lens of their own city," says Armstrong.
"We wanted the course to engage with lived experiences rather than being merely theoretical reflections," says Kale, a trained architect and architectural historian, who hopes the course empowers students to implement positive changes in their interactions with the world and diverse communities.
Mubarak Farah, a music student and professional pianist, says he loved the long discussions that took place with his peers and instructors throughout the course, and "appreciate[d] that every voice was heard."
"I think the value that can be gained here is people from each of these disciplines can take what they've learned from the course and use it to make their respective industries much more fair and inclusive," says Farah.