Archived: 2021-2022 Graduate Course Listings
Fall 2021/Winter 2022
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- PROFESSOR: Aubrey Anable
- DESCRIPTION: This graduate seminar will consider the ways that emotion figures in theoretical and historical accounts of film and related audio-visual technologies. 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.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Participation and Research Essay
- READINGS: The readings for the course will cover the contemporary “affective turn” in theory, its debates, and its critics. To the degree that aesthetic philosophy is grounded in the question of emotion, we will also consider earlier accounts of sensation, perception, and interpretation.
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- PROFESSOR: Laura Horak
- DESCRIPTION: This course will introduce students to the theories and methods of intersectional feminist, Black, Indigenous, queer, and trans digital humanities. 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.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Writing assignments, an in-class presentation, and a final project.
- READINGS: All readings are available online through Ares and Brightspace. Readings include works by Moya Bailey, Roopika Risam, Jacques Wernimont, Elizabeth Loth, Amanda Phillips, Alexis Lothian, Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Umoja Noble, Sasha Costanza-Chock, Max Liboiron, Jennifer Wemigwans, Catherine D’Ignazio, Lauren F. Klein, TL Cowan, Jasmine Rault, Bo Ruberg, Kelly Fritsch, Aimi Hamraie, Eve Tuck, Wayne Yang, Kimberly Christen, Jessica Marie Johnson, Kim Gallon, Kara Keeling, Cait McKinney, Miriam Posner, and the Digital Alchemists.
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- PROFESSOR: Gunnar Iversen
- DESCRIPTION: This course offers a rigorous orientation to the discipline of Film Studies. We will think critically about and practice key methodologies of the discipline, ranging from interpretation and close analysis, to building arguments, conducting research, and formulating original research project proposals. We will also explore the genealogies of key concepts in Film Studies, including national cinema, genre, and authorship. In the course, students will work on their analytic, writing, research, and communication skills.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Essays
- READINGS: All readings will be available on ARES or on Brightspace.
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- PROFESSOR: Malini Guha
- DESCRIPTION: This course continues where FILM 5010 left off in offering an advanced orientation to some of the major debates belonging to the discipline of film studies while also introducing students to newer methods of analysis. Topics to be studied in this course include (but are not limited to); film’s enduring relationship to reality; the question of how we might disrupt the Western-centric nature of the discipline; revisiting and rethinking the gaze; interdisciplinary methods of analysis.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: TBA
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- PROFESSOR: Aboubakar Sanogo
- DESCRIPTION: This interdisciplinary seminar will explore theories, histories and practices pertaining to the archival, with the moving image as its point of entry and focus, while in conversation with other relevant media and fields concerned with the archival (museums, libraries, etc.). It will revisit some of the most important theories of the archival along with lesser known ones. It will critically retrace the history of the moving image archiving movement. It will also explore the major debates and issues pertaining to archival practice including safeguarding, preservation, restoration, heritage, collecting, cataloguing, access, curating and programming, policy, the analog vs digital, as well as the significance of race, gender, sexuality and national, etc. Potential contributors may include both Canadian and international archival institutions, organizations and projects: Library and Archives Canada, the Library of Congress and the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and affiliates, etc.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Discussion leading, position paper, term paper (Tentative)
- READINGS: TBA
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- PROFESSOR: Malini Guha
- DESCRIPTION: World cinema has become a veritable sub-field within the discipline of film studies over the last decade. This course investigates the ‘world cinema turn’ in film studies by returning to earlier historical moments that similarly attempted to globalize and de-westernize the discipline while also investigating the limitations of this turn and alternative scholarly responses to it. Our approach to this material is interdisciplinary in nature, given that numerous Humanities disciplines have undergone their own ‘turns to the world’ and there are considerable overlaps as well as sharp differences between these approaches. We will explore the question of why the world is at stake in the present moment across the Humanities while also putting pressure on this turn by considering terms such as ‘the postcolonial’, ‘the border’ and so on.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: All readings and films will be available via Bright Space
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- PROFESSOR: Laura Horak
- DESCRIPTION: This course explores the widely varied and inventive world of film and media created by trans, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people in the United States and Canada. How have trans people used audiovisual media to create new forms of community, identity, and desire? How have Black trans and Indigenous Two-Spirit people used film to expose and craft ways to collectively survive colonialism, racial capitalism, and the prison industrial complex? What challenges or paradoxes do audiovisual media pose to trans struggles for self-determination and liberation? How has “trans” changed over time and in different places? What is trans cinema? This class will analyze a variety of trans-made feature films, shorts, television shows, YouTube videos, and web series that span modes and genres, including drama, sci-fi, comedy, documentary, experimental, and pornography. We will also compare trans-made media to mainstream representations of trans people. Students will have the opportunity to conduct close analyses of trans-made audiovisual media informed by the latest scholarship in the burgeoning field of Transgender Studies.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: Writing assignments and an in-class presentation.
- READINGS: All readings are available online through Ares and Brightspace. Readings include works by Kai Cheng Thom, Susan Stryker, Julia Serano, Viviane Namaste, Cáel M. Keegan, Eliza Steinbock, Syrus Marcus Ware, Dean Spade, C. Riley Snorton, Jin Haritaworn, Chelsea Vowell, Kai Pyle, and KJ Rawson.
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- PROFESSOR: Kester Dyer
- DESCRIPTION: This course investigates some of the key historical developments and theoretical debates surrounding the emergence and impact of the National Film Board of Canada’s (NFB’s) renowned “French Team.” Taking the heyday of cinéma direct in the years 1958-1965 as its focal point, the course will engage critically with the influence of anticolonial, nationalist and radical discourse on the intellectual climate of 1960s Québec. Students will look at the relationship between the cinéma direct movement in Québec and parallel documentary traditions in the United States, English-speaking Canada and France, and explore the ideological perspectives and formal approaches of both pioneering filmmakers and more recent generations of documentarians. The course will also consider the socially committed Société nouvelle program, challenges to male-centred cinema through the En tant que femmes series, and the emergence of important voices from other marginalized viewpoints. Overall, students will ponder the profound impact and lasting influence that cinéma direct has come to exercise on both documentary and fiction filmmaking in Québec.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: TBA