Archived: Graduate Courses 2022-2023
Fall 2022/Winter 2023
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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: 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 the national, etc. Past contributors have included both Canadian and international archival institutions, organizations and projects: Library and Archives Canada, the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), the Media Ecology Project, the Film Heritage Foundation, etc.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: 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 materials will be available via Brightspace.
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- PROFESSOR: Kester Dyer
- DESCRIPTION: This course examines the history of debates and more recent discursive tendencies that have characterized the scholarly assessment of cinema in Canada. It looks at constructions of nationhood that have taken place through debates on what Canadian cinema is and what it should be, developments in canon formation, the influence of key institutions such as the NFB, innovative programs like Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle, notable film movements, predominant genres, and policies impacting the Canadian film industry. Considering influential approaches like auteurism, feminism, and queer theory, and emphasizing attempts to move beyond the “two founding cultures” binary in Canadian film studies, the course stresses local contexts as well as the diversity of film cultures across Canada, notably the dynamism of Indigenous and diasporic filmmaking in this context. Overall, the course adopts a decolonial perspective that interrogates the extent to which approaches to Canadian film studies depart from Eurocentric paradigms.
- METHOD OF EVALUATION: TBA
- READINGS: Online readings.