Course Details

This course explores current practices of socio-cultural, political-economic, environmental, gender and ethnic activism that engage aesthetic forms to expand participation, redefine the style of mobilization, and reconfigure the realm of the political.
We will focus on how individual and collective aesthetic strategies, including graffiti, street art, theater, film, performance and media, work to strengthen awareness of unevenly distributed life chances (often gendered and geographic); the hollowing out of structures of job security; right-wing populism, war, occupation, and military rule. We will pay particular attention to how artistic practices and the ideas that inform them circulate and accumulate across national-cultural terrains, adding to what Susan Buck-Morss has called the “mimetic” qualities of political movements that make “the experience visible to others for whom the horizon of the possible expands.” Beyond the U.S. our examples will be drawn from East Asia, Eastern Europe (Hungary in particular), Latin America, and the Middle East.