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Seminar
I: Reading the American Landscape: Photography, Place, and Identity (Leaders:
Kevin DeLuca and Anne Demo) Nature
has long been understood to be unnatural. Raymond Williams, for example, characterized
it as "perhaps the most complex word in the language." The complexity
suggested by Williams is compounded when pairing nature with landscape. Interdisciplinary
studies of "natural landscapes" such as the pristine wilderness areas
of Yosemite and magisterial spaces of the American Southwest have well documented
the conjunction between landscape, myth, and identity. This seminar approaches
natural landscapes as contested
sites and places of political struggle. We will focus on modes of visualizing
landscapes and explore the race, class, and gender dimensions of such
natural visions.
Seminar
II: Visualizing Whiteness: Between the Global and the Local (Leaders: Thomas
Nakayama and Raka Shome). The study
of everyday whiteness as a racialized and colonialist ideology has become a
central area of investigation in critical studies across a number of disciplines.
As a powerful construct informing interlocking systems of domination, it is
important to uncover the rhetorics by which whiteness ends up as a central organizing
principle structuring the social fabric, while remaining invisible. This seminar,
located within this conversation on whiteness, seeks to explore the visual rhetorics
of whiteness. It will examine how the racial imagery of whiteness both informs
the struggle over national belonging, and, given the transnational relations
of media, influences larger relations of globalization.
Seminar
III: Iconic Photography and Public Culture (Leaders: John
Louis Lucaites and Robert Hariman)
This seminar will explore the role that iconic photography – especially
in its photojournalistic form – plays in underwriting American, liberal-democratic
public culture. Drawing upon recent interest in pictorial discourse, performance
theory, and the relationship between public culture and democratic theory, we
will focus attention on the role that iconic photographs play in articulating
specific conceptions of civic identity and on the ways in which they provide
formal, aesthetic resolution to fundamental contradictions in American public
culture. We will also explore the hypothesis that photojournalism operates as
a performative ritual in literate societies. The seminar will be organized around
case studies of the representation of war and dissent.
Seminar
IV: Visual Rhetorics of Witnessing: Representation, War, and Cultural Trauma
(Leaders: A. Susan Owen and Peter
Ehrenhaus) This seminar will examine works that contribute to our understanding
of visual rhetorics of witnessing, where witnessing is defined as the rhetorical
processes and practices through which traumatic memory is constructed. Visual
rhetorics of witnessing operate at the intersection of traumatizing cultural
experience, collective identity, and narrative (discursive and visual) representation
practices. The manner in which traumatic memory is narrativized provides glimpses
into the process of collective (i.e., national) identity construction and the
dynamics of ideological struggles to construct usable pasts. Readings will include
theoretical treatments of "trauma," "narrative," "history,"
and their relationships, as well as critical studies that address specific sites
of cultural trauma and hegemonic struggle.
Seminar
V: Material Memory: Exhibitionary Rhetorics and Politics (Leaders: Barbara
Biesecker and Kenneth Cmiel) Over
the last several decades, museums have come to be seen as particularly poignant
sites for the interrogation of the cultural politics of representation. This
seminar aims to revisit and extend this inquiry by addressing the following
questions: What is a museum (a vehicle for the production and dissemination
of knowledge, a technology of publicity, a disciplinary apparatus, or something
else altogether); what are the entailments for critical practice of defining
it one way rather than another; and how has all this evolved over the last two
centuries? While a shared set of critical readings will provide a common point
of departure in the seminar, we expect participants will enrich the conversation
by bringing
their own projects and disciplinary expertise to the table.
Seminar
VI: The Visual Politics and Poetics of Native American Performance (Leaders:
Oscar Giner and William
C. Trapani) This seminar examines recent efforts to correct the representation
of Native American peoples in museum and memorial practices, dance ceremonials,
photographs and traditional performances. By analyzing the historical development
and political force of such efforts we will interrogate their peril and promise,
particularly as they relate to the development of an "authentic" Indian
voice, and the need to define an aesthetic perspective in the examination of
Native American myths, ceremonials and recorded performances.
Seminar
VII: The Socio-Imaging of Politics (Leaders: Bruce
E. Gronbeck and James P. McDaniel)
Political acts not only create policy but also polity: they get things done
in society and simultaneously assert a political identity for citizens of that
society. Political images, as well, are both messages arraying political symbols
and also frames or fields that position their citizen-viewers within specifiable
subject positions, i.e., identities. Political images are constructed so as
to be viewed and yet to have that viewing done from some *where* by some *one*.
This seminar explores these dual rhetorical processes, theoretically and practically.
Seminar VIII: Postmodern Media Communities: Signs, Symptoms, Visions of the Future (Leader: Ron Burnett) Although, there are now many strategies for trying to understand community, there is less and less clarity to the conventional use of the term, which grew out particular notions of locality and geographic proximity. Dissent, contestation, grassroots knowledge, the sharing of information and knowledge and the struggle to define meaning and communication are central characteristics of postmodern media communities. These are communities where people get to know each other through a variety of media experiences that do not have a direct connection to geography. Networked technologies, zines, web-based environments, Freenets, listservs, and electronic mail have fundamentally altered the geographic boundaries of human interaction. This in turn has led to a redefinition of the meaning of communal interaction. A common characteristic of these communities is the use of visual media to communicate and share resources and ideas. Little attention is paid to the medium of communication. Rather, technology is used to facilitate existing or new relationships. This seminar will explore many of the contradictions and benefits that these new forms of community interaction have made possible.
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March 3, 2005
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