ARTC23AC

This course will enable students to think critically about, and engage in practical experiments in, the complex interactions between new media and perceptions and performances of embodiment, agency, citizenship, collective action, individual identity, time, and spatiality. We will pay particular attention to the categories of personhood that make up the UC Berkeley American cultures rubric (race and ethnicity), as well as to gender, nation, and disability. The argument threading through the course will be the ways in which new media both reinforce preexisting social hierarchies and yet offer possibilities for the transcendence of those very categories. The new media--and we will leave the precise definition of the new media as something to be argued about over the course of the semester--can be yet another means for dividing and disenfranchising, and can be the conduit of violence and transnational dominance.