Cultural Studies II: Visual Cultures

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This course will explore the variety of visual cultures and the theoretical insights garnered by the study of this interdisciplinary field. Straddling cultural studies, art history, museum studies, media studies, performance studies, literary studies, and science studies, the field of visual culture at its most expansive combines theories and methods from across the academy. We will investigate visual cultures from these exciting and challenging (inter)disciplinary perspectives. The course presents visual culture as a ubiquitous facet of modern life that perhaps more than any other component shapes and informs our understanding of self, society, and the world. Hence, it demands our careful attention and critical parsing of its workings at all levels of daily life. Our foray into the field will include examining the benefits of this inclusive mode of analysis, for instance in the range of objects available for study, as well as the drawbacks, particularly in terms of methodological rigor and the overinvestment in ocularcentric forms of knowledge. The student will be invited to scrutinize their disciplinary assumptions, to develop their toolbox of concepts, and to analyse objects that are rarely considered inside the university. Starting with an introduction to visual culture, we’ll investigate the terms vision, visuality, and image in conjunction with varying conceptualizations of culture. Each subsequent unit will deal with a “site” of visual culture that offers an object of study, a theoretical problem, and an interdisciplinary opportunity. We will study visual cultures from high to low, and examine how these forms are quickly transforming and breaking barriers of category and genre. The principle sites of inquiry traverse fashion, gaming, museum exhibitions, medical imaging, comics, and cinema. The methods from visual culture studies we will experiment with include cultural materialism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, poststructuralism, narratology, phenomenology, affect theory, feminism and cultural analysis. Key theorists include Hal Foster, Raymond Williams, Susan Bordo, Fredric Jameson, John Berger, Martin Jay, Vivian Sobchack, Richard Dyer, Mieke Bal, M.J.T Mitchell, Amelia Jones, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Ian Bogost, and José van Dijk.