涩里番

Technology figures centrally in industrial and post-industrial societies, and in the modern and postmodern imaginations. It is also linked intimately with practices and issues of human communication. This course provides a concentrated encounter with central currents in the philosophy of technology. Through close, critical reading and discussion of key primary texts, we will investigate the problem of technology as a core dimension of Western modernity. Emphasis will be placed on philosophic responses to the ontological, political and cultural dimensions of technological society, and the debates arising from these responses.

Requirements/Method of Evaluation:

Seminar participation - 25%
Seminar presentations (2) - 25%
Term Paper (5000-6500 words) - 50%

COMS 655: 鈥淢edia and the Senses: Affect Theory and Media Studies鈥� explores the relationship between historical structures of feeling, affective cultural resonances and the politics of sensation, and their media environments. To help us conceptualize and analyze these connections, we will be reading a selected group of texts in feminist, queer, postcolonial theories and cultural studies of affect and the constitutive role of emotions and feeling in social life, alongside some recent work in media studies that draws from these theoretical frameworks.

Theories of affect shift the focus in social and cultural theory from that of meaning making and the propositional work of language and representation toward the dimensions of movement, resonance and the 鈥渇elt鈥� in human life and our capacities for agency and collectivity. Our readings and discussion will reflect on this shift, and what it might get us as cultural critics, theorists and researchers. Questions of subjectivity, agency, embodiment, context, identification, and affiliation will orient many of our conversations in the seminar. In particular, we will consider how cultural theories of emotion and affect re-figure the focus on questions of identity toward other embodied models of social and political subjectivity and ways of conceiving of action and the labors of mediation that work outside and alongside those of identity.

Requirements/Method of Evaluation:

Weekly Short Writing Assignments [15%]
Seminar Paper Proposal [20%]
Discussion Facilitation [15%]
Final Seminar Paper [50%]

This course deals with cities and with the place of culture within urban life. Its main focus is on the ways in which various cultural forms may be seen as contributing to the 鈥渕ediality鈥� of urban life 鈥� that is, to the storing, transmission and processing of information and cultural expression. The main focus of the course will be Montreal, but we will be looking at other cities as points of comparison and dealing in a more general sense with cities and their culture.

Note that those taking this course include both graduate students (MA and Ph.D students in Communications and Art History) and advanced undergraduates within the Canadian Studies minor program. While I do not anticipate any problems arising from this variety of levels, I ask that everyone be respectful of other students in the class.

Requirements/Method of Evaluation:

Attendance and participation: 20%.
Reading 鈥渉ighlights鈥� exercise: 20%.
Team-Based Urban Site Analysis: 30%.
Final Essay: 30%.