Courses

Printmaking I: Texture

Painting III

In this course, students will focus on enhancing technical and critical skills through the development of individual themes and an independent studio practice. Studio work is complemented by discussion of pertinent topics in historical and contemporary painting. More about Tschabalala Self

Color Photography

An introduction to the problem of rethinking photographic picture making through the medium of color photography. This semester color photography will be explored using digital cameras and editing software.  No prints will be made in these courses.
More about Farah Al-Qasimi

Advanced Photography

To prepare the student for ongoing independent work, this course emphasizes the exploration of visual problems. At the heart of this exploration is asking good questions of oneself and one’s work, seeing how other photographers and artists in other media have dealt with such questions, and “answering” the questions for oneself through individual projects.
More about Farah Al-Qasimi

Photography and Ethics

This seminar provides an introduction to contemporary discourses on ethics and photography. Grounded in an expansive definition of photography, this course explores contemporary imaging technologies and circulation, from analog color photography to deep fakes, and from the flood of images on social media to white-cube galleries. This course, which will be predominantly discussion-led, pays close attention to the particular forms of violence that the medium of photography is proximate to, implemented in, and has the potential to reproduce. Our goal is to develop a nuanced understanding of the power dynamics inherent in representation, including: the development of imaging technologies as a form of reinforcing state violence and control; the role of the photograph in truth and human rights claims; the entangled imbalance between photographer, subject, and viewer; and how power imbalances fluctuate through intersections of race, class, gender, and ability. Artists and theorists considered include Ariella Azoulay, Allan Sekula, American Artist, Simone Browne, Susan Sontag, Harun Farocki, Renee Green. Through readings, case studies, guest speakers, group discussion, written assignments, and a final project, students should emerge from the course with a rigorous definition of photography and be able to situate their own creative practices within the ethical concerns of the medium, both discursively and in practice. The seminar will be led primarily by Natasha Matteson, Camila Palomino, and Candice Strongwater, of the Center for Curatorial Studies.

Advanced Acting: Challenging Contemporary Text

Concentrating on dramatic writing generated in the last 5 years, focusing on BIPOC and female playwrights, students will be challenged to refine their previous training to tell the story of a scene, create character, and explore how these connect through the lens of their unique Identity. Scene study and monologue work will be chosen specifically to address the personal and professional goals of each student in the group, and participants will hone their ability to recognize and meet the particular stylistic demands of contemporary dramatic text. Exploring the similarities and differences between acting for the theater and acting for film, this course will reinforce how to read and mine a text for “actor clues.”  This work, when coupled with one’s imagination and sense of self, heightens an actor’s ability to create. Prerequisite: Intermediate Acting: Scene Study. More about Bhavesh Patel

Adaptation: Deconstructing/Re-Constructing Shakespeare

Students will explore the concept of ensemble, rehearsal and story-telling in order to work together to mount a studio production of one of Shakespeare’s plays. The cohort will begin by exploring the text as actors, directors and dramaturgs in order to “unearth” an hour long cutting of the script. The second half of the course will be an accelerated rehearsal focusing on “telling the story” clearly and dynamically through the lens of our modern world. Students will be challenged to make compelling, informed choices and further understand how these actions and behaviors help tell the story of the role, scene, and script they are working on. Prerequisite: an introductory and an intermediate course in any area of theater making. More about Bhavesh Patel

Do It Together: An Introduction to Contemporary Alternative Curatorial Practices

This class focuses on the work of independent cultural initiatives actively working toward changing the direction and future of contemporary art and curatorial practice. We will focus on the unique ways that these contemporary independent art initiatives, specifically ones led by radical Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and queer organizers, enact and advocate for a more artist-centric, experimental, and equitable arts field. Students will be introduced to a range of non-commercial contemporary art organizations including alternative art spaces, publications, digital platforms, residencies, collectives, and independent organizers. Throughout this eight-week course, students will explore these models of experimental curatorial practice through weekly readings, short writing assignments, facilitated discussions, and guest speaker presentations. In the last few weeks, students will propose a collaborative public program or event working in close collaboration on the Center for Curatorial Studies thesis exhibitions with class instructors. This class is open to all students and levels and will be led by two graduate students at the Center for Curatorial Studies. 

Beyond Colonial Distinctions: Concerning Human – Non-Human Allyship

How might historically dehumanised communities stand in allyship with the non-human without experiencing further dehumanisation, and how does alter-life in turn stand in solidarity with us? This course attempts to grapple with the highly contentious meeting points between human rights, racialisation and non-human rights, considering how to forge allyship/allegiances between oppressed Black, indigenous and people of colour – so long denied human “status” across the “Western” world – and the alter-human without re-inscribing the violences of dehumanisation. Reading a range of Black Feminist, Decolonial, Queer Theory and Native Studies authors (Tiffany Lethabo King, Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing, Robin Wall-Kimmerer and M Jacqui Alexander etc.), as well as speculative authors, artists and activist collectives, together we will explore the newest and oldest forms of allyship we know: interspecies solidarity.  Drawing on the teachings of pecans, colonial fort gardens, and flooding military camps we will consider, in the words of Eyal Weizman, how the landscape stands against the state, and how we might in turn stand with – or “become with” to think with Donna Haraway – the landscape. Further, how can think/stand/become-with the very landscape and alter-life beings upon whose non-human status (Black, indigenous and people of colour included), the white-supremacist capitalist world we now call home was built? Finally, how can and do BIPOC-led strategies and movements for climate justice both acknowledge and move beyond systems of colonial distinction that determine which life has value and why within our co-dependent ecosystem? Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is the Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism for 2020-21. More about Ama Josephine B. Johnstone

Queer EcoPoetics: Sentience, Aesthetics and Blackness

This is an interdisciplinary seminar drawing on fields of Visual Cultures, Black studies, Science Fiction, Cultural Studies, Curatorial, Queer and Feminist Theory as well as environmental justice and artistic ecological interventionist work. Collectively the course aims to equip students with a critical praxis toward the curating/producing/caring work that engages race, gender, colonialism, class and disability justice in the face of drastic environmental change and its reverberations across the cultural sector. This course works across multiple mediums with the aim to engage not only multiple learning styles but to equip students to think, write, analyse and curate interdisciplinarily and intersectionally, thinking their politic through from material sourcing, to collaboration work, marketing, art writing and the gallery as a transient space for practicing alternative modes of being and imagining climate-changed futures. Students are asked to attend weekly film screenings and several exhibitions (COVID-dependent), participate in short weekly writing tasks, present at least once in the term and dialogue with the course itself by contributing material to our extended reading/viewing list alongside the standard two-three weekly readings.  The course structure covers a range of concepts from across visual arts, performance, film, environmental justice, ecological policy, curatorial theory, art writing and more including: EcoPoetics, climate justice, climate colonialism, decolonial visual cultures, pleasure activism, the anthropocene, speculative fiction/fabulation, cyber-punk, EcoPoethics, sentience/animacy, afrofuturism, intimate ecologies and multispecies justice. Ama Josephine B. Johnstone is the Keith Haring Fellow in Art and Activism for 2020-21. More about Ama Josephine B. Johnstone

Disability Rights, Chronic Life

This seminar engages with disability studies, queer theory, architectural and design history, political ecology, and histories of radical organizing and mobilization that focus on the idea and experience of disability and sickness. In traversing these materials, this seminar aims to to ask: rather than seeing disability and sickness simply as a limitation or failure to reach a “healthy” norm, what can the experience and often hidden histories of the disabled and chronically ill, as well as those who fight for their care, reveal about social structures, ideologies, and patterns of circulation that cannot be seen otherwise? What would it mean to move beyond the political and ideological centrality of the idea of health and to instead understand the way that it can function to normalize racialized and gendered structures of exclusion and privation? And what models of care, collectivity, flexibility, and access have been, and might be posed, against this, through the speculative work of chronic theorists and disability justice advocates and through hard-fought campaigns and daily ad hoc solutions alike? In addition to grappling with a range of historical and theoretical texts, we’ll also center on artistic, political, and critical tactics that work to draw out those hidden causes and the roles that conceptions of health, hygiene, and security play in reinforcing models of restricted access and normalized violence. More about Evan Calder Williams

Melancholia as Critical Practice

How to fathom with the unfathomable? With the ongoing catastrophe, that is, the aftermath of excess- the systematic erasure of peoples, histories, and knowledges based on enlightenment philosophical centering of the white male subject and its subsequent establishment of the capitalist exploitation of people, their land and ongoing death? Although publicly marginal to the ongoing movement for Black Live these questions are always central for the mattering of Black survival accompanied by deep sadness, mourning and loss not just for the past but also for potential futures; they remain and create the foundation from which one moves through the world, that make it possible to survive. The Triad of loss, mourning, and sadness brings me to embrace what I call Black Melancholia understood as critical practice. 

Based on Simon Gikandi’s book Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2010) this seminar proposes Melancholia as a critical practice for producing, looking at and inquiring artistic and curatorial work. We will first establish a critical understanding why Melancholia is a fruitful concept in Black Studies and secondly transdisciplinary explore different concepts of Melancholia in art history, psychoanalysis, Film, Visual Culture and Cultural Studies. Melancholia as a critical practice involved close readings against the grain, engaged looking and discussing artworks and exhibitions. Learn More about Nana Adusei-Poku

Race and the Animal

ANTH 291; Crosslisted with Africana Studies; American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights
This course explores questions of animality central to the production of race. Racialization is a process grounded in dehumanization and animalization; shifting the human-animal boundary acts as a powerful tool in subjugation. At the same time, animal bodies are routinely used as vehicles for consolidating authority and reproducing racialized hierarchies. We will examine these connections between race and the animal across a broad range of historical and contemporary contexts. In the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, colonizers in southern Africa relegated certain groups of people to the category of “˜vermin,’ thus authorizing their systematic extermination. White supremacist states, moreover, have long relied upon the use of canine repression in anti-black violence, from enforcing institutions of slavery to suppressing civil disobedience in anti-apartheid struggles. In more recent years, controversies over animal practices in the United States, such as Makah whaling and live animal markets in Chinatown, have worked to sustain racial hegemonies by challenging not only the rights, but also the ontological status, of nonwhite citizens. Inciting equally troubling debates around questions of ontology, animal welfare groups such as PETA over the past decade have cast animals in zoos and marine parks as victims of a modern-day slave trade, explicitly juxtaposing animality with blackness. Through each of these cases and others, we will aim to understand how the human-animal divide is employed to institutionalize and naturalize racial inequality and injustice. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Anthropology for Decolonization

ANTH 292; Crosslisted with Africana Studies; Asian Studies; Global & International Studies
The pandemic and the protests against racism and police brutality have brought the historical, cultural, and systemic sources of these issues into sharp relief. The course will address racial injustice by locating it within the historical and global processes of colonialism. By drawing out the scope of the issue and its interconnections, we hope to understand better the local and international solidarities required to address it. Indeed, Black liberationist leaders from W.E.B. Dubois to Stokeley Carmichael, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and Angela Davis have articulated the demand for racial justice against a global canvas, and in ways that underlined its continuity with the anti-colonial movements of their day. They saw a fundamental continuity between militarism and racialized carceral practice abroad and at home, and were inspired by Afro-Asian decolonization and the vision of a decolonized world order articulated by the Bandung Conference. In recent months the apparatus of global counterinsurgency and the paramilitary arm of border patrol have been mobilized against protesters on the streets of Washington DC and Portland. There has long been a reciprocal, mutually constitutive relationship between regimes of territorial expansion, slaveholding, and the elimination of indigenous peoples on the North American continent and overseas. Taking an anthropological approach, and suspending the dichotomy between foreign and domestic belied by an ever-expanding frontier, the course will examine the protracted, structuring effects of racialised practices of warfare, colonial administration, and exploitation on the US Mainland and in its overseas colonies, territories, protectorates, and bases in the Pacific, East Asia, and the Caribbean. We will study empire not only as a historical and now global imperative of hegemony but as a set of formations structuring the experience and lifeworlds of its subjects through practices and technologies of social control such as policing, schools, prisons, camps, reservations and border control. We will also examine the persistence and recurrence of notions of white supremacy and exceptionalism in multiple contexts as we seek postcolonial ethnographic perspectives on racial injustice. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Race and the Museum

ARTH279; Crosslisted with Africana Studies; Human Rights
In April 2018, “Decolonize this Place” issued a letter calling for the Brooklyn Museum to form a Decolonization Commission “that would address deeply rooted injustices pertaining to the museum.” Injustices would include “the colonial history of the museum’s non-western holdings, the lack of diversity among its curatorial staff and executive leadership, the fact that the museum’s buildings sit on stolen land, and the museum’s role as an agent of gentrification in Brooklyn, which has been a long-standing grievance of community groups.”  In a different public letter, Brooklyn Museum Director Anne Pasternak noted that art museums, although “founded on the fundamental belief that the sharing of world cultures would lead to greater understanding and empathy” have also “privileged Western white narratives while often diminishing the histories of others.” In this eight-week colloquium, we will take our inspiration from the points of view and tensions expressed in these letters, and hear from a variety of curators, critics, and academics about how museums might develop new narratives (particularly about race) as they re-visit and deconstruct the old. Course work will include responding to visitor lectures, short papers, and a final project. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

The Right to Employment

ECON 227; Crosslisted with Africana Studies; American Studies; Environmental & Urban Studies; Human Rights; Sociology
In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned, “People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” Today, the COVID-19 crisis and mass unemployment have once again exposed the pervasive pathologies in the economy, such as inequality, poverty, and discrimination that reproduce systemic racial, gender and environmental injustice. Roosevelt responded to the economic calamity of his time—the Great Depression—with far-reaching economic policies and an appeal for what he called a Second (Economic) Bill of Rights that led with the right to decent and remunerative employment. “Jobs for All” was a signature demand during the Civil Rights era, when Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King insisted that unemployment is a key force for racial subjugation. Today, the Job Guarantee has been called perhaps the most crucial component of the Green New Deal Resolution, a program that ensures a just transition for all workers and an antidote to systemic racial and gender discrimination that emerges from labor markets.  This interdisciplinary course traces the history of the struggle to secure the right to employment for  all. It will focus on the economic, legal, and policy developments in the United States, and will introduce students to some international policy initiatives and innovative programs. A key question for discussion is whether these proposals and concrete policies have advanced the goal of equity and economic justice. Students will read legislative documents, economic analyses, policy proposals, and program reviews. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Seminar in the Economics of Discrimination

ECON 338; Crosslisted with Gender and Sexuality Studies 
Many economists believe that markets are a relatively effective mechanism for coordinating wants and desires among members of society. Nevertheless we observe differences in economic outcomes for different groups of society. In this course we will explore the process through which differences in earnings manifest as well as the impact of these differences on wealth and well-being.  We pay particular attention to the role of discrimination in generating unequal outcomes in labor markets.  We will study discrimination with standard neo-classical approaches as well as through the analytical approaches of various schools of political economy including feminist, institutionalist, and Marxist.  We will discuss equality of economic opportunity and economic outcomes across, as well as relevant public policies for race, class, gender, sex and sexual orientation. Prerequisite: ECON 100 This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Air

EUS 222; Crosslisted with Architecture and Biology
Recent global catastrophes including the Covid19 pandemic and unusually destructive wildfires have highlighted the importance of equitable access to clean air in human and ecological health. While air is the fluid humans engage with most intimately, we are not generally aware of whether or not the air we are interacting with is “clean.” Environmental racism in the US has resulted in an inequitable distribution of clean air, which has in turn given birth to the powerful movement for environmental justice. This class will be devoted to learning the scientific principles behind measuring and managing air quality on a local, regional, and global scale. We will be interacting with other Bard (OSUN) network institutions to think cross-disciplinarily and cross-nationally about the global nature of air “management” and to creatively address the scientific needs of local and regional community members working toward reducing air pollution. Lab work will be guided by scientific questions generated by communities including Kingston, NY and Bishkek, Kyrgysztan.  Specifically, students will manipulate models to conduct field sampling, and utilize microbiological and chemical assays in the lab to better understand sources for and tracking of contaminants in air and the implications for people breathing that air. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Crusading for Justice: On Gender, Sexuality, Racial Violence, Media & Rights

HIST 210; Crosslisted with Africana Studies; American Studies; Gender and Sexuality Studies; Human Rights
This course focuses on the activism of journalist Ida B. Wells, daughter of two American slaves. Her campaign against lynching in the late 19th- and early 20th-century continues to complicate understandings of how and why black bodies are raced. She exposes lynching as state-sanctioned, extra-legal violence against black men and women. She challenges the legal double standards that erase the victimization of black women and the sexual agency of white women. In doing so, she put her life and livelihood on the line. In Wells’ work, we see the matrix of more than a century of black feminist thought, critical race theory, and civil and human rights activism. With articles on New Orleans and East Saint Louis that address violence against the police as well as police use of excessive force, her work speaks urgently of the contemporary American predicament to which the Black Lives Matters movement responds. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Black Modernisms

HIST 2271; Crosslisted with Africana Studies; French Studies; Human Rights
This course is a grounding in the foundational literature of 20th-century anti-colonial and post-colonial thought as they buttressed, abraded, or rejected prevailing notions of the modern. It is an intellectual history exploring African diasporic political and social movements from revolutionary and anti-colonial resistance to pan-Africanism and négritude. Theorizations of diaspora and exilic identities emerged in tension with the contemporary understanding of national identity, where birthplace, homeland, natal language, and loss became rival terms in the struggle for territorial- and self-sovereignty. By focusing on the francophone world, students will follow developments in Paris, Marseilles, Saint Domingue/Haiti, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Senegal enabling them to assess heterogeneous responses to a single imperial framework. We read across genres: history by C.L.R. James, poetry of Aimé Césaire and Léon Damas, journalism by Paulette and Jane Nardal, essays of Léopold Senghor and Suzanne Césaire, psycho-social theories of race and revolution by Frantz Fanon, and the fiction of Maryse Condé. We will frame readings of this primary literature with more recent conceptualizations of the French Atlantic, the black-Atlantic, -Caribbean, and -diaspora. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Race, Health and Inequality: A Global Perspective

HR 104; Crosslisted with Global & International Studies
The COVID-19 pandemic has put a spotlight on the fact that long-standing systemic health and social inequities have put many people from racial minority groups at increased risk of getting sick and dying from disease. This course will explore the causes and consequences of racial and ethnic health inequities and examine the history of how different countries have responded to these inequities. We will examine how racism, colonialism, segregation and globalization impact the health of incarcerated populations and the health of various immigrant groups. This course will also explore how various populations around the world respond and adapt to new outbreaks of disease and illness, along with the factors that limit the effectiveness of these responses. We will also look to the future and examine how community-based activism and large-scale social movements could move countries closer to achieving health equity. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Civil Rights Meets Human Rights

HR 189; Crosslisted with Africana Studies; American Studies; Political Studies
For much of the 20th century, Civil Rights activists and Human Rights advocates worked hand-in-hand. Their shared target: state actors and global systems that exploited human bodies and denied human dignity in the name of prejudice, nationalism and profit. Yet in the 1960s, a new wave of social movements representing Black, Feminist, LGBTQ, Chicano, Indigenous and Disabled perspectives shattered this consensus, demanding an identity-based approach to civil rights advocacy and pushing against notions of universal human rights. This seminar will introduce students to the history of this conflict, and allow them to explore for themselves the benefits and/or costs of advocating for social justice through the figure of “the human” or through the filter of identity. Students will be introduced to the foundational writings of identity-based movement leaders, with an eye for their applicability to contemporary struggles over immigration, anti-trans violence, mass incarceration and police violence. We will consider the relative efficacy of direct action, lawsuits, media campaigns and civil disobedience. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Law of Police

HR 264; Crosslisted with Sociology
Recent events have challenged the status and role of police, highlighting persistent problems of abuse – particularly against African Americans – and our historic failure to address them. At the same time, the movement to reform the police faces powerful countervailing political, economic and legal forces. Law defines the power of the police and its limits, but critics of the left and right show how the law fails to account for the reality or cover the full range of a police action. Can you walk away from the policeman who stops you on the street? You may have a Constitutional right, but other laws that insulate the police may prevent you from ever exercising that right. This course will explore the laws that have empowered police, those that have attempted to limit them and limits of the law, itself, in theory and practice. The theoretical readings include writings by Louis Althusser and Georgio Agamben, as well as others who have engaged their theories. We will also read works by sociologists, criminologists and legal scholars, including Loic Wacquant, William Stuntz and Egon Bittner. After the theoretical and historical exploration of the material, the class will focus on several themes including: street encounters, search and seizure, accountability for abuses, the role of the federal government, policing immigrants, racism and other challenges of Black Lives Matter. The course material will include video and audio of police encounters as well as court decisions, contemporary legal analyses and work of advocacy organizations confronting police. This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.

Solidarity as Worldmaking

MES 301
The conventional narrative of anticolonial self-determination has often been quick to dismiss radical insurgencies as merely nationalist struggles, focused primarily on nation-building. However, recent scholarship on decolonial movements across the Global South suggests that such an approach has obscured the expansive vision and ambitions of anti-colonial thinkers and statesmen who sought to both critique and reimagine the existent world order. Decolonization therefore emerges as nothing less than an attempt at global redistribution so as to transform post-imperial realities and possibilities. In this seminar, we will examine resistance and liberation struggles—in Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, and Palestine—that shaped processes of decolonization in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Focus will be on the platforms that developed throughout the 1950s and 1960s, such as the Bandung and Tricontinental Conferences, as well as the formation of a range of cultural and artistic associations and publications including Lotus, Souffles, and Black Phoenix. We will consider the disciplinary and methodological stakes of producing scholarship that both engages with and participates in global solidarities. While centering on the movements originating in the mid-twentieth century, we will also reflect on contemporary movements that build on this history in their own internationalist worldmaking. All readings will be in English. This course fulfills the MES Junior Seminar and is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond. This course is part of the World Literature course offering.