Course Description

Course List

FIMS 9608A-001 (Fall 2022)   Ways of Seeing, Ways of Listening

Instructor: S. Sliwinski

Course Description
The title of this course is a nod to John Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing, a project that took shape both as a book and a television series. Turning away from conventional art criticism, Berger joined a generation of thinkers, artists, and activists who interrogated our conventional understandings of seeing and knowing. This generation opened up important questions about the gendered, racialized, and sexualized dimensions of the human gaze, as well as the performative dimensions of representation, the influence of capital, and the connection between looking and listening. In short, this generation of thinkers inspired a broad investigation of human relationality through the politics of regard. 
This course tracks this intellectual and creative trajectory, treating our various ways of seeing and listening as relational ontology characterized by exposure and the vulnerability of an incarnated self for whom the other’s attention is necessary. We will regard vision and listening as a historical processes—both individual and social—which, paradoxically, depend on being seen and heard. Here the classical formation of the subject is displaced by an understanding of the self as radically dependent on the other.

Course Syllabi for FIMS 9608A-001 (Fall 2022)
The syllabi for this course is a PDF file that requires a FIMS account to view

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