PhD seminars

ARTH 805 Critical Examination of Artistic Context: Probing Peripherality: A workshop-seminar on para-academic methods

• Instructor: Dr. Rebecca Duclos

This workshop-seminar exposes and explores research methods that are not always associated with academic or scholarly analysis, but which predominate in everyday life and creative practice. What constructs have separated and hierarchized certain methods as “acceptable” over others in the academic sphere? As we probe this question we open ourselves up to ask: might intuition and improvisation be considered as methods? Is there a role for chance in research? What are bold forms of scholarly subjectivity? Are there other ways to find “voice” through experimental writing practices? As this is a hybrid workshop-seminar, we will not only read about and discuss a rich selection of these para-academic methods, but will actively try them out in practice together. We will investigate concepts and methods such as parataxis, unconscious scanning, digression, lucid dreaming, chance operations, improvisation, collective composition, dérive, détournement, and amanuensis. Participant presentations will be specifically directed at subjectively describing a method of choice that will be personally engaged, accompanied by a critical analysis of how the method “worked” and how it “worked upon” the participant. This analysis will intentionally draw from non-art world contexts such as neuroscience, psychology, poetry, philosophy, anthropology, ecology, urban studies, literary theory, library science, indigenous studies, etc, Students are encouraged to place their research questions and directions at the centre of this seminar but also to be open to workshopping their own and others’ ideas and approaches in an effort to unlock new realizations about ongoing projects.

ARTH 809 Theory and Methods of Art History: Sensory & Atmospheric Methods

• Instructor: Dr. May Chew

This seminar focuses on experimental and experiential methods mobilized by researchers, writers, and artists to grasp the ungraspable. Critical attunement to the realms of the sensory, affective, immersive, and atmospheric requires flexible, capacious, and interdisciplinary methods drawn from art history, media studies, critical theory, philosophy, and other fields. We first address how we think with and as bodies, while at the same time challenging dominant understandings of what a body is and can do. We will draw on theorists and practitioners who challenge theories predicated on Western-centric understandings of embodiment and subjectivity, and heed anticolonial theories urging for epistemic, sensory, and somatic realignments beyond colonial paradigms. From here, we will also turn to the growing field of affect and atmospheric studies which prods us to decenter the human and to attend to the porous terrain between bodies, environments, climate, emotions, and minds. Relatedly, we will explore how writers and artists approach that which might be termed “emergent sensibilities,” which have developed alongside targeted economies of attention and therapeutic management, and investigate how the latter continuously reshape our understandings of technology, embodiment, and agency. We will examine how the sensorial and atmospheric have also been understood as politically-laden terrains, paying attention to ways in which they are choreographed in institutional and commercial settings, and the everyday. An underlying thread of this course also probes what it means to be “moved” by aesthetic and sensorial encounters, and how such experiences can reaffirm or challenge bodily and subjective boundaries. This also calls for a study of how art can make space for diverse forms of embodiment and felt knowledges.