ARTH 801/4 Somewhere Between Local and Global

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

It is a commonplace that nationalism as a suitable companion or container for art has been under review since the relationship first developed, neither “nation” nor “art” being particularly precise, transparent, or stable, concepts and both, as rallying points, being highly susceptible to, and productive of, propaganda and economic opportunity. Any drift in global politics, economics, or technology causes ripples in cultural activity; the seismic shifts since 1989 have had their effects as artists and art historians – citizens after all – have been struggling to redefine their fields of operation.

But if national art history is headed for the junkyard, its replacement has not yet arrived. A productive uncertainty prevails. The global project is periodically announced and maintained by interim solutions of reorientation and classification that never quite pan out. Both hegemonic history and counterhistory are in trouble, as Terry Smith justly observes: “Globalization has recently reached the limits of its hegemonic ambitions yet remains powerful in many domains. The decolonized have yet to transform the world in their image” (“The State of Art History,” Art Bulletin, December 2010, 379). Almost a decade later, and we are still just getting started. Words matter, and any convenient shortcuts threaten to perpetuate prejudicial divisions. “The first thing,” said Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her 2017 keynote at the AICA (Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art) Congress in Paris, “The first thing is to stop thinking non-European.” Art history’s historiographical literature is shot through with speculation and paradox, which keeps the discussion lively, if sometimes disconnected. The big thinking that should be compatible with world-making sometimes falters before the scariness of the endgame – the prospect that real change, affecting more than curriculum and curatorial units, is taking place.

This seminar addresses the ongoing intra- and interdisciplinary debates over the legitimacy and function of national art histories, in relation to three factors: globalization, disciplinary redefinition, and methodological restlessness. It will make use of an edited collection, Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World (2017) to extract and critically analyze the contributors’ methodologies, as applied to Canada, Egypt, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Romania, Scotland, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the so-called art cities, including Cairo, Dubai, New York, and Vancouver. These readings and other sources are intended to help members of the seminar to position their own research.

The “unfinished world” figured in the title of Narratives Unfolding is a plural concept: it captures the microscopic unit that is the field of art history today, as well as the macrocosm, a set of supranational conditions that elevate certain events of cultural practice, while abstracting them from place and time. On this phenomenon, we will pause and reflect, for however broad our perspectives, each of us is positioned “somewhere” between local and global, between the centre (as sensed) and all points imaginable. This seminar can be useful to any emerging art historian who wants to be reflexive about their place in the field, and in the world at large.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students in the inter-university PhD program in Art History. 

Contact: Kristina Huneault

GDBA 531 Professional Business Skills

Offered: 2019 /2 /3
Credits: 3

This course provides students with the necessary skills that help with successful interaction with others in business settings. Topics include designing and delivering effective written and oral messages from concept to delivery, working in groups, and negotiating and resolving conflict by using ethical communication tactics. Pedagogical methods include group-based work, in-class workshops, case studies, presentations and report writing.

Prerequisites: Must possess an undergraduate degree in any field.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students admitted to GDBA, GCBA, GCQBS, and GCE. 

Contact: Karen Fada

DART 631 Interaction Design: Theories (& Practices) of Interactivity

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

Interaction Design: Theories of Interactivity, (alternately it could be called: Theories (& Practices) of Interactivity) students are introduced to philosophies, values, methods, and techniques that inform the broad discipline of interaction design, for the purpose of developing digital things that are designed with specific audiences in mind. In tandem with theoretical explorations, DART 631 invites students to reflect on designing with and for humans, with and through computational technology. Students will be introduced to basic programming, data visualization, and physical computing in a language and modality chosen by instructor, and encouraged to produce prototypes.

Contact: Angela Enea

ENGL 603 - Media Archaeology: Inscription Media edition

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

What is media archaeology? As Jussi Parikka describes, it is a subfield of media history that scrutinizes contemporary media culture through investigations of past media technologies and creative media practices. Media archaeology takes a special interest in recondite and forgotten apparatuses, practices and inventions. At an historical moment when our own media technologies become obsolete with increasing rapidity, the study of residual forms and practices provides valuable context for analysis, and perhaps the possibility for the emergence of something new.

This course deals with the theory, current practice, and possible trajectories of media archaeology as a discipline. Our chief resource will be the research collection of the new Residual Media Depot of the Media History Research Centre at the Milieux Institute. Work will consist of a mix of writing, thinking, talking, and hands-on encounters with materials from the collection, according to student skills and interests.

This course has been taught twice as an intensive one-week graduate course for the Concordia International Summer Schools -- in 2016, as the pilot for the Summer Schools program itself, and again in 2017. It has been extremely successful on a global scale, drawing students from countries including Canada, China, Sweden, Finland, Spain, Mexico and the USA. For the first time, I am proposing to run it as a full-semester course in winter 2020, and I expect a large cohort of students from departments across Concordia and elsewhere.

I run this course on a "flipped" model, meeting one per week in a 3-hour block. A large amount of additional critical discussion will take place on the class website (see residualmedia.net) in the form of weekly individual blog posts that help to structure conversation.

The first hour each week follows a seminar model. We will make frequent use of breakout groups of various kinds, concept mapping and. In order to provide further context, all seminar members will also spend time locating media examples for in-class screenings in order to provide further contextual information.

The remaining two hours each week consists of work time for an individual or collective project in applied media archaeology. Students must propose their project after the second week of the course. Students will have access to the Depot collection, some support from Research Assistants, plus any other necessary supplies that Milieux can provide (after a student is accepted, the instructors will determine what we can supply and what students will have to supply themselves). Students will also be able to book additional work time on the Depot, according to the availability of my Research Assistants each week.

Projects might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• visual studies of the collection’s hardware
• readings of boxes, manuals and other textual materials
• platform studies of individual consoles in the collection
• media archaeologies, genealogies or geologies of particular consoles
• software studies of particular programs supported by the Depot’s machines
• modding of a particular console (either supplied by the student or purchased for them to work on while here)
• experiments with the Depot's upscaling and signal processing equipment and displays - fieldwork (e.g. a trip to the old Coleco factory, which is now an office loft, or trips to local retro stores, or arcades)
• white papers on the use of particular equipment in the Depot (e.g. how to set up RF consoles like the Atari 2600 or 5200 for classroom use)
• databasing the Depot collection (now underway)
• use the collection to test media-archaeological theory against real technology
• build an emulator, like a Retropie
• build an upscaler
• do some online bibliographic work around retro media collections, archives and labs Students will have access to a full range of Milieux workspaces and equipment during this period.

Readings will be circulated before the course begins. All seminar participants will arrive having completed the readings in advance. The readings themselves will consist in part of major texts from media archaeology, material media studies, cultural technique theory and articulation theory, and in part of new work that the instructors are preparing.

This particular session of the course will focus on inscription media -- forms of analog media that are created as one physical process leaves a trace on the other (e.g. handwriting, typewriting, phonography, film-based photography, etc.). In addition to providing literary graduate students with a much-needed introduction to material media theory, it will provide them with an introduction to media-archaeological methodology and history, paying particular attention to the field's historical relationship to literary studies. (Key authors on the syllabus may include, but are not limited to, Nathan Altice, Wendy Chun, Wolfgang Ernst, Lisa Gitelman, John Guillory, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stuart Hall, Friedrich Kittler, Eric Kluitenberg, Carolyn Marvin, Shannon Mattern, Jussi Parikka, Bernhard Siegert, Vanessa Schwartz, Jonathan Sterne, Cornelia Vissmann, Raymond Williams, etc.).

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

Contact: Andre Dubois

ENGL 608 - Protocol, Hierarchy, the Virtual, Code: Medievalism in Digital Culture

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

This course studies the afterlife of medieval literary and cultural forms in digital media through an analysis of four key words. Since the twelfth century, “protocol” has evolved from the name for an authenticating portion of an official papyrus record into a name for predefined strategies for making choices in response to contingent circumstances. “Hierarchy,” a name for angelic and ecclesiastic orders first attested in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius, became both a structural logic for databases and a derogatory term for unequal distributions of power. “Virtual” is a post-classical, scholastic adjectival form of virtus (“virtue”), which carries forward this term’s gendered connotations of “manliness” into its framing of ideal potentiality. Finally, “code” is a term whose English use derives ultimately from the corpus iuris civilis of Roman law, a text whose monolithic value hearkens back to the original root of Latin codex in caudex: not only the stump of a tree, but a large block of wood attached to the feet of slaves as a form of punishment. The semantic range of caudex / “code”—running from mute, material marker of abjection to a rule-based but theoretically limitless path to virtual freedom—nicely encapsulates the larger contradiction that these keywords each reveal, and that the medievalism of digital media serves to express.

To trace the history of these words and concepts, this course course will pair theoretical readings by Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari with studies of primary evidence taken from medieval historical documents and philosophical texts, and from contemporary digital media and media studies scholarship. Each keyword will be paired with an analysis of a text from that key literary tradition and narrative structure, the grail quest: “protocol” will be paired with Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du graal, “hierarchy” with the selections from Malory’s Morte d’Artur concerning the Round Table, the “virtual” with Phil K. Dick’s Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ursula Leguin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and “code” with the adventure game Skyrim and its mods.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

Contact: Stephen Yeager

MSCA 672-B / ADMI 832-B Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

This seminar style course is designed to familiarize students with the philosophy and method of qualitative research. It aims to cultivate skills to develop relevant and feasible research questions and carry out tasks to tackle these questions. Beyond scholarly research, the course will also cover applied uses of qualitative methods. Other topics to be covered are research ethics in qualitative methods, research project management, online data, presenting research findings, data collection aids, and multi-method inquiry. The seminar aims to address the needs for MSc and PhD students in Marketing who seek to utilize qualitative methods in their research projects or theses, and incorporate these methods in their future teaching. It is also valuable for graduate students from other departments who would like to incorporate qualitative research training to their studies.

Contact: Maria Dolores Mosquera

MAST 679-H Topics/Stats & Probability: Statistical Learning

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

This course is an introduction to statistical learning techniques, which is a subdomain of machine learning. Topics covered include:

• Cross-validation
• Regression methods (Linear models, Variable selection, Shrinkage)
• Classification methods (K-nearest neighbors, Linear and quadratic discriminants, Logistic regression, Support vector machines)
• Decision trees
• Unsupervised learning (Clustering, Principal component analysis)
• Neural networks.
  

Prerequisites: 

• Linear Regression
• Elementary linear algebra
• Elementary calculus
• A first course in probability
  

Contact: Frédéric Godin

FMST 801 Epistemology of the Film and Media Archive

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

The objective of the course is to explore the changing role of the archive in audio-visual culture, as it intersects with a wide range of media technologies and emergent histories. What kind of knowledge is produced by different kinds of archives, and how does that knowledge shift with changes in media and technologies of storage and access? How have archives served (or not served) different constituencies in Canada and globally? How are archives funded and supported and how does that support influence the kinds of knowledge, research, and historiography thereby produced?

The class will include weekly readings and screenings with which students will be expected to engage critically. Students will be asked to identify an existing archive, and produce a critical analysis of that archive based on research questions developed in class from the assigned readings. An alternative assignment is to produce a work of media archiveology, for those students who have the appropriate media-making skills, in which they will use film extracts in order to analyze a specific archive—again using research questions developed from course readings.

The course will also lead towards a symposium in Spring 2020 involving researchers affiliated with the Archive/Counter Archive Research consortium. Students in the class will be involved in the planning of the conference and will be invited to participate.

Prerequisites: Prerequisite for students not enrolled in the PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies program: enrollment in a doctoral program; previous courses in film and/or media studies; permission from the Instructor.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students in the PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies Program. Students in other doctoral programs should email the instructor Catherine Russell for permission to register with a copy to the Graduate Program Assistant. Please explain your interest in the course and relevant background in your email.

Contact: Catherine Russell

FMST 635 / 835 Queer of Colour Film and Media 

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

This seminar explores the formation and circulation of the category of queer of color and its relatives—such as queer diaspora and queer Indigeneity—and their significance for studying film and media. We will consider the separate but related genealogies of these terms, as we historicize the category of “queer” vis-à-vis frameworks such as diaspora, blackness, settler colonialism, indigeneity, and postcolonialism. Of especial interest will be how queer of color audiences and mediamakers have responded to hegemonic constructions of race, gender and sexuality through practices of critical spectatorship and production. Film and media to be examined include works by Kent Monkman, Cheryl Dunye, Dee Rees, Paul Wong, Thirza Cuthand, Isaac Julien, Pratibha Parmar, Aurora Guerrero, Adam Garnet Jones and Vivek Shraya.

Special instructions: Priority will be given to students in MA Film Studies and PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies Programs. Students in other Master's and doctoral programs should email the instructor Dr. Beenash Jafri for permission to register, with a copy to the Graduate Program Assistant. Please explain your interest in the course and relevant background in your email. 

Contact: Beenash Jafri

Note: Priority will be given to students in the Political Science PhD and MPPPA programs. Interested students must obtain permission to enroll from the professor.

POLI 683/POLI 815 - Democratic Governance, Public Policy & Research Methodology

Offered: Summer, Fall, Winter (2019)
Credits: 3

This course provides a unique opportunity for students to take a selection of the Workshops on Social Science Research (WSSR) offered by the Department of Political Science for credit.

The WSSR are intensive short learning experiences designed to enhance your knowledge and skills in the areas of democratic governance and public policy. These workshops are led by highly reputable and insightful guest lecturers from well-known academic institutions and/or well-qualified and distinguished backgrounds. For this course, you must select, register in, and attend six workshops, as well as complete all the requirements listed in this outline below.

Prerequisites: Graduate students from all faculties are welcome to take the WSSR for credit. Be sure to consult with your Graduate Program Director (GPD) in order to confirm that you are eligible to receive credit toward your degree. Please email confirmation of eligibility from your GPD to wssr@concordia.ca once you have completed and submitted your "Permission Request" form (see below). See a list of Concordia GPDs and GPAs.

Special instructions:

• To apply for permission to register for this course, students need to complete the Permission Request Form on the website.
• To earn credit for this course, students will select, register in, and attend six days-worth of workshops (9:00am-4:30pm). The listing of workshops can be found on the website.
• For information about how the course works, download the course outline.

PSYC 734 - Multivariate Statistics (aka Latent Variable Modelling)

Offered: 2020 /4
Credits: 3

This course covers the analysis of continuous and categorical latent variable based on continuous and categorical indicators, taking into account the nesting of information units within individuals (longitudinal) and groups (multilevels). As such, we will cover: Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), Path Analysis, Mediation, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), Exploratory and Bifactor SEM, Multi-group analyses and tests of measurement invariance, Moderation, Autoregressive cross lagged models, Latent change models, Latent curve models, multilevel analyses, and doubly latent multilevel analyses. Emphasized for these topics are the correct estimation of models, the correct interpretations of the results, and the ability to pursue autonomous learning thereafter.

See the 2019 course outline. The 2020 version will follow the same sequence.

Prerequisites: PSYC 601 (or any equivalent graduate class in statistics covering the basics of analysis of variance, correlation and regression, and hypothesis testing).

Special instructions: Priority will be given to psychology students. Students from other departments should first contact the instructor to make sure that they meet the prerequisites.

Contact: Alexandre Morin