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

CHME 6021 Advanced Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 4

Topics include principles, concepts, and laws/postulates of classical and statistical thermodynamics and their link to applications that require quantitative knowledge of thermodynamic properties from a macroscopic to a molecular level; basic postulates of classical thermodynamics and their application; criteria of stability and equilibria; constitutive property models of pure materials and mixtures, including molecular-level effects using statistical mechanics; equations of state; phase and chemical equilibria of multicomponent systems; and thermodynamics of polymers. Applications are emphasized through extensive problem work relating to practical cases. A project is required.

Prerequisites: Knowledge of general thermodynamics expected. 

Contact: Alex Devisscher

CHME 6081 Advanced Separation Processes

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 4

Topics include a review of basic chemical and mechanical separations; multicomponent separations; membrane separations; adsorption; chromatographic separations; and ion exchange. A project is required.

Contact: Alex Devisscher

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

ENGL 616 - “The World” of Eighteenth-century British Literature

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

“What is a World?” asks Pheng Cheah in the title to his 2016 book investigating the nature and politics of novelistic discourse. Yet his argument takes the canonical “rise of the novel” narrative for granted. So does Amitav Ghosh in his treatment of the limited capacity of the novel to represent climate change in The Great Derangement. Others have problematized the critical intersections of postcolonial, global, and environmental studies with the history of the novel as a genre and with literature more generally most notably Srivinas Aravamudan in Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel and Siraj Ahmed in The Archeology of Babel. In this course we will read three or four early novels and/or oriental tales that deal with “the world” including Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Beckford’s Vathek, to investigate what novel history (pace Aravamudan) and literary critical methods deriving from philology (pace Ahmed) can tell us about the world-making as it is currently construed.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

Contact: Marcie Frank

ENGL 662 - Digital Archives and Alternative Canadian Literatures 1750-1980

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

This course will introduce students to the use of digital resources as an important element of Canadian print culture studies. Beginning with a survey of Canadian print culture, including neglected periodicals and unexamined authorship, students will be invited to contribute to the opening of a Canadian studies with a wider focus than has been possible in the past. The course will present units on the print culture of the underground railway and the abolition movement, on sources for the study of early indigenous records and print, and on early women’s writing drawn from a spectrum of early Canadian communities. Canadian regional print sub-cultures and their predominant genres will also be considered.

Authors to be treated include Mary Ann Shadd, Henry Bibb, Laura Smith Haviland, George Copway, Orenhyatekha, Kahkewaquonaby, David Thompson, Anne Grenfell, and also figures drawn from the more standard history of Canadian literature, including Emily Pauline Johnson, Susanna Moodie, Catharine Parr Traill, Archibald Lampman, Charles Sangster, Marjorie Pickthall and Nellie McClung. This will be a very “hands on” course, and will invite consideration of the material-cultural implications of book history and semiotics. The final units of the course will extend this treatment to small press publishing and the “little magazine” and will be asked to consider the role of such publications in supporting communities of writers in Canada. In this context students will also examine the rise of Canadian modernism in the work of A. M. Klein, Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwoo.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

Contact: Daniel O'Leary

ENGL 665/800 A - Postcolonial Environmental Humanities

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

Environmental humanities can be broadly defined by its focus on cultural, political, and historical dimensions of climate change, resource extraction, and human/nonhuman relationality. Postcolonial studies has long been engaged in articulating transnational approaches to understanding the entanglement of nature and culture in the history of empire. Working primarily in the fields of world literature and postcolonial studies, scholars such as Edward Said and Rob Nixon have brought these areas of inquiry together, arguing that “because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through the imagination” (Said 1993). The entanglement of nature and culture is intensified in the present through the dramatic effects of human-induced climate change—or what is being referred to as the era of the Anthropocene. These activities are interwoven with the history of global networks established since the Industrial Revolution, as well as colonial empires, traders and capitalists. Theorizations of the Anthropocene within the humanities (Chakrabarty 2006; Haraway 2016; Latour 2017; Morton 2016; Moore 2015) foreground the global character of this history, and dovetail with postcolonial approaches to the study of the environment. Described by Nixon as “slow violence,” this kind of environmental change is “neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing across a range of temporal scales” (2011).

This course will examine how human/nonhuman relationality and representations of the environment are addressed in postcolonial writing. Through attention to writing about exploration, natural history, travel, eco- tourism, gardens, and memoirs of settlement, this course will investigate how colonial ways of knowing and perceiving the environment have contributed to the discourse of human ascendency over nature. In additional to postcolonial approaches to the environmental humanities (Glissant 1989; Pratt 1992; Mukherjee 2010; Nixon 2011; Carrigan 2011; DeLoughrey et al. 2015; Huggan et al. 2015), we will examine theorizations of the Anthropocene and the posthuman that foreground the global character of environmental history. We will ground these theoretical debates in discussions of literary works by writers such as Anita Desai, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Helon Habila, Jamaica Kincaid, and Arundhati Roy, Eden Robinson, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Indra Sinha.

Prerequisites: Priority will be given to PhD students in cognate disciplines and related research interests (Humanities, INDI, Communication Studies, History, Cinema, Art History, Religion Culture and Society). Admission to this course requires permission of the instructor.

Special instructions: Please contact Dr. Jill Didur with a statement of your interest and background in this area. Priority will be given to PhD students in cognate disciplines and related research interests (Humanities, INDI, Communication Studies, History, Cinema, Art History, Religion Culture and Society). Admission to this course requires permission of the instructor.

Contact: Andre Dubois

HUMA 887 - Social Semiotics and Discourse Analysis

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

This seminar will introduce students to some of the main traditions and practices in semiotics and discourse analysis. Students will engage with metatheoretical issues (such as theoretical influences across different traditions), as well as opportunities to apply different frameworks through concrete examples (e.g., semio-linguistic analysis, the circulation of visual signs, semiotic and the non-verbal, political discourse analysis). Specific topics to be covered may include: Saussurean semiotics; the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce; the notion of value and the sign as elaborated by Rossi-Landi and Ponzio; systemic functional grammar; the utterance (énonciation); studies in discourse and ideology; intertextuality; francophone discourse analysis (Pêcheux, Maldidier, Robin); the archeological tradition of Michel Foucault.

Prerequisites: Doctoral students only. This is an interdisciplinary course; doctoral students from all disciplines are welcome.

Contact: Anna Ramos

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 (2018, 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

RELI 6004 / 839A - Power & Religion in South Asia

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

This course examines the intersection of power and religion with a primary focus on early modern and contemporary South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka...). With a long history of religious pluralism and diversity, the region is home to Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, and Jews. Among the themes to be explored are: the religious undergirding of social hierarchies of gender, caste and race; religious ritual and power; pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial ideas of sovereignty and the state; “religious movements” and justice; and politics and religious identities. Many of these themes will be relevant to a broader analysis of religious dynamics and power relations, which students may wish to undertake, outside of the confines of this region.

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor.

Special instructions: Open to MA & PhD students.

Contact: Leslie Orr

RELI 823 - Historiography, Religion and Power

Offered: 2019 /2
Credits: 3

In this course, we will track three themes. We begin with a brief examination of the history of the disciplines of the History of Religions, and of Comparative Religion. This leads us to the second theme we will be concerned with: historiography. We will consider the character of the sources we can use for making histories, and the nature and value of different approaches to historical study, especially in terms of their value for elucidating religious change and processes of religious interaction. The third theme is an extended treatment of colonialism, globalization, post-colonialism, decoloniality, and secularism as elements in or perspectives on contemporary religions and cultures.

Prerequisites: Open to PhD students only, with approval of instructor.

Special instructions: Course of interest to students in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Contact: Leslie Orr

SOCI 650 - Media Sociology: Studies in Truth and Democracy

Offered: 2019 /1 
Credits: 3

The current political and media landscape has social scientists and pundits perplexed as to how to explain the tenacity of deeply opposing world views and truth claims threatening the stability of liberal democracies around the world. The course raises two kinds of questions for in depth discussion: 1. What are the diversity of approaches (political economy, field theory; cultural sociology, actor network theory; critical sociology; postructuralism, posthumanism) that study these divisions through media and crisis in politics and journalism (professional work culture, technology, aesthetic, discourse, organization, ideology). And 2. Have journalism, politics, and social science contributed in some way to the present divisiveness? Each of these disciplines (or interdisciplines) are first level observers of events, but each has a different interest in sources, constituents, and/or actors/actants as well as in the relations between fact, opinion, and truth. Does the existence of conflicting views represent a strength or weakness in social science? Will democratic politics survive the next internet? Is journalism a parasite of civil society, or on the front line of ‘resistance’ to power?

Special instructions: Priority will be given to graduate students in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. For all other students, registration is subject to permission of the course instructor (Greg Nielsen).

Contact: Greg Nielsen