Sarah E. Lewis (Department of History of Art and Architecture and of African and African American Studies)
First-Year Seminar 62M (Spring Term) Enrollment: Limited to 12
Meeting Time TBD CANVAS SITE
How do images—photographs, films, videos—create narratives that shape our definition of national belonging? Social media has changed how we ingest images. Protests, state violence, racially-motivated injustice, natural disasters, grief and loss and triumph are all played out in photos and videos in real time unlike anything we thought possible just a few decades ago. Recently, an Executive Order targeted sculptures and monuments to “restore” history. The seminar will wrestle with the question of how the foundational right of representation in a democracy, the right to be recognized justly, is indelibly tied to the work of visual representation in the public realm.
The seminar is organized chronologically around case studies to explore the interplay between images and justice at inflection points in American history—emancipation, indigenous conflict, desegregation, Japanese internment, borderland conflict, the long Civil Rights movement, and more. We will consider what effective resistance looks like and how resistance has been documented and commemorated. The aim of this seminar is to develop rigorous skills of visual literacy and critical analysis foundational to being engaged global citizens, and to understand of the opportunities and challenges that technology is presenting to civic life. By the end of the seminar you should be able to argue how images have had persuasive efficacy in the context of social and racial justice movements, critically engage with and contextualize the narratives surrounding images posted online, and problematize our notion of the foundational right to representation in a democracy like the United States.