Art History 130- Seeing Race: Anti-Racism and Visual Culture is a new course being offered this upcoming spring 2023 term. This course fulfills ethnic studies, Comm B (optional), and humanities requirements.
Course Description: Confronting how images work to shape ways of seeing race, this introduction to visual cultures tracks how power works through the visual —from visual surveillance and racial profiling to anti-racist visual activism. The course trains critical understanding of the role of imaging in producing ways of seeing race in its intersections with gender, sexuality, and ability. Through critical consideration of the spectacle of racialized violence and the everyday micro-aggressions of the stereotype, the course addresses the ways that images harm. But it also considers how just representation may offer restitution and repair. It explores forms of anti-racist visual activism that seize the power to look back. And it questions the ethics of an assumed right to look and to take an image. In asking these imperative ethical and political questions about what images do, the course trains the critical capacity to harness and intervene in the powers of imaging.
As an introduction to the critical and intersectional study of race and ethnicity in visual culture that centers the way visual culture affects the circumstances, conditions, and experiences of marginalized racial and ethnic minorities, this course cultivates awareness of the history of how visual culture has shaped our present understanding of race. It cultivates an ability to recognize and question assumptions about how visual representation affects how we see racial and ethnic difference. It develops consciousness of self and other and particularly of forms of empathy. And, in the structuring of its assignments that critically analyze and intervene in real world examples from maps to memes and surveillance footage to statues, the course is dedicated to training effective participation in a multicultural society.
View more course information in Course Search & Enroll.
This post was authored by Academic Affairs on 11/04/2022.