printer friendly pageURBANST 27Q: Sophomore Seminar: Three Detectives, Three Cities
This seminar will analyze the social reality of three historic cities (London in the 1880s and 90s, San Francisco in the 1920s and 30s, and contemporary Shanghai) through the prism of popular crime fiction featuring three great literary detectives (Arthur Conan Doyle¿s Sherlock Holmes, Dashiell Hammett¿s Sam Spade, and Qiu Xiaolong¿s Chief Inspector Chen). As a student in this course, you will explore why crime fiction is so popular, why the fear of crime is so much a part of modern urban culture, and why the police detective and the private investigator have become iconic code heroes of pulp fiction, movies, TV shows, and even video games. If you take this class, you will have the opportunity to write a paper and present your research on one of the classic literary detectives or on one of today¿s related manifestations of the same impulse in mass-market tales of superheroes, vampires, and the zombie apocalypse.
Terms: Win
| Units: 3
Instructors:
Stout, F. (PI)
URBANST 180Q: How to be Governed Otherwise: Art, Activism, and the City (ARTSINST 180Q, CEE 131Q)
This course will introduce you to contemporary art¿s engagement with political activism. This introduction will focus on the city as, at once, a field and target of activism¿a field of public appearance, artistic intervention, and political action, as well as a target of claims to residence, livelihood, recognition, justice, and collectivity. We will pose activist politics, artistic intervention, and urban space as mutually imbricated, each shaping the possibilities, programs, and histories of the other¿a perspective that offers insights into the spatiality, materiality, and visuality of political identity, agency, and action. Over the quarter, we will study some of the many artistic interventions that are encompassed by urban activism, from informal and everyday practices to protest, resistance, and occupation. Comparative case studies will be drawn from a global context. You will investigate these case studies through both research on urban activism and activist practice; the seminar will therefore invite you to explore the militant possibilities of research, the research possibilities of activism, and the implications of each for the production of art.
Terms: Win
| Units: 4
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
Instructors:
Herscher, A. (PI)
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