ARC 342R, ARC 388R, AMS 391, CRP 382C, LAR 380Q
Mon 9:00AM-12:00PM, PAR 101
Instructor: Bryan Norwood
This seminar aims to think carefully about how our bodies engage with the built environment. Through theoretical and historical texts, we will consider the lived experience of subjects and how subjects are governed and guided by their built worlds. We will read from both phenomenology and biopolitics, drawing on accounts of embodiment and accounts of the control of bodies. Beginning from the simple premise that bodies and embodiments are not the same, a particular aim will be to attend to the ways differences in race, gender, class, and ability shape our engagements with the built environment.
This seminar will be structured around a series of multi-week engagements with singular texts, interspersed with shorter texts. That is, we will read three books carefully: Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi’s Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement. We will contextualize and expand on these three books through select additional texts from authors such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Sylvia Wynter, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Saidiya V. Hartman, Sunaura Taylor, and Katherine McKittrick. This seminar will focus on collective text annotation and in-class discussion. Writing assignments will center on short responses to the course texts.