ARC 342R / ARC 388R / AMS 391 Seminar
Fri 9:00am – 12:00pm, SUT 2.110
Open to all SOA students
Bryan Norwood: bryan.norwood@utexas.edu
The aim of this seminar is to think carefully about how our bodies engage with the built environment. Through theoretical and historical texts, we will consider lived-experience and the ways that subjects are governed and guided by their built worlds. We will read both from the orientations of phenomenology and of biopolitics (and critiques of these approaches), of accounts of embodiment and of accounts of the control of bodies. Beginning from the premise that bodies and thus embodiments are not the same, a particular aim will be to attend to the ways differences in race, gender, class, and ability affect our engagements with the built environment. This seminar will be structured around a series of multi-week engagements with singular texts, into which other shorter texts will be interspersed. That is, we are going to 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 Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Saidiya Hartman, and Sylvia Wynter. The focus of this seminar will be on reading, collective annotation of texts, and in-class discussion. Assignments will be structured around writing that progresses to a final paper.
