ARTH 565
Sonic Ecologies: Queer Listening, Orientations, and Objects Fall 2023
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

This seminar considers sound, the aural imagination, and practices of listening in visual art and time-based media. Focusing on work produced in the 20th and 21st centuries, we will explore theoretical, media, aesthetic, and reception issues through an intersectional lens. While we will focus on queer theory and related artworks and art historical accounts, the course will also draw heavily on recent writings on and artistic practices that take up other related aspects of “ecology” broadly understood: interspecies relationality, the environment, the climate crisis, and scholarship grounded in the specificity of critical race theory, Latinx, Caribbean, and diasporic studies. Readings will tend toward the theoretical–from Sara Ahmed and José Esteban Muñoz to Tina Campt and Ren Ellis Neyra, among many others–but will be accompanied by art historical accounts and each class meeting will be grounded by in-depth discussion of several specific works of art. When resonant, we will take advantage of access to relevant exhibitions, performances, or events at the Clark, Williams College Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, or Bennington College. The course will prioritize student-facilitated discussion, and student work will be focused on producing a substantial research paper (with an option to produce a hybrid research/creative project, developed in conversation with the instructor). Undergraduates welcome with permission of the course instructor.