Research Seminar (584-0-21)
Topic
Unethical Media
Instructors
Neil Kanwar Harish Verma
Meeting Info
Annie May Swift Hall 109: Mon 10:00AM - 12:50PM
Overview of class
In recent years, the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements have challenged how scholars approach moral questions surrounding the works, artists or genres they select for syllabi and public exhibitions. Yet as this crucial debate around the ethics of pedagogy has grown, there has been no robust discussion about how we treat these same works in research contexts. What does it mean to feel morally conflicted about picking a novel, theorist, film or image for a class, but less so when it comes to analyzing that same material in an article or talk? As scholars, do we want our object to be "good" too much?
This is a class about what happens when good scholars study bad things, highlighting how this practice has always been a key part of critique. It is often by running up against critical thought that a media work becomes "ethical" or "unethical" in the first place. Moreover, the question of how to engage with "unethical media" motivates a whole array of critical argumentative comportments - it shows us how to canonize, how to excuse, how to elevate, how to politicize, how to aestheticize, how to love or hate - and in this way the question of ethics helps us to assume the identity of a scholar. To gain perspective on this process, our class will look at the intersection of contemporary theory and moral philosophy, along with films, photographs, graphic novels and radio dramas that try to deal morally with issues of aesthetic distance, visual violence, cancel culture, scholarly privilege, disgrace, eco-pessimism, and the ethical representation of sexuality, gender expression and race.
Theorists may include: Chinua Achebe, Elizabeth Anscombe, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Georges Didi-Huberman, Immanuel Kant, José Esteban Muñoz, Sianne Ngai, Susan Sontag, Judith Jarvis Thompson and Linda Williams. Key media artists will include Anna Biller, Sophie Calle, Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Lee, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, Jane Gillooly, Kelly Reichardt and Cindy Sherman.
Registration Requirements
This course is open to all PhD students in Screen Cultures and Comparative Literary Studies. Students in other programs should contact the instructor to obtain permission..
Learning Objectives
Our goals are to: (1) deepen and complicate our thinking about ethical approaches to research (2) learn more about the way critical debates emerge and unfold, and (3) work in a peer-to-peer way to craft more sophisticated approaches to our own research objects.
Evaluation Method
| Participation | 30% |
| Short Assignments | 20% |
| Term Paper | 50% |
Class Materials (Required)
Note: I do not require students to buy hard copies of books, or to purchase through the campus bookstore. You may order these books in any version that suits you, from any retailer.
Sophie Calle, Suite Vénetienne 978-1938221095
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals (any edition, or online version)
Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All 978-0226148175
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others 978-0312422196
Plato, The Republic (any edition, or online version)