CEE #38

ISSUE CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR   |   THIRD THURSDAY    |   CLAIMING BLACKNESS   |   FIELD NOTES FROM THE EMPATHIC UNIVERSE   |   MEET MARGIT EDWARDS   | "ONE TAKE/TAKE ONE" EXHIBIT   |   CONVERSATIONS   |   GATHERINGS   |  
APPLY TO SSMF  | SPRING COURSE LISTINGS

The leaves have finally begun turning, and if you’re in Philadelphia right now you’re excited about the sports teams (go Phillies!!).  Living on Broad Street in South Philadelphia means we always get a front seat to the various forms of celebration that happen after big wins, which is a lot of fun (but I will truly never understand what compels people to climb light poles!).  

In Jamaica this past weekend – I was there to screen our film, “Four Days in May,” as part of the Kingston Biennial – a friend who had gone to both documenta 15 and Venice remarked that this was the year of upending art “as we know it.”  This led me to wonder about how we “know” art, which is of course part of the point of drawing attention to – and dismantling – the hierarchies of value that have shaped our experiences of creative practice.  It also led me to think about the ways creative practice can be a form of care.  Deborah Anzinger, artist and director of NLS Kingston collaborated with a class Grace Sanders Johnson, Krystal Strong, and I taught last spring called “Sighting Black Girlhood.”  Deborah hosted us for two weeks this past summer as we worked toward an exhibit of portraiture inspired by The Colored Girls Museum’s “The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face” project.  Four artists were commissioned to choose a “muse,” and to work with their muses toward creating portraits (you can see them below).  When we debriefed after the exhibit opened, Deborah mentioned that one of the unexpected outcomes of the project was that it created a portal for “intergenerational care.”  I thought this was a lovely way to conceptualize what should happen in our classrooms, and in our engagements with each other.  How are we holding our students and colleagues as we work toward the new knowledges on the horizon?  We’ll look forward to seeing you at the very beginning of next month at our CEE Fellows’ events!


 
Deborah A. Thomas 

R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology
Director, Center for Experimental Ethnography

Jeanne Lieberman and Shari Hersh.
Building Environmental Justice in Philadelphia: Participatory Action Research Seminar with Mural Arts

Using art as a point of entry into environmental justice, students in this seminar will contribute to a citywide (Philadelphia) campaign to end short-dumping, the illegal dumping of waste. This campaign is being launched by Mural Arts’ Environmental Justice Department together with environmental justice partner organizations across Philadelphia...


  
Jennifer Joan Thompson
On the Stage and in the Streets: An Introduction to Performance Studies

What do Hamilton, RuPaul’s Drag Race, political protest, TikTok Ratatouille, and Queen Elizabeth’s funeral have in common? They all compose repertoires of performance. From artistic performances in theatres, galleries, and concert halls to an individual’s comportment in everyday life, to sporting events, celebrations, courtroom proceedings, performance studies explores what happens when...

 

Regina Austin, Alissa M. Jordan , and Juan Castrillón 
Critical Qualitative Research and the Intentional Torts (Proseminar)

This course is designed to introduce professional school students to critical multimodal qualitative research in two ways. First, the course will consider the value of qualitative research to the analysis of contemporary social justice controversies that are the subject of actual intentional torts cases.


Francesca Ammon
Topics in Historic Preservation: Photography and the City

This seminar concentrates on a selected topic in the social and cultural history of the built environment. Past themes have included photography and the American city and the relationship between cities and sound.


Peter Decherney
Virtual Reality Lab

In this collaboration between Penn and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), students will work with with curators to create virtual reality projects connected to the museum's collections. This course mixes virtual reality theory, history, and practice.


Margit Edwards
The Black Arts Movement: Theatre and Performance

This course examines the Theatre and Performance practices of the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s.The Black Arts Movement (BAM) emerges in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Philadelphia among other locations, as a cultural component of the Black Power Movement, and its legacy continues to this day.
 

Toorjo Ghose Aaron Levy
Art and Social Work: Art and the Ecology of Justice

How can the arts help us build a more just society? How can the arts transform social structures and systems? Public health crises involving clean water (Flint), police violence (Baltimore), and a lack of economic and educational opportunity following reentry (Philadelphia) make legible the need for a new visual language that critiques these conditions and challenges entrenched structural inequalities. 
 

Grace Sanders Johnson and Deborah Thomas 
Sighting Black Girlhood

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the deep inequities of our social systems, and protests against police killings drew broader attention to anti-Black state violence worldwide, yet the gendered dimensions of these problems are not always fully understood. While many in the public have..
 

Kristina Lyons and Marilyn Howarth
Transdisciplinary Environmental Humanities

Emergent transdisciplinary fields, such as the environmental and medical humanities, reflect a growing awareness that responses to contemporary environmental dilemmas require the collaborative work of not only diverse scientists, medical practitioners, and engineers, but also more expansive publics, including artists, urban and rural communities, social scientists, and legal fields. This course is inspired by the need to attend to….
 

Jairo Moreno 
Audiovisual Climate Research
In this course, you will collaborate with your peers to create a public-facing, digital exhibit that communicates research about a local problem posed by the climate crisis. First you will encounter theories for communicating climate research in sounds, images, and embodied practices.
 

Brooke O’Harra and Heather Love 
Queer Archives, Aesthetics, and Performance

This course focuses on questions of how to represent the queer past, which it approaches from several angles: through training in archival methods and in scholarly debates about historiographical ethics (or, in the words of David Halperin, "how to do the history of homosexuality"); through engagement with the work of artists...