PPGA 591C Lind Initiative Seminar
WHAT: A 3-credit course
WHEN: Thursdays, 3:30 – 5:00 PM, Winter Term 2, January – April, 2024.
WHERE: Liu Institute for Global Issues – Boardroom (316)
INSTRUCTORS:
Kimberly Bain, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literatures
Christopher B. Patterson, Associate Professor, Social Justice Institute
WHO CAN APPLY: This is a competitive entry graduate course for UBC students from any faculty. Graduate students and fourth-year undergraduates are encouraged to apply.
Course Title: Pop Politics: Making Cultural Lives and Livelihoods in the United States
This class will examine how American popular culture by marginalized authors and artists responds to political discourses in ways that reveal and creatively upset racial, gendered, sexual, class, and nationalist norms. Course texts and speakers will consider histories of colonial and state violence, as well as their continuous reiterations through capitalist and imperial projects. We will also interrogate the popular remaking of gender, racial and sexual norms through cultural studies methods that attend to capitalist processes of imperial extraction, production, and commodification. Furthermore, readings by marginalized (Black, Indigenous, people of color, queer, trans) authors will examine popular culture and its audiences through theories of affect, embodiment, and erotics.
By attending to the ways political identities and histories have been creatively reimagined through vernacular and often unseen forms of popular art (hip hop and punk, reality tv, refugee literature, independent cinema, memes, and indie video games), we ask: How does popular art and culture allow us to rethink mainstream discourses of state history and institutional identity? What does it mean to resist the violences of the state and colonial empire through flourishing, playing, and making new worlds? Meandering through the mess of marginalized and queer(ed) popular art, we will explore the promise and peril of popular culture, while pursuing new ways to creatively reimagine ourselves and the political realms around us.
The 2024 Phil Lind Initiative series is hosted at the UBC Vancouver campus located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people.
Subscribe to our Phil Lind Initiative Newsletter for updates on our next series.
The Phil Lind Initiative is hosted by UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.
Applications for the 2024 Lind Seminar on Pop Politics are now CLOSED.
Contact info: lind.initiative@ubc.ca
