Seminar: Arts Research Integration

Seminar: Arts Research Integration

Meets with MUSE 780, ART 500, ANTH 501

This graduate level seminar proposes that research does not only happen in academic spaces, but can also emerge from community, studios, embodied encounters, and through our diverse experiences in everyday life. As Irit Rogoff suggests, “Research, in the final analysis, is the potential for immersion and engagement without drawing conclusions and making predictions, the potential for making the world our own.” What is the benefit of studying art or other fields of cultural inquiry at a research university? What do artists and other practitioners have to offer our thinking about how we know the world? How do we understand artistic and other forms of cultural practice as research? This graduate seminar takes students on an expedition of readings on art and visual culture and asks them to articulate their own practices as research.

We will look at the work of many contemporary artists, including Janine Antoni, Simon Denny, and Stephanie Dinkins, among others. Seminar readings may include excerpts from Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Daston and Gallison’s Objectivity, Kat Jungnickel’s Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research, and Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson’s Curating Research, among others. The course requires graduate level reading, short-format summaries, and a seminar paper. The work of the seminar will also give students an up close look at curatorial work underway at the Spencer Museum, which engages the work of Antoni, Denny, and Dinkins (above). Seminar students will therefore be participants in curatorial research and uniquely prepared to engage current and upcoming exhibition projects and associated public programming as part of their studies.