Core Courses 2017-18
In the academic year 2017-18, NICA offers three 6 EC core courses for research master students.
Cultural Studies Now
NICA Core Course, 6 EC, November-December 2018 | Offered by Murat Aydemir. In this course, we will revisit the main genealogies and methodologies of Cultural Studies in relation to current developments, exploring the following five areas of contestation: conjuncture, politics, reality, interdisciplinarity, and culture. How did Cultural Studies start out? What can it now be?
Decolonial Studies and Political Philosophy
NICA Core Course, 6 EC, April-May 2019 | Offered by Prof. dr Yolande Jansen. This course looks at the intersection of decolonial studies and normative political philosophy, and tries to address them from a relatively integrated perspective. We bring together both fields in a systematic way by testing normative theories of global justice and human rights in political philosophy against the works of liberalism’s critics from a decolonial or critical theoretical perspective.
Queer Intersections
NICA Core Course, 6 EC, April-May 2019 | offered by Toni Pape. In this course, we will explore a mix of seminal and very recent interventions in queer thinking.
The Digital Mass Ornament: Found Collectivities in Contemporary Art and Culture
Workshop with Natalie Bookchin, June 29, 15.00-18.00. In her art practice, Natalie Bookchin interrogates our contemporary digital surface in order to reveal the social realities that lie beneath.
The Digital Mass Ornament: ARTIST TALK AND FILM SCREENING NATALIE BOOKCHIN
On June 28 the internationally acclaimed American artist Natalie Bookchin will give a talk about her work, followed by a screening of her latest film Now he’s out in public and everyone can see.
Soapbox: Practices of Listening
CFP, deadline May 30, 2018 | For the first issue of Soapbox, a graduate journal for cultural analysis, we invite submissions that explore listening as a critical practice. With this topic, we aim to bring together accounts of listening as both a method and object of analysis, including everyday practices and new modes of research that articulate who or what can listen and who or what can be heard.
Politics of Boredom
CFP, EXTENDED DEADLINE JUNE 10, 2018 | The punk youth of the 70s, with no prospect on a future, but with a fiery desire to reject, shouted “London’s burning with boredom” in unison with the Clash song. In the 2000s, the Apple factory claimed that the workers in China committed suicide “out of boredom”, even though their working conditions were “just fine.” Can boredom work as a collective force for creativity? Can it be an affective entry point to build new political subjectivities?
The NECS 2018 Conference | Media Tactics and Engagement
Call for Papers: The NECS 2018 Conference | Media Tactics and Engagement
27-29 June 2018
The changing media landscape requires continuous (re)invention of the ways in which photography, film, television, digital media, and the arts are produced, distributed, accessed, and consumed. Back in the past like today, the question of media tactics and engagement is crucial once more. Today the question seems even more urgent, since large corporations provide platforms and services that foster the desired behaviour of the average media viewer/user/consumer and produ(c/s)er; nevertheless, in previous decades, ways of planning long-term strategies, tactical reactions to unforeseen circumstances and engagement have determined media practices and discourses. The NECS 2018 conference will explore the various – both intended and/or subversive − ways in which media are currently developed, deployed and distorted.
Artistic Research
Seminar, 2 EC, starting October 31, 2017 | Bringing academia and the art world together, artistic forms of research change the social status of both, and introduce a potential array of practice-oriented methodologies that challenge institutionalized forms of knowledge production. This series of meetings between October 2017 and June 2018, during which members of the group will present their research and receive feedback from their peers, seeks to promote the exchange of ideas and experiences among artistic researchers and others interested in the field.
NICA Electives: Corporeal Literacy (Utrecht University)
Block 4 (23 April 2018 – 29 June 2018) – Utrecht University
In this course, we will focus on movement and gesture as aspects of how we are corporeally literate that have for a long time been neglected in accounts of embodied meaning making but are currently gaining more prominence as the result of technological developments (movement becoming more and more part of what can be detected and shared by media as well as of ways of using media and interacting with them) and also the emergence of embodied, embedded and enactive understandings of perception and cognition. During the meetings we will discuss a panorama of historical and contemporary approaches to movement and gesture in relation to questions of (among others) affect, emotion, experience, spatiality, and memory. Students are invited to explore the potential of these readings for the analysis of encounters with objects, events and situations of different kinds.