Core Courses 2017-18
In the academic year 2017-18, NICA offers three 6 EC core courses for research master students.
Repairing Infrastructures
In the 2018-19 ASCA Cities seminar series we examine the city through the lens of infrastructures. This seminar will take stock of the many failures and crises of infrastructure, gathering thinkers and ideas committed to reparative infrastructures that both anticipate and help sustain sociality. Putting infrastructure at the heart of our social and cultural analysis, as Deborah Cowen (2017) argues, “insists that we ask how power works, in its most mundane and practical ways,” in turn helping to refine concepts of resistance and justice.
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.
Soapbox: Practices of Listening
Soapbox is a graduate journal for cultural analysis. For the first issue we have been inviting submissions that explore listening as a critical practice. With this topic, we aimed 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
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?
ReThink NICA
We, the undersigned members of the national research school NICA (Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis), express our solidarity with the national and interdisciplinary ‘Rethink’ movement and emphasize the following principles and demands …