Cultural Analysis as Reportage

Dates: 7 November – 12 December 2024 (Thursdays)
Time: 15.00-18.00*
Location: University of Amsterdam, PCH 4.28
Instructor: Joost de Bloois
Credits: 6 ECTS
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*The session on November 7th has been moved to 12-15 in BG2, Room 0.02.

**This course is fully booked. 

Over the past years, cultural analysis has ventured more and more into the cultural field at large, paying attention to more than cultural artifacts. In this course, we’d like to push this development a little further. We ask ourselves what cultural analysis can be if its primary focus is what Lury and Wakeford call ‘the happening of the social’: the minute attention to contemporary socio-cultural phenomena as and where they occur. What if we consider cultural analysis as a form of ‘reportage’ – an academically informed reporting on the here-and-now – rather than a theoretical exercise? Understood as reportage, cultural analysis reports from the happening of the social by recording, narrating and analysing where and when socio-cultural events occur. In this course we will explore what alternative genealogies for cultural analysis we may imagine, beyond ‘Theory’ (reconnect with its roots in early cultural studies, with ethnography, cultural sociology), what alternative forms of writing and narrating ‘reportage’ would encourage (non-academic writing, different formats of writing: from interventions to long-form enquiry), what different modes of working and researching become possible (from new forms of field work to new dealings with theory), what new tools will be at our disposal?

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