This course offers a direct learning approach to intersectional feminisms and socially engaged art and arts activism. We will explore public art, art activism, digital storytelling, analyze creative media that addresses social problems-- their goals, audience, message, and impact. We will focus on the exciting overlap between socially engaged art and recent social movements around the world. This broad perspective will help us decide how to create our own arts-based activism. After exploring independent short films and film festivals, you will have opportunities to collaborate in planning the 10th annual Feminist Border Arts Film Festival, including evaluating film submissions, creating short digital documentaries, and collaborating on a class zine project.
Comics. Graphic medicine. Comics journalism. Graphic memoir. This course invites you to consider how graphic narratives can give shape to marginalized (gendered, LGBT+, racial and ethnic) identities and experiences, especially in relation to positive social change. Some of the questions that animate our study include: How do comics invite us to reevaluate traditional narrative forms (both literary and visual)? How do graphic novelists blur the distinction between private and public histories? Why are graphic narratives a uniquely powerful creative medium to reflect and critique social inequalities and advocate for more just futures? Our work in this class follows adjacent paths—just as a language class might ask you to both read and practice speaking and writing the language, our class will ask you to both read and create your own graphic narratives.
This course will introduce students to the lively field of transgender studies. Students will become familiar with the field's formative discussions and primary concerns; they will develop an understanding of the central theoretical and activist tools that have emerged from the field; and they will engage some of the deep connections between trans studies and other critical fields such as Black studies, disability studies, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, the posthumanities, queer theory, and science studies.
E-Mail: dmb1@nmsu.edu
