124267 AR Cultural/Media Studies 1/2 (AR) (2021S)

NB
Due to the ongoing public health situation, this course will be taught online. All scholarly articles as well as some excerpts from literary texts will be made available on Moodle. The three assignments are to be turned in as .doc files or .pdf files via email (sylvia.mieszkowski@univie.ac.at), which means there is no need for you to come into Department while it may not be safe to do so.

This course seeks to entwine contemporary literature, history and theory. Bernardine Evaristo's Booker-Prize winner Girl, Woman, Other (2019) will provide us with the literary strand. The novel comes in 13 self-contained yet connected chapters, and we'll use one part of our lesson each week to discuss them in chronological order. A second part of each week's lesson will be dedicated to historical background or contemporary context, which will range from the history of slavery and its connection with imperialism to the history of (scientific) racism and protest movements like Black Lives Matter. While I'll make suggestions, this is the part where you are invited to bring content into the course that you deem important, interesting and in dialogue with the respective chapter of Evaristo's novel. The third strand of each lesson will be dedicated to a theory text from the field of Black Feminism that I'll select. It will be largely up do you, how exactly these three strands are woven, plaited or twisted together or how they otherwise form a constellation that opens up a space for discussion.

This AR pursues several goals: to teach you about gender, race, class and age as intersected, socially constructed, relational categories; to help you contextualise literary texts with historical contexts; to help you bring theory and literature productively into contact with each other. The 'specialist'-task (which every student in class undertakes once) is supposed to provide the basis and impulses for the group work (in which every student in class participates on a weekly basis). You'll be expected to provide a powerpoint presentation as an accompaniment to your specialist task.

One week before the lesson in which it is your turn to act as specialist, I will meet with you online, discuss your ideas, make suggestions and help you structure your plan. After each lesson, you, next week's specialist and I will get together for an immediate reflexion, which takes into consideration your own estimate of your performance, peer-feedback and feedback from me.