240519 SE The Politics of (In)visibility (P4) (2020S)

Seminar "Ethnographic Media Practices: The Politics of (In)visibility"

What can be seen and shown? By whom? Why? And what happens when these norms are breached? These questions are hard to ask because aesthetic norms so often appear self-evident, but they can be asked by anthropologists. In this course, we will study practices of seeing, showing, erasing and concealing in the realm of states, markets, and citizens. How do these practices come about? The course encounters such questions from different theoretical angles, through readings of literature from anthropology, development sociology, colonial history, philosophy, and media studies. In the end students reflect on the potential role of anthropologists in these politics of (in)visibility, and put theory into practice in a Visual Workspace.

Learning goals
After completing this course,
- Students have gained theoretical knowledge about the ‘politics of (in)visibility’, or more broadly the politics of aesthetics.
- Students can reflect on how the discipline of (visual/multimodal) anthropology is influenced by these politics or provides possible alternatives to them, and feel challenged to find a position of their own.
- Students can translate concepts into images and can work with analogue and digital techniques of montage and performance to demonstrate or construct theory.

Course set-up
The course has two parts. The first part consists of reading seminars. Students prepare classes by reading literature, viewing related images, and writing short papers that draw connections between concepts and images. In the second part of the course, students work on a visual research project with a multimodal outcome. They collect visual materials, gain experience with techniques of performance and montage, and produce an aesthetic intervention: a short film, which is exhibited.

Entry requirements:
This class is open to all students and no specific technical skills are required. To assess the existing skills and interests within the classroom, students will bring a portfolio to the first meeting, to show what their previous experience with visual media production is and discuss their personal aims/motivation for taking the class. Bring any creative product you have created: this can be film, photographs, drawings, graphics, music, soundscapes, or a website.