Art For Earthly Survival

“This course provides an introduction to the interdisciplinary, multi-sited activity of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies from the vantage point of artists, activists, and cultureworkers. In both content and activity, this class offers a consideration of the social structures and material conditions which organize our learning, and of difference as an embodied experience from which we derive knowledge and understanding. Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies convenes academic fields that all learn from difference, and share the premise that social transformation is connected to our capacity to perceive and understand how difference relates to power, value, and the social structures that organize our everyday lives. We will be learning from artists, theorists and culturemakers who have always already been critically and creatively resisting oppression and imagining worlds of care and collective liberation, with special attention to feminist genealogies of thought and practice.”

Syllabus-WGSS250Spr23

The purpose of this 1 credit course in your DCC Honors curriculum is to guide you through the process of envisioning, elaborating, and crafting a written proposal for your Capstone project, which you will complete and share in the Spring semester, under the auspices of the HDCC209 course. The subject material of your Capstone projects is open to your imagination, which can be both enlivening and challenging. We ask that you engage the questions, themes, techniques and provocations from your DCC coursework that most spark your curiosity and care, in order to bring a vision into reality; we invite you to use DCC’s community, connections, and resources as a container to incubate your efforts; and we encourage you to imagine how the compelling forces of your project will ripple outward into your other realms of experience. A successful project is one that gives you the opportunity to learn how your interests and investments come into contact with the world as it stands, and how your pursuits can contribute to creating the world you want to live in.

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Begin to notice the different qualities of movement you experience throughout the day. Take note of unique moments, repeated patterns, and transitions. Your observations may be internal: How does it feel to be in your body? How does that change throughout the day? What precipitates these changes? And your observations may be external: How do the other beings around you move? Independently, and in relation to one another? What conditions, structures, constrains or compels what is moving around you, or moving you around? Experiment with ways to write, describe or notate some of your observations in a diary (or journal or whatever you use to collect your thoughts).

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This is an art class. You are an artist. I invite you to explore Being An Artist with me. I am an artist AND a queer naturelover jewish white settler anti-racist graduate student instructor pursuing a PhD in Women’s Studies at UMD. I have designed this course to support the conceptualization of an ambitious and thoughtful creative project by offering strategies, examples, and exercises from artists who are working on what might make life/earth survivable, liveable, and flourishing. Climate activists, anarchists, abolitionists, and liberation workers across a wide range of social movements often rally around a shared sentiment: Another World Is Possible. Perhaps a world of sustainable ecological and social relations, where living beings are free and cared for, where creative and generative gifts are shared abundantly. But what makes these other worlds possible?

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