Media Art, Sound & Listening

What we consider to be pleasing, appropriate and/or beautiful is conditioned by culture and 'habitus'. This course examines how global media relates to varying aesthetic standards: the role of media in defining contemporary aesthetic values as well as in responding to them. Learn More Here.

PO5016/CM5016 Digital Advocacy: Within/ Without Borders

This course analyzes the rhetorical-cultural aspects of global advocacy, such as how to fashion persuasion that speaks to multiple national, ethnic, religious and political audiences about issues of transnational importance and which have the same or similar persuasive goals. Case studies will be used to move back and forth between theory and practice, where studying the practice will inform the theory, and vice-versa. The course will answer important questions for global advocates. Learn More Here.

CM4016 Global Advocacy

This course focuses on how transnational actors - governments, citizens, social movements, corporations, NGOs, issue groups, and so forth - communicate to achieve their goals. The course also helps students develop skills in global advocacy, learning the genre of the press release, the organization and transmission of information (or, more accurately, persuasion) on websites, list-servs, grassroots work, and in visual rhetoric (posters, culture-jamming). Learn More Here. 

This course addresses the use of communication technologies for mediating public discourse, organizing democratic protests or denouncing state violence. Through a practice and research-based approach to digital media productions, we interrogate the media’s capacity to produce “civic media”, in other words design a space of possibility, “a way of imagining a future. Learn More Here.

Fashion Theory: (Un)dressing the Self: Dress & Identity Dress is representation and objectification of our identity. It enables and supports social roles and structures. It grants us individuality at the same time as confirming our group belongings. As the most visible form of consumption, the most pertinent type of non-verbal communication, dress fulfils a decisive role in the construction of social as well as individual identity, the reflexive production of self. This course examines dress and fashion as social and cultural phenomena. It will explore the ways in which different identity categories – social, individual, gender, class – are constructed through dress. Moreover, we will explore dress as a multi-sensory system in relation to the way we experience and construct our ‘selves’ and the world we live in – a fact often overlooked in our seemingly occularcentric culture. Focusing on the physical self, the physio-aesthetic effect of cloth/ing on our bodies will be considered, the symbiotic relationship between the moving body, dress, the skin, the senses, and the self. Through the readings of some of the key (fashion) theorists (e.g. Anzieu, Barnard, Barnett, Barthes, Davis, Eicher, Entwistle, Eco, Evans, Featherstone, Finkelstein, Flugel, Foucault, Goffman, Kaiser, König, Lacan, Laver, Lindstrom, Lipovetsky, Pallasmaa, Phelan, Roach-Higgins, Simmel, Stone, Veblen, Vinken, Wilson) we will investigate motivations in dress, the communicative properties of clothes and how we perform ourselves by way of dressing every day, the Western hierarchy of the senses, and the construction of the self as a visual and tactile process and the role of dress within it. In addition to textual and visual sources, this course will consider a series of films to explore dress as an embodied and situated practice, investigating the relevance of filmic representation for fashion-related research and analysis. In preparation of the written assessment, the course will include a workshop on visual analysis. Learn More Here.

Fashion is mediated to us as a constantly changing series of fashionable, style-building products. Yet, the many processes that go into a product, all its ingredients and treatments, its full journey, its true cost, the hundreds of hands that shape it, often go unrecognized and even unrecorded. Moreover, the fashion and textile industries have grown from a diverse set of situated craft practices to an interconnected global business of unprecedented scale and speed. In this process its geographic, economic and temporal dimensions, cultural and aesthetic practices as well as environmental and human impacts have changed dramatically.

This course explores fashion not (only) as product but process. It explores this industry from field to fashion and investigates the complex global fashion system from cultures of extraction, design, manufacture, to cultures of representation, consumption, wearing and disposal/re-use. The fashion chain will be studied through a series of rich textual and visual sources, lectures, debates and visits. Moreover, in recent years a discourse of sustainability has been mobilized – also in relation to fashion, used to critique, challenge and redirect the current fashion system but also employed as a marketing tool. We will explore the concept of sustainability, its history and meaning, its language and its limits. How is it possible to unlearn and undo today’s finite fashion system which relegates its “consumer” to passive users rather than active makers? Learn More Here. 

Fashion is a global cultural phenomenon which has involved a host of different globalised industries for centuries. This course will explore the beginnings and developments of fashion. Aiming to de-hierarchise and decentralise the notion and study of fashion, we will explore different histories of fashion and ways to study them. Drawing on textual, visual and material sources, on literary, press and academic sources, on image, film and object analyses, Global Fashion will be explored in lectures, seminars, research projects, exhibition visits and excursions – with experiential learning at its core. Learn More Here.

There is more than one fashion system, more than one global capital of fashion. This course aims to decentralise and de-hierarchise existing notions of fashion by exploring a number of fashion systems – past and present. While we take our location, Paris, as a starting point for our experiential exploration of the professional field of fashion, we will move beyond the myth. Paris has been the self-proclaimed world fashion capital for more than three-hundred years. This city has influenced the very notion of fashion itself, but also global aesthetic codes, and the way many of us consume and wear garments. Paris and its fashion myth have been instrumental in the development of a highly complex globalised fashion system, which has subsumed and suppressed many other fashion systems.

We will consider the correlations between these systems without the processes of fashion cannot be understood. How are fashionable commodities made, mediated, consumed – and what happens to them once they have gone out of fashion? How are Paris as a fashion city and its key figure La Parisienne discursively constructed? How have systems of textiles and fashion changed in recent years – both in Paris and globally? What impact has its altered dimensions had on the bodies that work within the industry and those wearing and living with its products? These questions will be analysed in lectures, seminars, research projects, visits, and by making extensive use of film in addition to other visual media and textual sources. Learn More Here.