Yeong Ran Kim

This course aims to create everyday archives in collaboration with community members from the College’s surrounding neighborhoods. Working with SLC’s community partners, students will create a team blog to document the modes of perception, consciousness, and affect that characterize everyday life. Drawing upon Ann Cvetkovich’s “radical archive of emotion,” José Esteban Muñoz’s “ephemera as evidence,” and David Román’s “archival drag,” we will explore aspects of everyday life that often go unnoticed but are crucial for understanding who we are and how we perceive the world. By utilizing digital media, we will engage in expanded modes of recordkeeping, intervention, and preservation. During the semester, students will work toward a collective exhibition at BWCC. Conference work in this course will consist of a collaborative, community, digital-media project based on dialogue with diverse community members.

This course explores various digital humanities projects and engages in innovative methods for community-oriented research through a queer feminist praxis. Through a combination of readings, discussions, and conference projects, students will gain an understanding of key concepts and theories related to race, gender, sexuality, disability, and technology. The course will provide students with practical skills for creating digital projects, as well as opportunities to work with communities. Conference work in this course will consist of a collaborative, community, digital-media project. That format will allow us to cultivate emerging moments of coming together that vitalize creative making, as well as to find innovative ways to share what was learned from a community-engaged research teaching experience and curatorial practice. This interdisciplinary and practice-based course invites students from all disciplines. Potential group conference projects: (1) leading film and media workshops for local communities, (2) creating an interactive storytelling project on Yonkers and Bronxville, and (3) curating an (online or on-site) exhibition. Prior experience in teaching and/or media production is welcome but not required.

This interdisciplinary course examines queer/trans artistic and activist practices in the global digital culture. We will explore the ways in which queerness and transness are performed and constructed through digital media, as well as the impact of digital technologies on the formation of a new sense of being-with. Topics will include queer/trans representation and politics; the role of social media in activism and community formation; and the digital in relation to identity, power, and knowledge production. Through critical analysis and hands-on projects, students will gain a deeper understanding of queer and transgender issues with digital media and digital technologies.

Sound studies is a burgeoning field of research, which has attracted critical attention across multiple disciplines—music, history, cultural studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, and environmental studies. By reorienting ourselves vis-a-vis our sense of hearing, we will explore how sound offers a mode of knowing attuned to different sonic registers of the everyday. This course will offer an introduction to diverse theories and practices of sound, with special attention to critical race theory, feminism, queer and trans theory, and global studies. How do we listen to voices unheard? How do we engage experiences of pleasure, repression, rage, and isolation that lie beyond dominant language? How do marginalized groups build communities through voice, sound, performance? Throughout the semester, we will explore the works of queer, trans, and indigenous intellectuals and artists of color (Fred Moten, Wu Tseng, José Esteban Muñoz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rebecca Belmore, Tavia Nyong’o), as well as produce our own audio pieces. No prior experience in recording and editing is required.

This course is designed for students with a strong interest in community work and digital-media production. We’ll explore new forms of research-creation and pedagogical-performative modes of engagement by considering the role of digital media in making new connections, building friendships, and forging communities. We’ll examine the relation of aesthetics to politics and explore the myriad ways in which theory and praxis can inform one another, with special attention to digital-media pedagogy. This course largely has three components: 1) a group creation of a multimedia performance piece; 2) designing an after-school program and running the program on Saturdays for community youth; and 3) curating an online exhibition on the College’s website. In the first month of the semester, we’ll create a multimedia performance piece together as a class, based on ethnographic research in Yonkers, Mount Vernon, or Bronxville. In so doing, students will learn about surrounding communities and become equipped with the basic skills needed for digital-media production. Students will then have the opportunity to put those skills into practice as we design a new kind of after-school program and host a digital-media workshop for public-school students in Yonkers, Mount Vernon, and Bronxville. This course asks students to play the role of teaching artists by integrating their art form, perspectives, and skills into the community setting. Students will team up to teach and support youth participants to create a multimedia performance piece, through which they will show and tell stories about themselves and their communities. All workshops will take place on campus on Saturday afternoons from 1pm to 3pm. Scheduled workshop dates are February 26; March 5, 12, 26; and April 2, 9. In the final month of the class, we will design a website together in order to host an online exhibition based on the works that are produced in previous months, including students’ works and the youth participants’ works. This format will allow us to cultivate emerging moments of coming together that vitalize creative making, as well as to find innovative ways to share what was learned from community-engaged research, a teaching experience, and curatorial practice.

This class examines queer/trans artistic practices, together with trans, queer, and decolonial theories. We will focus primarily on the work of queer- and trans-identified artists within a larger context of contemporary artistic experimentation that aims to envision a more-than-human world. On the one hand, we will interrogate existing parameters of inclusion and neoliberal citizenship; on the other, we will explore a new set of sensibilities and relationalities emerging from visions of a new mode of being (or being-with). At the horizon of this world in transition appears a mode of unmasterful art practice, which suggests new ways of making and responding to art. Students will engage in textual study, as well as direct artistic production or performance involving diverse media and methods.

This course is designed for students with some familiarity with working in a variety of media and who wish to explore them further in relationship to our local communities. Progressing through a series of projects involving all of the five sense perceptions and a variety of material and media, students will explore what it means to use everyday technologies today. Each project will ask students to explore the nature of sensation and of mediated experience. What happens to us when we capture our sensory perceptions? How do media technologies influence our perceptions of the world? How do other kinds of diverse knowledge, techniques, or know-how that exist in communities come into play in relation to digital apparatuses? During the course of the semester, students will have the opportunity to work with writing, sound, image, and procedural rhetoric as a way to experience public environments, as well as to represent individual and collective stories about them. Additionally, we will study a selection of media theories relating to a wider range of technological apparatuses inaccessible to our actual use (such as the electron scanning microscope or fiber-optic cable landing sites) in order to situate our projects within a larger, global framework. For qualified and dedicated students, course work may include volunteer work with a local community partnership.