“Creative Citizens” courses build students' skills in creative activism and civic engagement. Course topics may include social justice, environmental activism, civic or political engagement, activist movements, forms of protest, social practice, community engagement, design activism, and more.

Animation

Christoph M Steger

ANIMA-3600-1: Media History

This course will address the history of animation as an art form and an industry. Emphasis will be on key figures, movements, and technologies associated with the field of animation from the pre-silent days until the present day. The class will be primarily devoted to screenings of films and discussions of their importance to the overall history. We will consider the works’ forms and techniques, their narrative or poetic content and the historical and cultural context in which they were created. The class will cover animation from a global perspective: we will look at the major American studios and concurrent developments in Europe and Asia. We will examine historical trends to help us understand the animation field today and to speculate on the future of animation.

Architecture

Lisa Findley

ARCHT-5500-1: HT: History/Theory Elective: RADICALLY LOCAL: Architectural Critiques For Our Precarious Time

MARCH-6500-1: HT: History/Theory Elective: RADICALLY LOCAL: Architectural Critiques For Our Precarious Time

This seminar investigates architects who practice within a critique of standard practice models; an acute awareness of climate change; a suspicion of globalization; a disdain for the impacts of “flat world” labor, material supply and environmental impacts; a critical position in regard to environmental justice; and/or an active engagement with decolonization. These positions lead to an exploration of architectural form and production that is often profoundly local in material, construction craft and technique, capacity building and sustainability (environmental, social, economic and cultural). In the hands of the most talented of these architects, these attitudes lead to fresh, elegant and leading edge architectural works and ideas. These practices provide an insight into a shift of the international conversation around architecture away from Europe and North America (though not excluding them).

Neeraj Bhatia

ARCHT-5800-1: UR: Urban & Landscape Elect: Forming Life in Common

MARCH-6800-1: UR: Urban & Landscape Elect: Forming Life in Common

Living Together is an act of politics through the collective shaping everyday life. In recent years, communal living has gained widespread attention for its potential to address the affordability crisis in highly desirable urban centers. While media accounts of this domestic typology typically describe it for its economic efficiency—incorporating it into simplistic narratives about gentrification and rising rents—this ‘necessity-oriented’ explanation of communal residences misses the breadth of motivations and manifestations of intentional communities, from socio-political values to professional networking and life-style affinities. Not only has living together embraced a larger range of users, through sharing resources, these spaces inherently build a domestic commons and offer a higher quality of social life. In parallel, contemporary modes of communal living have expanded from communes to include new experiments in co-living, hacker hostels, timeshared spaces, etc. Forming Life In Common is a seminar that examines the histories and theories of how people have lived collectively—linking the physical form, underlying protocols of land tenure and ownership, and questions of governance. Centered on the political negotiations required to live together, the seminar will unpack how different experiments in commoning, sharing, caring, maintaining, and forming life together might provide lessons for a more collectivized future wherein precarious individuals find solidarity and power.

Critical Ethnic Studies

Amana Harris

ETHST-2000-1: Your Art Your Impact

This course takes a new look at community based and contemporary art practices from a self-exploratory, education, social justice and civic engagement lens. We will investigate values, ethics and self-development concepts; explore education from a historical and present day context; learn about activist artists; and infuse all of these concepts to inform and push the boundaries of your own art practice. Art that incorporates spiritual and ethical renewal, as well as social responsiveness and environmental transformation is a primary focus as we investigate methods employed by a growing movement of activist artists. Students will work in the ways they are accustomed to as studio artists, while also developing arts projects that address local social and environmental concerns.

Jack Leamy

ETHST-2000-3: Mural Art

This course explores murals as public living spaces, visual geographical multi-layered zones for political activism, social/cultural awareness and aesthetic advancement. Starting with the early 1930’s to the present, we will look at murals as sources of meaning and forms of social justice activism. We ask, what is the role of mural art as it is displayed strategically in public spaces? Where does public space become available and to whom? Who claims public spaces and how? How do we define public space and who has the authority to have a voice and be heard in the public realm? Students will be asked to work collaboratively, choose a space to create a virtual mural design, make claims and defend them through writing exercises, research, and design. There may be opportunities for select and final mural designs to appear in virtual and/or public spaces.

Pallavi Sharma

ETHST-2000-5: Catalyst for Change

The course investigates how present-day Asian American artists are contesting societal assumptions and subverting stereotypes through their socially engaged art practices and participation in local as well as global social movements. The students will create art projects with strong sociological and political bends, which address the undercurrent problems related, but not limited to, class gender and ethnicity. Through virtual gallery/studio visits, reviews, online exchanges, and discussions with the members of cultural and artistic Asian American collectives, students will learn a critical and conceptual framework to examine the body of works of selected artists and will learn to understand the strategies of resistance and empowerment movements.

Vreni Michelini-Castillo

ETHSM-2000-6: Spirituality As Resistance

In this course we will learn about the significance of spirituality through the legacy of ancestral societies, the freedom struggles of BIPOC, and the power of diasporic people. We will delve into the philosophies and practices that shaped the formation of spirituality since time immemorial; closely examining the cyclical context of these sensibilities prior to and after the apocalypse of 1492. We will collectively analyze the impact of the last 500+ years of imposed colonial forces using critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality. Simultaneously we will celebrate and put into practice ancestral wisdom—passed down, safeguarded despite genocide, ecocide, censorship, enslavement, displacement and forced assimilation. Our course has twin components, theory and embodiment, through which we will reflect and act on the importance of ritual, of remembrance and of gratitude within liberatory movements and within our lives. Our focus for this course will be the autonomies sprouting and permeating, despite the power configurations of nation/states and transnational corporations, in Turtle Island, Anahuac, Abya Yala (Americas) and beyond.This course requires rigorous interdisciplinary study of ourselves, ancestral lineage, red medicine, art, astronomy, archeology, art history, biology and traditional ecological knowledge.

Brian Karl

ETHSM-2000-9: Deconstructing Prison

How did the use of physical captivity become so integral to ideas of social order and so influential on cultural attitudes -- especially in the U.S. but also elsewhere? And what are some possible alternatives to continuing regimes of incarceration? How does the structured basis for defining crime and its punishments reflect and reinforce inequalities in society based on race, gender and economic status in the U.S. particularly, and how might those inequalities be more positively addressed and improved otherwise? This course will develop collective understandings of prisons in the contemporary moment by considering a wide range of critical insights on the significance and problems inherent in penal systems by way of first-hand written accounts, fictional narratives, and theoretical perspectives along with creative projects in other media by and about incarcerated individuals. Along the way, the class will examine differing ideas about prisons as sites of rehabilitation and reform, deterrence and/or punishment as well as investigate movements to abolish prison entirely.

Steve Jones

ETHST-3000-1: Agitprop: Issues and Causes

agitprop | ˈajətˌpräp | noun - political (originally communist) propaganda, especially in art or literature: [as modifier] : agitprop painters.Origin - 1930s: Russian, blend of agitatsiya ‘agitation’ and propaganda. Agitprop, “agitation” and “propaganda,” is political (originally communist) propaganda, especially in art or literature. Propaganda involves persuasive strategies, but is different than persuasion in its intended outcome. A graphic design approach to propaganda will involve an examination of the relationship of message to context, focusing on the intentionality and responses of an audience, and lead to an understanding of propaganda as a communication process. This course will explore the history of propaganda from the mid 19th century to its modern day manifestation in American/global politics. Each student will have an opportunity to explore her/his individual values to establish a theme for a campaign and attempt to persuade a targeted audience through several class assignments.

Rekia Jibrin

ETHSM-3000-4: Tryin' to get Free: Foundations and Futures of Intersectionality

SSHIS-3000-4: 'Tryin' to Get Free': Foundations and Futures of Intersectionality

Representation, equity, diversity, and inclusion are all words that characterize contemporary perspectives on racial, gender, economic, and other forms of social justice. Cutting across all justice-oriented movements is another keyword: intersectionality. Many identify as having an intersectional approach, but not everyone shares an understanding of what the term means, its historical origins, and present-day debates about it. By the end of this course, students will develop deeper historical, philosophical and political literacies of diversity and inclusion through the lens of intersectionality. While this course is structured by historical, theoretical, and philosophical texts produced by peoples in struggle globally, it centers how Black women have engaged such thinking, transnationally. By the end of this course, students will develop representational pieces that situate their own evolving relationship to intersectionality historically.

Stephanie Sherman
ETHSM-2000-5: Non-Conforming: Disability and the Arts

How and why have some human bodies and minds been regarded as incompatible with full participation in social-cultural life or competent citizenship? Through wide-ranging readings, screenings, conversations, writing and creative work, we will explore and unsettle societal constructions of ability and disability. Placing focus on the arts and visual culture, we’ll consider such questions as, which bodies and minds have access to representation, education, reception and creative work itself? How are our habits of both looking and making conditioned by norms of ableism and associated qualities including “skill,” “stamina,” “beauty” and “criticality”? We will examine deep intersections between disability justice and social struggles in the areas of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class; as well as urgent issues of the environment, labor, and poverty. For help engaging these themes, we’ll delve into practices of artists and designers, who take them on with passion, humor, irony and radical imagination from within the lived experience of disability.

Shalini Agrawal
ETHST-2000-2: Radical Redesign

Decolonizing design and architecture practices starts with understanding the roots and steadfast legacy of colonization to resurface narratives that have been hidden, erased and forgotten. We can disrupt our biases and blindspots towards anti-racism and decoloniality by taking time to learn about forgotten history, and reflect on the unreconciled impacts of colonization. How might we acknowledge the injustices, colonial practices and racism in design and architecture, and acknowledge the resulting long lasting and harmful impacts? This studio begins by identifying areas of Radical Redesign within the traditional design process starting with researching colonization and its correlation with issues of diversity, identity, race, gender and culture. Building on this knowledge, we identify and confront our personal biases that have maintained systems of dominance, while challenging formulaic design processes. Moving from individualism, perfectionism and urgency, we prioritize non-Western methods of knowing, doing with the goal of defining and achieving personal translations of belonging, care and healing. We reexamine traditional design processes and propose new methods of designing with, instead of for, positioning ourselves as agents of care with traditional design processes.

Game Arts

Aaron Gach

GAMES-3100-1: Critical Game Design

Critical Game Design is a hybrid theory/studio course exploring how social justice, critical theory, philosophy, and applied science can inform the creation of effective, culturally-literate and meaningful game art. The course engages with principles of ethical and contextually-aware game design, through exposure to different schools of thought and critical approaches that will inform the student’s capstone projects, as well as work in their postgraduate game careers. Critical Game Design develops student conceptual capacity to analyze the effectiveness and intentionality of gameplay and game mechanics, through a series of practical and conceptual studio assignments, across a variety of game mediums, while exploring experimental, arts-based, and culturally and historically-specific approaches to game making.

Graduate Design

Susanne Cockrell

DESGN-6704-1: Grad Elective: Social Practice

This workshop takes a field-study approach to investigate ways that artists and designers expand their practice through social engagement, community processes and participatory actions. Such an approach is typically transdisciplinary and collaborative across liberal art and art/design disciplines. Rather than the product of a single artist/designer working within an isolated studio, social practice projects are driven by the desire to connect and look outside oneself in meaningful and tangible ways, seeking to positively impact daily life within specific communities. The workshop will expand on methodologies and histories of socially engaged art, build awareness of local histories, social forms, and a nuanced understanding of the relationship between social justice, poetics and the ethics of cultural production in the public sphere. Students will learn a set of critical tools and modes of working in this expansive genre that can help a designer/artist work in the field and diversify their practice. We will meet with CCA faculty and Bay Area Artists working in the area of social practice across architecture, design and fine art divisions, as well as pioneers across the country who helped establish the field. If funding and time permits we will road trip to LA + Joshua Tree to meet with pioneers in the field.

Philosophy and Critical Theory

Ignacio Valero

PHCRT-2000-6: Ecologies of Belonging

The paradoxical but very hopeful lesson that we are learning at a planetary scale from the convergence of the ‘space age’, climate change, Covid-19, information technology, and the global economy is that we all belong to one vast interconnected socio-ecological system. Hopeful, too, that we are becoming increasingly aware that our beautiful ‘blue dot’ planet (Carl Sagan) is located at the marvelous Goldilocks range where abundant and varied life is possible. We could call it our cosmic hearth, our home, our earth, heart, art, ear, activating all our common senses in the here and now. Beginning with these insights, we will study how four key bio-historical processes intersect with each other: 1) ecological/ environmental, 2) political/ economic, 3) global/ cultural, and 4) aesthetic/ technological. I will explore with the class my concepts EcoDomics (building, making, architecture) and the aesthetic(s) of the common(s). Two concepts I envision together as an “art of living and making (in) common(s),” that is, an alternative array of theories and practices that call us to respond to the deeply amoral instrumentalization of the human, non-human, and more-than-human, and invite us to learn how to live in common and how to make and build commons. The aim is to help design and construct worlds of belonging more attuned to life, to develop alternative models of democracy and everyday living, where data are not just tools of surveillance and exploitation for the many and sources of power and super-profits for the very few, but public goods for the benefit of all.

Social Science and History

Maxwell Leung

SSHIS-2000-1: American Politics

This course offers a solid overview of the American political system beginning with studying its foundation and its development over time. The course will analyze the increasingly important role of campaign financing, social media, and other modes of representation in elections in contemporary American politics and how civil society as well as political units such as interest groups, political parties, political action committees (PACs), super PACs, and the media influence the policy making process. The course will introduce how Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court operate, both in theory and in practice, and how they work for, and sometimes fail, the interests of the nation. The course reviews the contours of democracy in contemporary political and civic life and asks these questions: What facilitates democratic life? What is civil discourse and its engagement? How do we attend to questions of identity and difference (e.g., gender, class, race, gender identity and expression, religious affiliation, etc.) in democratic practices? How do we address systemic and structural inequalities such as racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, for example? Is voting all that matters? Does democracy mean majority wins all, all the time? What is the role of dissent in a democratic society? This course compels students to ask where are we headed as a nation, what criteria do we use to evaluate a desirable outcome and for whom, and if it is not on a suitable course for yourself and others, then what can we do to change it, if at all?

Maxwell Leung

SSHIS-3000-2: Social Problems

This course is an introduction to the sociological study of contemporary social problems in the United States. The primary goal throughout this course is to develop your "sociological imagination" a term coined by sociologist C. Wright Mills to describe a way in which we can better understand ourselves and the world around us. It is through this understanding that we can begin to unravel how our individual lives are rooted in larger social realities, demonstrating how our individual circumstances are inextricably linked to social structures. In this course, we will examine issues of crime and deviance, social class and stratification, racial, ethnic, and gender inequality, work and family life, media, consumerism, urban decay, corporate crime, poverty, health care, drug wars, and others through sociological perspectives. Students should gain a better understanding of the structure of society, how we have perceived "social problems" and we have responded accordingly.

Juliet Kunkel

SSHIS-2000-2: Cultural Landscapes of the Bay Area

This course will address different forces that have shaped the cultural landscapes of the Bay Area, including settlement, the eugenics movement, immigration and immigration bans, policing, and politics of housing. We will be pairing a conversation around the historical formation of these forces with discussion of how oppressive structures have and continue to be contested by activism, organizing, and social movements. By the end of this course you will have gained a broad understanding of some of the structural elements of the Bay Area’s cultural landscapes, and interrogated your personal positioning and responsibilities with respect to these structures.

Upper Level Interdisciplinary Studio

Rod Cavazos

UDIST-3000-8: Xenoludology

Xenoludology stakes out a new creative domain at the nexus of game design and art-making.The course introduces students to the principles of ludology — the study of game design — and to the history and psycho-cultural roots of gameplay itself. Class projects take form as exhedra: unique, playable art constructs (additive sculptures, stabiles, assemblages, +). Students immerse themselves in ideation and research, prototyping and playtesting as they develop two course projects: an artfully divergent reinterpretation of an ancient abstract game (Royal Game of Ur, Sennet, Mehen, Hnefatafl, etc); and an entirely original exhedron of their own imagining. The course makes use of prototyping and fabrication tools while also placing a premium on handicraft and creative reuse of everyday materials.Xenoludology coalesces a rare blend of speculative thinking, user experience design, additive sculpture, and lusory invention — forever shifting the bounds of gameplay in the process.

Taro Hattori

UDIST-3000-4: Dissonance - Music and Conflict

We experience many forms of conflict in our personal, social and political lives. "Dissonance – Music and Conflict" explores how we integrate our experience of conflict in our creative work by applying Musical ideas into our visual art, design and writing practices. We will learn how Music envelops various forms of conflicts and surpasses the impact of the clash, and create in-class, site-specific and socially engaged projects both individually and collaboratively. The interdisciplinary nature of Music lets us research and practice a wide variety of activities including performance, video, sound, multimedia installation, spatial design and public space interventions. Each student is expected to produce projects which are personally rooted and socially connective as Music is. Former musical training is not necessary. Topics include psychology, politics, storytelling, social practice, public space, perception, body, praying and destruction. This class is suited for students in any program of any division at CCA.

Katherine Lambert

UDIST-3000-5: U+ME, Inclusive and Integrated Embodiment

We are witnessing quantum leaps in 21st c. technological and biological developments which hold the promise of advancements for embodied spatial experiences in our built environments. For years, these developments have held implicit challenges to architecture, interior environments, and designed objects. Now we are moving well beyond our conception of the body, its abilities and adaptive qualities and finally, our environments hold the potential to adapt to our bodies in ways that were inconceivable even 30 years ago. Up until recently, the environment is conceived of as static and the body as an active agent working against each other at the interface of ability. Now, we have adaptive environments and shifting boundaries that hold the promise to liberate the old paradigms surrounding physical embodiment. Through student research, prescient articles and designed exercises, this course will help define the interactive qualities of this new world as we co-creating our future selves.

Writing

Faith E Adiele

WRLIT-2100-1: Eating Words: The Literature + Film of Food

LITPA-2000-3: Eating Words: The Literature + Film of Food

As poet Adrienne Su says, “When we talk about food, we’re talking about culture.” Not only do food conversations cross borders and history, but the recent rise in chef as celebrity, restaurant as performance, and cooking as competition has helped create what chef and food writer Ruth Reichl has proclaimed “the golden age of food writing.” Food literature has changed to meet our increasingly sophisticated and international palates, with food comics/graphic novels; cookbooks blending recipes, family stories, photographs and cultural history; food adventure travelogues; memoirs that use a particular food as the organizing principle; and micro-histories investigating the political history of foods with the power to start wars. This course will provide a taste (of course!) of food-focused film, essays, maps, graphic novels, cookbooks, memoirs, and poems from around the world, from antiquity to now. Students from all majors are encouraged to do creative projects in their areas of specialty.