Visual & Critical Studies Courses
Methodologies, in tandem with the VCS Forum series, operates as the core of the VCS MA and Dual Degree curricula. The VCS Forum series features guest speakers from a wide range of creative and scholarly fields and serves to open dialogues on contemporary issues in the visual arena. Methodologies serves as a discussion section for the Forum, where the dialogue is continued and further enhanced by incorporating in-‐depth analysis of readings furnished by the Forum speakers. Students consider the author’s theoretical allegiances, modes of argumentation, forms of evidence, presentational strategies, career choices, and the discursive field(s) into which their work intervenes.
The program in Visual & Critical Studies at CCA trains creative leaders in visual and critical fields. Seminars offered under the heading VCS Topics build skills in historical investigation, critical thinking, and visual analysis, while providing students with key theoretical tools as well as exposure to their academic, social, and artistic applications.
STRATEGIES FOR VISUAL & CRITICAL STUDIES
This course is a survey of the key texts, thinkers, concepts, and theoretical approaches that influence the study of visual culture and the production of criticism. It is an opportunity for students to engage with the ideas that are deployed in these conversations, while gaining the ability to use these resources in their own work. Much of our course will be devoted to learning these languages and determining how they intersect with the visual, allowing us to facilitate the task of criticism. The course is by design interdisciplinary, drawing upon the theoretical advances made in fields as diverse as philosophy, linguistics, art history, psychoanalysis, and literary studies. Given the abstract nature of our readings, one of our challenges will be to determine how, if at all, these texts actually facilitate a discussion of the visual. The guiding thesis of this course is that the visual is situated within larger fields of cultural production, which require carefully defined strategies to make explicit their ontological, epistemological, historical, and political assumptions.
Strategies will facilitate the acquisition of certain essential skills. In the first instance, it will outfit students with methods of critical analysis while enabling them to refine their written and verbal communication skills. It will help students to develop an ethical perspective on contemporary visual culture and thereby deepen visual literacy. The interdisciplinary nature of the course is designed to teach collaboration across the disciplines and to promote creativity in critique and communication.
THEORIES OF IDENTITY, DIFFERENCE AND POWER
The politics of identity continues to be a compelling and hotly debated topic in visual culture. Students explore the construction, negotiation, and contestation of identity and difference in visual and critical studies. The theoretical scope of this seminar includes postcolonial theory, race theory, gender studies, and whiteness studies. Students investigate how theorists and artists address the complex intersections of race, sexuality, gender, class, health, and nationality in light of such subjects as immigration, transnational media, diasporic communities, disidentification, belonging, and desire. Special attention is given to critical and visual perspectives that challenge monolithic views of identity. We privilege diverse, multiple, and intersectional approaches that connect lived experience, social critique, and artistic practice. Focuses include cultural diversity, critical analysis, and visual literacy. Students also sharpen their research, verbal communication, and writing skills. Students will develop a general understanding of visual and critical studies in relation to theories of identity and difference, hone skills for analyzing culture from a visual and critical perspective, and focus on a final research project and class presentation using principles of visual and critical studies.
This course is taken in the spring semester before students enter their thesis year. It directly supports the thesis drafting/writing process. Low-‐stakes writing exercises enable students to develop their authorial voices. Students will practice all stages of the writing process, from brainstorming to revising and deep editing, with the intention of contributing to the full range of rhetorical situations open to visual and cultural critics. This course provides students the opportunity to develop tools and techniques for critical writing.
In the fall of their final year, students enroll in Master’s Project for the purpose of expanding and developing a seminar paper into a Master’s thesis under the supervision of a thesis faculty director and an Internal Advisor [and external advisor?]. The Master’s thesis is an essay of publication quality, approximately 30 pages in length. In addition to the thesis director, two additional readers from the Visual and Critical Studies faculty (the Chair and the Internal Advisor) will assess the Master’s thesis and the student’s overall academic performance. The committee will determine whether or not the student has satisfied the thesis component of the requirements for an M.A. in VCS. Those students who have satisfied the thesis requirement will register for MP2 in the spring for completion of the Sightlines and Symposium components of the program’s degree requirements. Upon successful completion of MP1 and MP2 students will receive an M.A. or dual degree.
In the spring semester of the thesis year, students formally present their research to the public. The day-‐long Visual & Critical Studies Symposium groups graduating students into thematic panels moderated by prominent scholars representing relevant fields. MP 2 prepares students in the arts of formal, conference-‐style presentation. In this final semester, students also craft a free-‐standing essay based on their thesis research for publication in the VCS journal Sightlines. In MP 2, students receive professional training in writing, revising, and editing for publication.