Recent Courses

Undergraduate + Community Workshops

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Postgraduate (MA/MFA)

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Postgraduate (PhD)

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Course flyer for a PhD seminar by Dr. SA Smythe. Sparse black background with long text in white letters. Title aligned right bold in chartreuse in the upper right corner. Description: "Custody" is its own contronym, invoking care/safety and incarceration/punishment. Who are the custodians of the various ecologies of Black life and thought? What stories do we harbour and curate around Black presence(s)? What tools-methods-practices are being used to meet the charge of maintaining collective memory, and what are some systematic obstacles regarding representation, recognition, preservation and repair? The PhD seminar Black Custody moves with the premise that custody of any kind cannot be thought without blackness and indigeneity. We will delve into custodial systems, community protection/guardianship, and both collectivist and carceral management of oppressed and racialised people and their knowledges. By unraveling the aesthetic contexts inherent in various modes of care work—which is also to say, curation—we will deepen our analysis of the profundity of care, preservation, and representation within cultural, social, and political realms. Discussion topics include: Technologies of poiēsis, poetics, and possibility Anti-colonial perspectives on curatorial ethics & responsibilities Power dynamics in custodial practices and their impact on dispossessed and system-impacted communities Representation and recognition politics in cultural institutions Alternative models of custody and guardianship rooted in abolitionist frameworks and other cosmologies Aesthetics of care as a transformative and reparative practice Digital custody and archival challenges in the digital age course description Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters (1980) Tina Campt, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (2021) Hugo ka Canham, Riotous Deathscapes (2023) Sarah Jane Cervenak, Black Gathering Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life (2021) Barbara Christian, "The Race for Theory" (1987) Ashon Crawley, Meditation on Abolition (2023) WEB Du Bois, "The Criteria of Negro Art" (1926) Darby English (ed), Among Others: Blackness at MoMA (2019) Nicole Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020) Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geographies (2023) Stuart Hall et al, "Social Production of News" in Policing the Crisis (1978) bell hooks, "Touching the Earth" (1996) Natalie Harkin, Archival Poetics (2019) Audre Lorde, "Blackstudies" (1974) Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (2019) El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, "Musée, colonisation, et restitution" (2019) Morgan M. Page, "One From the Vaults: Gossip, Access & Trans History-telling," in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production & the Politics of Visibility (2017) Anthony Reed, Soundworks: Race, Sound & Poetry in Production (2021) Tonia Sutherland, Resurrecting the Black Body: Race & Digital Afterlife (2023) Vanessa Eileen Thompson, "Decolonizing City Spaces & Images: Black Collective Solidarity and Conviviality in Paris" (2020) Plus: selected manifestos, soundtracks, artist statements, performance + film screenings, and virtual site visits TEXTS (seminar selections tbc)