Postgraduate Course: Things: New Materialisms (ARTX11039)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines some of the prominent emerging theories associated with the new materialisms in the fields of material culture studies, philosophy and science studies. It concerns developments in theoretical practice that call into question the binarism and anthropocentrism of critical theory and the cultural turn. The new materialisms, in their different ways, speculate on how things are material, singular and/or entangled. They have radically redefined post-human politics, agency, corporeality, criticality, representation, and time.
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| Course description |
Through close readings, students will examine the work of some of the most important contemporary material cultural scholars on process, the non-human/human relations, ANT, thing theory and the non-modern before considering how they might apply the new materialisms within their own field, developing models that are relational, entangled, porous, co affective, autopoietic, embodied, vibrant....
Aims of the Course:
1. To examine the agency and porosity of things and objects.
2. To undertake a systematic analysis of the principal theories and discourses of the new materialism.
3. To practice and expand the transversal theories and discourses of new materialisms in relation to disparate fields of scholarship.
- Lecture Programme on Material Cultures
Indicative subjects:
1. Materialisms: ANT
2. Materialisms: 000
3. Materialisms: Speculations
4. Materialisms: Animism and Vitality
5. Things: Aesthetics
6. Things: http://www
7. Things: Biopolitics
8. Things: Nonmodern
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate a highly developed command of visual and material literacy and an imaginative critical faculty.
- Successfully engage your peers in discussions that articulate the relationships between the new materialisms and related theories and discourses.
- Apply critical analysis, evaluation and synthesis to principle theories and discourses at the forefront of the new materialism and, in turn, apply this to related issues in your own field.
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Reading List
- Barad, Karen. Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Spring 2003, Vol. 28, No.3, p801-830.
- Barrett, Estelle and Bolt, Barbara. Carnal Knowledge: Towards a New Materialism Through the Arts, New York: IB Taurus, 2013.
- Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A political Ecology of Things, Durnham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
- Boggost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology: Or What it's like to be a Thing, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
- Bryant, Levi. The Democracy of Objects, Open Humanities Press, 2011.
- Bryant, Levi. 'Politics and Speculative Realism', Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism IV, New York: Punctum, 2013.
- Cool, Diana and Frost, Samantha. New Materia/isms: Ontology, Agency and Politics, Durnham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
- Brown, Bill. "Thing Theory", Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No.1, Autumn 2011, p1-22.
- Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Thousand Plateaus. trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
- Dolphijn, Rick and van der Tuin, Iris.(eds). New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Open Humanities Press,2012.
- Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of
Objects, Open Court, 2002.
- Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
- Morton, Timothy. Realist Magic, Open Humanities Press, 2013.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
- By researching in groups and working towards common goals you will learn social skills and negotiating skills, understand accountability and appreciate alterity.
- You will learn extradisciplinary skills, an understanding how to gain an applied knowledge of disciplines that are relevant to your research by engaging with case studies of material cultures.
- You will learn a range of artwriting and publishing skills; working with IT, social and print media. These skills relate to the distribution of their work.
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| Keywords | materialism; animism; speculative realism; non-human; para humanities; actor-network theory; object |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Angela McClanahan
Tel: (0131 6)51 5885
Email: a.mcclanahan@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Jennifer Watson
Tel: (0131 6)50 2226
Email: Jennifer.A.Watson@ed.ac.uk |
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