Creative Humanities: Critical and Situational Analysis

Course goals

After completion of this course, students have learned to:

• use dramaturgical, dispositif, and curatorial analysis as concept-driven methods for critical cultural inquiry into artistic and creative practices;
• develop a clear and feasible research question for a concept-driven situational analysis of a specific creative object or practice;
• conduct a concept-driven situational analysis of a specific creative object or practice.

Content

In this course, we focus on understanding how specific situated artistic and creative practices address, position, and activate their audiences, and which analytical methods help to gain insight into these strategies for audience engagement. You will practice and experiment with three specific concept-driven and comparative methods for the critical and situational analysis of various and hybrid forms of media, art, and performance, and learn to recognise how they engage and activate their spectators. We will introduce you to the methods of dramaturgical analysis, dispositif analysis, and curatorial analysis. In this course we develop insight into the way these methods activate various theoretical concepts (such as intersectional and queer dramaturgies, somatechnics, ecology, prefiguration, or pluriverse) and the kinds of knowledge they yield about the objects and practices analysed.

In the course, you will learn to develop your own concept-driven analysis of specific artworks or exhibitions, performances, or screening situations. For this you will first draft a dramaturgical, dispositif, or curatorial analysis of your chosen object or practice, including a clearly formulated research question. This draft includes schematic drawings or other forms of visualization. For the final analysis, your will further develop this draft analysis into a comparative analysis of two different objects.

Towards the end of the course, you will have learned to develop your own concept-driven analysis of specific situated artistic or creative objects with an emphasis on 1) how these address, position, and activate their spectators, and 2) how they, as such, produce meanings, experiences, and knowledges. Moreover, by the end of this course, you will have gained a practical understanding of creative humanities and have experienced that critical thinking and reflexive writing are also fundamentally creative acts!

This course is the second course in the specialisation track Performing Arts and Creative Technologies.

Additional information

Priority rules
This course has priority rules and a waiting list. Your enrolment is guaranteed if you

- are a student in the BA Media and Culture and this course is part of your specialisation (verdiepingspakket)
- are a student in the BA Liberal Arts and Sciences or Taal- en Cultuurstudies and this course is part of your specialisation (kernpakket)
- are an exchange student and meet the course’s entry requirements

In all other situations, you will be placed on a waiting list if you enrol in this course. For any remaining slots in the course, lots are drawn among the students on the waiting list.