Visual and Material Culture Studies

This course provides a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary introduction to visual culture from ancient civilizations to our contemporary global world. It presents key terms, concepts, and issues that are central to the study of images, visuality, practices of looking, as well as visual media, technology, and culture. It deconstructs the mechanism and impact of visual communication by illuminating how images exert power in specific geographic and cultural contexts, manufacture desire in viewers and consumers, and construct meaning and experience through time. Lectures target the acquisition of visual literacy and the understanding of visual culture around the world.

This course provides a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary introduction to material culture from ancient civilizations to our contemporary global world. It presents key terms, concepts, and issues that are central to the study of materiality, including maker and creation practices, modes of objectification and commodification, and material ways of knowing often set aside by textually-expressed knowledge. By decentring the text and focusing on the material world, this course will allow a better understanding of otherwise overlooked knowledge and experiences. This course offers a range of approaches to material culture drawing from anthropology, archeology, art history, archival and curatorial studies, the history of the book, ethno-history, Indigenous studies, marketing, museology, race studies, sound studies, and women's and gender studies.

Cartography implies not only the visualization of space, but also the creation of tools that can powerfully define and delineate space in political, social, and cultural ways, which give rise to borders and exclude or include people, things, and resources in life-changing ways. This course digests several thousand years of mapping in the western and non-western worlds to teach students how maps work and what types of knowledge they express. Students will be exposed to the uses and implications of mapping as an instrument that furthers the ambitions of kings, presidents, and even academics. Students will also be exposed to non-western ways of articulating space and reflect on how the digital realm is urgently requiring our society to assess the ways that maps control how we know the world around us.

This course introduces students to critical assessment of culture and arts. Students attend, discuss, and write about Canada-focused (national and local) cultural events such as public lectures, visits to local historic sites, concerts, exhibitions, and plays.

This course offers an immersive opportunity to experience and examine visual culture in a real, non-simulated context though a first-hand encounter with images and visual representation. Fieldwork is designed to facilitate the direct application of key terms, concepts, and issues in visual culture to the analysis of images, practices of looking, and media of communication. Visits to sites of significance in visual culture (archives, castles, churches, libraries, monuments, museums, palaces, etc.), interactions with local image producers, and interest-guided exploration will illuminate how images communicate meaning, exert power in a specific geographic and cultural context, inspire desire in the viewer, and travel across borders.

This course explores the intersection of verbal texts and visual arts in Francophone literature and culture from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach to examine how, different yet inseparable, words and images have always interacted with each other in a variety of ways and forms such as verbal portraiture, literary references to pictorial works, engravings and photographs used as illustrations or book covers, and the use of words in paintings.