Syllabus: Cultural Studies – Spring 2025

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SS-330 – Cultural Studies 

Pratt Institute

Social Science and Cultural Studies 

Spring 2025

 Instructor: Fania Noël, Ph.D   

COURSE DESCRIPTION & LEARNING GOALS:

This course explores the relations of cultural artifacts in the contemporary world to their various social contexts. Culture is understood as the material expressions and images that people create and the social environment that shapes the way diverse groups of people experience their world and interact with one another. The course focuses on the critical analysis of these various forms of media, design, mass communications, arts, and popular culture. Critical Black Studies and Black Feminisms Theory inform this course. It involves a critical and systematic examination of key works by influential thinkers, considering how they both contributed to and drew from larger intellectual movements. As an interdisciplinary, writing-intensive course, we will engage with seminal texts and ideas from these traditions while connecting them to contemporary culture, current events, and our creative and intellectual endeavors. 

The primary goals of this course are to:

  • Connect theoretical methods and concepts to creative and intellectual pursuits beyond the classroom.
  • Develop nuanced understandings of ourselves, others, and the social, cultural, and historical relationships that shape our interactions.
  • Use cultural studies to engage in reflective and metacognitive practices, fostering self-directed and motivated learning.

COURSE OUTLINE

Session 1: January 28 – Introduction

  • During, Simon. “Introduction.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 1–27. (27 pages)
  • Hsu, Hua. “Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies.” The New Yorker, 2017. (5 pages)
  • Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 56–68. (12 pages)
    Total pages: 44

Session 2: February 4 – Theory and Methods of Cultural Studies

  • Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 90–103. (13 pages)
  • Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 95–119. (24 pages)
  • hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Black American Cinema, Routledge, 2012, pp. 288–302. (14 pages)
    Total pages: 51

Session 3: February 11 – Place and Space

  • De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 151–160. (9 pages)
  • McKittrick, Katherine. “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 12, no. 8, 2011, pp. 947–963. (16 pages)
  • “Black Geographies: Mapping Black Spaces and Places.” Black Feminisms, https://blackfeminisms.com/black-geographies/. (3 pages)
    Total pages: 28

Session 4: February 18 – Frankfurt School and Public Sphere

  • Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger, MIT Press, 1989, pp. 1–36. (36 pages)
  • Fraser, Nancy. “Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, no. 4, 2007, pp. 7–13. (6 pages)
    Suggested Reading:
  • Fraser, Nancy. Remaining sections, pp. 14–25. (12 pages)
    Total pages (requested): 42; Suggested: 12; Overall: 54

Session 5: February 25 – Culture and Distinction

  • Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Field of Cultural Production, or the Economic World Reversed.” Poetics, vol. 12, no. 4-5, 1983, pp. 311–336. (25 pages)
  • Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 72–81. (10 pages)
  • Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, “Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power,” pp. 159–176. (17 pages)
    Suggested Reading:
  • Bourdieu, Pierre. Remaining sections from Outline of a Theory of Practice, pp. 82–95. (13 pages)
  • Hebdige, Dick. “From Culture to Hegemony.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 357–367. (10 pages)
  • Geary, P. (2020). The production of taste: ecologies, intersections, implications. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 40(3), 280–291.
    Total pages (requested): 42; Suggested: 34; Overall: 76

Session 6: March 4 – Surveillance and Violence

  • Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Random House, 1977, pp. 170–210. (40 pages)
  • Browne, Simone. “Branding Blackness: Biometric Technology and the Surveillance of Blackness.” Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 89–96. (7 pages)
    Suggested Reading:
  • Poster, Winifred R. “Racialized Surveillance in the Digital Service Economy.” In Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, edited by Ruha Benjamin, pp. 133–166. (23 pages)
    Total pages (requested): 42; Suggested: 33; Overall: 76

Session 7: March 11 – Marxist Approaches (Mid-Term)

  • Gramsci, Antonio. “Hegemony, Relations of Force, Historical Bloc.” Prison Notebooks, pp. 189–221. (31 pages)
  • Marx, Karl. “Estranged Labor.” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan. Available online: Marxist Archive. (10 pages)
    Suggested Reading:
  • Marx, Karl. “The Power of Money.” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, remaining sections, pp. 11–15. (5 pages)
  • Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 85–100. (15 pages)
  • Lettow, Susanne. “Biocapitalism.” Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 2, 2018, pp. 6–8. (2 pages)
    Total pages (requested): 41; Suggested: 22; Overall: 63

Session 8: March 25 – Watching Race

  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Sneja Gunew. “Questions of Multiculturalism.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 193–200. (7 pages)
  • Gray, Herman S. “Television and the Politics of Difference.” American Studies: An Anthology, 2009, pp. 433–445. (12 pages)
  • Wallace, Michele. “Negative Images: Towards a Black Feminist Cultural Criticism.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 118–139. (21 pages)
    Suggested Reading:
  • Wallace, Michele. Remaining sections, pp. 140–131. (9 pages)
    Total pages (requested): 40; Suggested: 9; Overall: 49

Session 9: April 1 – Whiteness is a Country: Nation and Nationalism

  • Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “There Is No Such Thing as Western Civilization.” The Guardian, 2016. (7 pages)
  • Anderson, Benedict. “Introduction.” Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1983, pp. 1–9. (9 pages)
  • Fanon, Frantz. “On Violence.” The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, 1963, pp. 145–155. (10 pages)
  • Ong, Aiwha. Flexible Citizenship. Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 1–21. (20 pages)
    Suggested Reading:
  • Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract, Chapter 1. Cornell University Press, 1997. (32 pages)
    Total pages (requested): 47; Suggested: 32; Overall: 79

Session 10: April 8 – Gender and Its Discontent

  • Oyẽwùmí, Oyẽọ́nké. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 1–20. (20 pages)
  • Butler, Judith. “Gender Is Burning.” Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993, pp. 81–99. (18 pages)
  • Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, 2007, pp. 149–165. (16 pages)
    Suggested Reading:
  • Namaste, Viviane. “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory.” Hypatia, vol. 24, no. 3, 2009, pp. 11–22. (12 pages)
    Total pages (requested): 54; Suggested: 12; Overall: 66

Session 11: April 15 – Feminisms and Antagonisms

  • Cho, Sumi K. “Converging Stereotypes in Racialized Sexual Harassment: Where the Model Minority Meets Suzie Wong.” In Critical Race Feminism: A Reader, edited by Adrien Katherine Wing, NYU Press, 2003, pp. 349–366. (17 pages)
  • Farris, Sara R. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017, Introduction, pp. 1–16. (16 pages)
  • Richardson, Trevor. “Objectification and Abjectification in Ex Machina and Ghost in the Shell.” Medium, 2017. (3 pages)
    Suggested Reading:
  • Additional analysis of Ex Machina. (6 pages)
    Total pages (requested): 36; Suggested: 6; Overall: 42

Session 12: April 22 – Black Feminist Methodologies

  • Hill Collins, Patricia. “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia, vol. 13, no. 3, 1998, pp. 62–82. (20 pages)
  • Brooks, Daphne A. “Introduction.” Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Harvard University Press, 2021, pp. 9–49. (40 pages)
    Suggested Reading:
  • Ashley Patterson et al. (15 pages)
    Total pages (requested): 40; Suggested: 15; Overall: 55

Session 13: April 29 – Bread and Circus: Spectacle, Love, and Technology

  • TV Show: Black Mirror – “San Junipero” (S03, Ep 4) and “15 Million Merits” (S01, Ep 2). Available on Netflix.
  • Beer, David. “Power Through the Algorithm? Participatory Web Cultures and the Technological Unconscious.” New Media & Society, vol. 11, no. 6, 2009, pp. 985–1002. (16 pages)
  • Gray, Herman. “The Feel of Life: Resonance, Race, and Representation.” International Journal of Communication, vol. 9, 2015, pp. 1108–1119. (11 pages)
  • Haraway, Donna. “The Cyborg Manifesto.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–155. (6 pages)
  • Potter, Russell A. “History – Spectacle – Resistance.” In The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 458–474. (16 pages)

Suggested Reading:

  • Haraway, Donna. “The Cyborg Manifesto.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991, pp. 155–181. (26 pages)

    Total pages (requested): 49; Suggested: 32; Overall: 77

Session 14: May 6 – The Day After the End of the World: Environment, Techno-Capitalism

  • Films: Mad Max: Fury Road and Blade Runner 2049. Available on streaming platforms.
  • Said, Edward. “Introduction.” Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978, pp. 1–28. (28 pages)
  • Wilson, Sheena, et al. “Introduction: On Petrocultures: Or, Why We Need to Understand Oil to Understand Everything Else.” In Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017, pp. 1–16. (16 pages)
    Suggested Reading:
  • Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11–40. (29 pages)
    Total pages (requested): 44; Suggested: 29; Overall: 76

Session 15: May 13 – Final Exam