COLONIAL PRACTICES

*This course requires an application (at this link), due September 1.

The seminar “Colonial Practices” considers colonial practices through architectures, institutions, and ecologies around the world. Each week, we study aesthetic and spatial practices alongside Black and Brown consciousness, Feminist, Indigenous, and anticolonial and decolonial theory. The places around which maps have been constructed, across which migrants have moved, and within which insurgents have configured form the intellectual problems of this course and strategic positions from which to sense, write, and think with the constructed environment.

Students lead discussions on shared readings, co-produce collaborative research with community partners for public dissemination, and write papers based on individual research. Our collective studies examine archives of colonial practices, museum-based institutional critique, insurgent art and design practices, and forms of geographical counter-cartography and architectural counter-occupation. Students are expected to conduct in-depth independent research, bringing their own interests and objects of historical inquiry into the course, and special sessions of the course will be targeted toward the development of students’ scholarly research and methods.