GANT
6265

Political Imagination

New School for Social Research: Anthropology

Liberal Arts
Graduate Course
Degree Students (with Restrictions)
Political Imagination
Fall 2023
Taught By: Barbara Adams
Section: A

CRN: 16037

Credits: 3

This course focuses on imagination as a mode of inquiry and as a site of political creativity. We will build on long standing work on the sensorium to expand conceptions of the political, providing students with the opportunity to generate new imaginative possibilities. Approaches include building a research practice that involves walking, archiving, mapping, multimedia and sensory-oriented fieldwork, speculative storytelling, and practicing material synaesthesia. Grounded in a series of site engagements, the course will foreground sensorial literacies and methods of ‘observation’ that include but go beyond the visual, developing mimetic capacities and embodied modes of understanding and relating. We center collaboration and cooperation as essential modes of inquiry and practice. Possible sites range from a sewer grate to local waterways and sidewalk trees to botanical gardens. We will look to living systems asking what the natural world can teach us about mutual aid, recovery, and restoration, while emphasizing traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), queer and non-binary perspectives, and multi-species cosmopolitics. We will work collectively to develop alternative visions and approaches that challenge the myths, metaphors, practices, and narratives that make it difficult to shape the world and our futures in ways that center justice. This course will count toward the minor in Anthropology and Design.

College: New School for Social Research (GF)

Department: Anthropology (ANT)

Campus: New York City (GV)

Course Format: Seminar (R)

Modality: In-Person

Max Enrollment: 18

Add/Drop Deadline: September 11, 2023 (Monday)

Online Withdrawal Deadline: November 19, 2023 (Sunday)

Seats Available: Yes

Status: Closed*

* Status information is updated every few minutes. The status of this course may have changed since the last update. Open seats may have restrictions that will prevent some students from registering. Updated: 8:52pm EDT 10/1/2023

Meeting Info:
Days: Wednesday
Times: 4:00pm - 5:50pm
Building: Academic Entrance 63 Fifth Ave
Room: 305
Date Range: 8/30/2023 - 12/6/2023