This seminar operates in the generative tension of two fields of inquiry and “knowledge-making” that are often set at odds with one another—the poetic or broadly, the techniques and properties of making and unmaking; and the political or broadly, questions of power and affiliation. We will explore the distinctions between the analytic and the artistic, the normative and the imaginative and their implications for the ways in which disciplines and bodies of knowledge get constructed—and which affect the ways in which argument, position, intervention, and research are made or conducted. To do so, we will engage with a range of topics including but not limited to mobility studies, political economy, and interspecies relationships and explore the intersections of the poetic and political through multiple modalities—texts, images, affect, sound, rhythm, movement choreographies and other multi-sensory experiences. The course is consciously transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary. We are interested in the conceptual, spatial, and phenomenological ways in which borders (of disciplines, things, states, species) are drawn and the possibilities and limitations of transgressing and transcending them. We will explore these mobilities through a wide range of material from the social sciences and humanities as well as visual arts and performance to consider politics in surround sound as it were—as a multi-sensory affair. Throughout, we will seek the line between the poetic and the political and ask what’s at stake in maintaining or unsettling it.