Women, Art, & Culture is an introduction to Women's Studies

Tuesday, 7 February – Women’s Studies, what is it about? 

What is Women's Studies? How do we learn about it by thinking  about women, art and culture? • a scholarly field • feminist action • issues in women's interests • analysis of power & knowledge • intersectional interventions challenging dominant structures of inequality 

Notice how our class is structured as a series of experiences. So-called constructionist learning and collaboration open up our analysis of women, art, and culture, and our introduction to the field of women’s studies, as well as to activist practices.

The course will involve both taking things in, absorbing them and learning to put them in context; and also actively using what we come to know, sharing it others, thinking on one's feet, brainstorming and speculating, figuring out how it all fits together. Both require careful preparation before class and keeping up with the reading. Some educators call these forms passive and active learning. One can take in and absorb more complicated stuff than one can work with and work out, at least at first. We do both in the class, but we also realize that active learning requires patience and imagination, a bit of courage to try things out without knowing something for sure yet, and a willingness to play around with being right and wrong, guessing and a lot of redoing. (How to Read handout here.) How does the first museum assignment fit in here?

 

• Bring in our book-museum, Pérez’ book, Chicana Art. 
"Creating an invaluable archive, Laura E. Pérez examines the work of more than forty Chicana artists across a variety of media including painting, printmaking, sculpture, performance, photography, film and video, comics, sound recording, interactive CD-ROM, altars and other installation forms, and fiction, poetry, and plays. While key works from the 1960s and 1970s are discussed, most of the pieces considered were produced between 1985 and 2001."

• Check out Pérez’ teaching site: http://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/faculty/profile.php?person=12

• Start finding the artists in Pérez on the Web. Bring in an example to share. Alma Lopez (p. 265)

How will we use Pérez to help us care about it all? How will we activate web action to see how alive and dynamic women’s studies’ concerns are? That they involve people of passion individually and in groups? 
"This book expresses what it has meant to me to be in the world with the companionship not, fortunately, of dead authors who are kindred spirits, but of the women I have been gifted to study and know in the pages that follow.... I thank each and every one of the women whose work is studied here, for they are a mighty, awesome, and glorious bunch." (xv)
"It meant a great deal to me to discuss this work with other intellectuals when it seemed a dangerous topic." (xiii) "...the Hellman Family Faculty Fund for a grant that helped make possible the publication of this book's color images." (xiv)  


Freewrite: "Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes. It could change your life." Setting up a positive cycle.

This will be a media and technology intensive course. Bring your own laptop, netbook or iPad if you can, to connect across media, to become increasingly savvy about web resources, and to use data visualizations and virtual environments for cognition and collaboration. Throughout the course we will share resources for all these. • What is Web Action? How will we activate it? in class and everywhere  • How do we use the Wikipedia wisely & well? • And what about distraction? How can we use it too? 

Jason Farman, a faculty person here at UMD, wrote about this in today's Atlantic Monthy: "We absolutely need breaks and distance from our routines to gain a new points of view and hopefully understand why it might come as a shock to your partner when you answer a work call at the dinner table. Yet, by conflating mobile media with a lack of meaningful connection and a distracted mind, they do a disservice to the wide range of ways we use our devices, many of which develop deep and meaningful relationships to the spaces we move through and the people we connect with." 

And as Cathy Davidson from Duke University puts it, delightful distractions can actually increase our ability to then refocus. Steady stimulation or high transmissions including joyful play, keep the gate to working memory closed and permit increasing absorption. The gate is opened by either an increase or decrease of stimulation, and that is when new information enters for reorganization, then closes the gate again.

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You will be telling us about your museum experiences next week! Mentally prepare yourself to talk in class! Notice the Freeland readings for next week too! Learn how to complete the logbook! Here is the template to download!

What is your stake in all this? How might it matter to you and to those you care about? 

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