Fall 2025 Courses

Professor Pato Hebert
ASPP-GT 2002-001 (OPEN ONLY TO ARTS POLITICS STUDENTS – NO EXCEPTIONS)
Mondays 10:30am - 2:30pm
4 points

Methods & Criticism I supports you to identify and strengthen the methodologies operating in your practice while developing a critical framework for diverse modes of creative and political action. Weekly presentations and discussions will allow for robust engagement with one another’s work, which may include but not be limited to artmaking, scholarship, activism, curation and pedagogy. Over several weeks, we’ll also do slow, careful readings of two primary texts: Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Kimmerer will guide us in considering the power of place and the more than human. What vitalities might be cultivated by holding multiple worldviews and ways of being? Butler will help us to consider how fiction – and the novel in particular – offers a space for considering what lessons lie in coalition and the multi-generational. How does science fiction envision new worlds and forms of collectivity amidst dystopian futures? Operating beyond more conventional notions of activism, agitprop or the contemporary, how might such texts help us to reimagine the political and creative dimensions of our practices? Additionally, how might critical readings and contextualization of these works impel us into new possibilities for thinking more critically about the terms and forms of our own work?

Our goal will then be to apply these lessons to the professional pauses and pivots that unfold for you over the course of this one-year program. How is this current historical moment calling you to reflect, shift or lead? What are the frameworks, methodologies, tools, connections and experiences you need in order to evolve and sustain your practice? In addition to our critique sessions, analytical readings and discussions, we’ll also conduct weekly writing reflections, complete individual final essays articulating your relationship to arts politics, and undertake a group exercise to map resources, challenges, synergies and pathways. This course helps to prepare students for the research, creativity, collaboration and convening that will continue in the core Methods and Criticism II course in the Spring Semester, and across your chosen elective courses. 

Professor Laura Harris
ASPP-UT 1000-001 (juniors and seniors with instructor’s permission)
ASPP-GT 2000-001 (graduate students only)
Mondays 3:45 - 7:10pm
4 points

We will return to and consider together these terms and others as ways of locating or “framing” socio-ecological life.  What are the implications of understanding socio-ecological life in these terms (and/or others)?  This is a broad topic that has been addressed by many scholars.  This class will not offer a comprehensive history, but rather a way of understanding the specificity of the ways some contemporary political and aesthetic practices have reworked or departed from these terms.  So we will review some of the history of the enclosure and appropriation of communal space made possible by the imposition of the economic framework of private property.  We will also review some of the history of the partitioning, political administration and policing of space by states through the emergence of international law.  And we will consider some attempts to revisit these histories in Western science and philosophy.   At the same time, we will look at very different ways of understanding the ground or space or material contours of socio-ecological life that are fundamental to communal, indigenous, pastoral, and exilic/diasporic social formations, among others.  Finally, will look at documentation of some recent projects—political and aesthetic—that maneuver, elude, or make use of the contradictions in these terms, or that attempt to sustain or imagine and activate other forms of socio-ecological life without them.  We will consider the work of writers like:  John Locke, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Samera Esmeir; Wen Liu; Anooradha Siddiqi; Renisa Mawani; Isaac Newton; John Bell; Karen Barad and Nathaniel Mackey.  We will also consider work by groups and artists such as: The Freedom Farm Cooperative, The EZLN and Zapatista Caracoles; Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti; Jorge Furtado; Hélio Oiticica; Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman; Beatriz Santiago Muñoz; Julieta Aranda; Alan Lomax; Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum; among others.

Professor Karen Finley
ASPP – GT 2003 (OPEN ONLY TO ARTS POLITICS STUDENTS – NO EXCEPTIONS)
Tuesdays, 10:30am - 1:15pm
2-3.5 points

This class is a core course required for all Arts Politics students. In our class we will engage in conversation and collaboration while getting to know each other as a cohort. In this class we will be considering space, place, seen and unseen histories as inspiration for arts politics.

For our colloquium – we will be exploring New York City. We will at times visit outdoor public spaces. How do we engage and consider public art? How do we reflect on spaces of protest and memory?  We will be visiting Stonewall National Park and meet with an artist activist and volunteer ranger. We will visit Columbus Circle and consider monuments, and engage in participatory walks through the early settlement of African American and Irish immigrants known as Seneca Village in Central Park. We will engage and collaborate and create our own collaborative presentations in Washington Square Park. Arts Politics faculty, Dr. Sheril Antonio will visit and speak about her research on the seen and unseen with Washington Square Park history.  We will have guest artists and alumni who engage in Arts Politics in their practice. We will visit NYU special collections and consider what is an archive? The collection holds rich collections of books, serials, pamphlets, archives, photographs, oral histories, and more.

Professors Kathy Engel and Ella Shohat
ASPP-GT 2049-001 (Graduate students only)
Tuesday 3-6:35pm
4 points

This seminar will focus on memoirs, whether in written or audiovisual form, which foreground a complex understanding of such questions as “home,” “homeland,” “exile,” “hybridity,” and “diaspora.” We will examine different narrative forms of memory-making, analyzing how post/colonial authors and media-makers perform “dislocation and belonging.” We will address the socio-political ramifications of the reading and writing of memory. We will also explore various genres and media including memoir, creative non-fiction, poetry, film, and music video.

While examining texts and audiovisual forms of memoir, we will create our own, with particular focus on language, narrative, multilateral expression of story through time, place, and context. We will look at multilingualism, and memoir as a form of resistance and survival, giving students the opportunity to write their own versions of such narratives. Through writing exercises, we will explore the relationships between ways of seeing, knowing, recording and transforming experience.

As co-teachers of the class, a poet and a scholar, both historically engaged with the question of public narrative and the weaving of the single and the collective story, we will work together to probe reading and writing invoking and invoked by the multiple expressions and experiences of memory.

Course requirements include readings, screenings, presentations, critical and creative writing, and workshop style discussions of students' work. A final project will be either a scholarly paper or an extension of the student’s own narrative writing.

Professor Luis Rincon Alba
ASPP-GT 2006-001 (Graduate Students Only)
Fridays, 2:30 - 6:05pm
4 points

In his book, “Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War,” historian Vincent Brown defines colonialism as a “perpetual state of war.” His expanded understanding of warfare challenges traditional notions of war that are limited to armed conflict and battle and allows to conceive of war as an expanded effort at controlling life and the systems that reproduce the conditions for life and the living. In this class, we will follow a similar approach and interrogate the forms in which artists from war-affected regions and populations recuperate and redeem the traces, memories, lessons, and scars left by this expanded understanding of war and colonialism. In conjunction with this, we will critically read philosophical, historical, and other texts from the humanistic tradition to understand how war overflows, challenges, and redefine the theoretical understanding of violence, brutality, race, gender, sex, and the human paying special attention to how it affects the dichotomy of the living and the dead. The class will also pay attention to how war and its traces remain in audio-visual archives, theater plays, choreographies, music, literature, and performance art.
In the Fall of 2025, the war will focus on the work of scholars and organizers Annie Paradise and Manolo Callahan. We will explore how their work with the CCRA (Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy) challenges traditional understanding of war as mostly armed conflict as it invites us to consider the multiple manifestations and intensifications of warfare against the reproduction of social life. Paradise’s Book “The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley” (Northwestern University Press, 2024) will be central to the development of the course as well as the conceptual maps produced by the CCRA.

Professor Karen Finley
ASPP-UT 1028-001 (sophomores, juniors, seniors only)
Undergraduate Only
Wednesday 10:30am - 2:05pm
4 points

This is a dynamic, generative class where you will be able to engage in creative production. We are creating and making. We will reflect on performance art, installation, hybrid media, site-specific, text and experimental practice. Creatives or curators that work in related areas are invited to expand their practice such as film, visual art, photography, creative writing, music, technology or if you just need to explore new ground! The professor is a multi- disciplinary artist who is active in the field. This is a workshop atmosphere and the professor strives to have an educational space for trying things out and discovering together. This class will look deeper into varying aspects of the theory of performance: concept, generating content, research and staging. We will consider the strategies of subversion of form, of interruption from normative expectations.

We will consider everyday experience, randomness, abstraction and performance as a space for social change. We will create rituals, consider sacred space, and healing as possibility. We will observe, review and appreciate lists, timing, gathering and collecting.  Performing, embodiment, communicating the body: gender, race and identity.  Recovery, restoration and healing is made possible. Appreciating in-progress, process, or how do we give and receive feedback. Humor and absurdity is appreciated.

We will have a workshop on how we translate our performance into performance writing. We will look at performance scores such as with Fluxus. The visual and prop aspect of performing:  such as objects, accessories, the archive, design and costume. Listening, finding voice, silence and giving and taking commands, and deviation from dominant forms of entertainment and product.  Hopefully with deeper understanding, we will seek to challenge and stimulate our own creative content to produce innovative, thought-provoking  performance.  Students will present their own work either individually or in groups, write about the theory and content of their production and have assigned readings to supplement the assignments and their areas of concentration. There will be guest artists, and we will attend performances and art events. Finley will update the description closer to the course with field trips. In past classes we have attended Skirball, La Mama, The New Museum, The Grey Gallery, The Guggenheim and The Museum of Modern Art. We will also visit the archives at NYU.

Professor Ella Shohat
ASPP-UT 1006–001 (Undergraduate section - seniors)
ASPP-GT 2006-001 (Graduate section)
Monday, 3:30 - 7:05pm
4 points

From their inception in the 19th century, the technologies of representations as embodied in still and moving images were shaped within the imperial imaginary of race, gender, and nation. Circulated across the globe, these representations performed a pivotal role in mediating between distant and different cultural geographies linked to imperial expansionism. The apparatus of the real which manufactured seemingly neutral documentation of race and indigeneity was vital for the construction of a coherent sense of a world order. For over a century, the accumulated images and sounds have generated an archive with a claim to objective historical authority. At the same time, the cinematic archive came to be formative for the narration of anticolonial national histories, entering into the stream of newly formed hegemonic and resistant representations, especially around re-remembering a time and a place prior to colonial traumas. Over the past few decades, the cinematic archive, meanwhile, has also become a source for creative artistic practices across a wide mediatic spectrum generating varied forms of critical knowledge. They have also actively generated possibilities for counter-archival practices in the form of found-footage documentaries, mockumentaries, hybrid docufictions, music videos, and interactive web projects. In this interdisciplinary course, we will study the intricate relationship between the archive and the counter-archive, exploring diverse aesthetic strategies, including deconstructive recontextualization, satirical montages, performative reenactments, and digital experimentations.

Professor Kathy Engel
ASPP-UT 1070-001 (Seniors with instructor’s permission)
ASPP-GT 2070-001 (Graduate section)
Wednesdays 3:30 - 7:05pm
4 points

The Mexican poet Homero Aridjis, former ambassador from Mexico to Switzerland, the Netherlands, and UNESCO, and founder and president of the Group of 100, an environmental association of artists and scientists, writes:
I live in a state of poetry, because for me, being and making poetry are the same. If the poem is to lyrically, surprisingly, uncover truths hard to embrace, isn’t it then rooted in love? To work at the reveal of the poem takes love for language, image, form and disturbance of/through form, and the possibility of transformation? And isn’t that a way of resisting tyranny, dominance?
We will explore, read deeply and closely, poems that invite readers/listeners to ask hard questions, look and hear hard images, grapple with contradiction, translation, poetic inheritance and invention. We will explore poems from different times and places, written and spoken, danced and sung, on the page, on cement, on the screen. We will look closely at how they were made and will also write in conversation with what we read and hear. We will look at poems born in struggles for liberation, how rage, grief and love move in the same body of work. What does it mean to write from and of a specific time and place? What makes a work timeless? We’ll look at relationships between poems, and also essays and letters. What drives the poem? How does the individual voice interact with the notion of a collective voice? What moves us, teaches us? What are the poems that sustain, that dare, that push, that offer us new eyes. That liberate. Let’s soak in them, ask them, listen. Read write & pause &…

Excerpt from You Are Who I Love

- Aracelis Girmay

…You protecting the river You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick
You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose
You taking your medicine, reading the magazines
You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they

know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.
You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe
You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet
You are who I love, you
reciting Darwish, then June…

Professor Shanté Paradigm Smalls
ASPP-GT 2001 (MA Arts Politics Students Only)
Thursdays, 10:30am - 2:05pm
4 points

What are some of the issues that impact arts, politics, and the intersection of arts & politics? There are many! This course introduces Arts Politics MA students to methodological (systems of approach to an area of study), critical (analysis, theory), and discursive (what is being talked about/discussed at a broader level) tools to engage with the selected themes and art objects for the course.

The course will focus on reading, watching, listening, participating, observing, and writing in order to engage questions such as: what is the relationship between art and politics/the political? How does geography, embodiment, time period, genre, and other factors shift what politics are and how artists, art critics, scholars, and others engage with art as a political tool and a political method? How do we deploy writing, thinking, and discussion as aesthetic, civic, and intellectual responses to global politics?

Sitting with these questions, the course will engage three main themes: criticism, institutions, embodiment. The course tasks consist of reading, seeing visual art work, watching films, workshopping with small groups, and writing and final paper. Readings may include: bell hooks, Art On My Mind; John Berger, Ways of Seeing; Edouard Glissant, A New Region of the World; Theodor Adoro, Aesthetics; Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’,”; nikki a greene, Grime, Glitter, & Glass; Okwui Enwezo et al. PostWar Revisited; Joseph Pierce Speculative Relations; Laura Marks, The Fold; Tina Campt, Listening to Images.

There will be site visits to galleries, museums, and festivals, as well as guests to our class and invitations to attend relevant lectures, workshops, and talks. Students will write a final paper, make a presentation, and participate in a paper workshop.

Professor Luis Rincon Alba
ASPP-UT 1006-002 (Undergraduates only- sophomores, juniors, and seniors)
Thursdays, 3:30 - 7:05pm
4 points

This class explores the modes through which music has expanded understandings of race and ethnicity and how it has shaped the critical understanding of performance and the modes this expansion has shaped and how it manifests throughout New York City’s musical soundscapes. It pays close attention to the participation of the colonial in the formation of the contemporary political and aesthetic landscape while also defining the forces that shape culture and art on a global scale while taking advantage of how the city locally reflects these global and historical dynamics. The class maintains the tension among multiple elements such as race and ethnicity but also class, gender, and sexuality to offer an intersectional perspective of the political role that ancestral and contemporary musical performance played in anti-racist activism and social organizing.
We will also practice simple but meaningful musical exercises aimed at giving students tools to listen in detail while also understanding how a sense of orientation and alignment resides at the heart of Black and Indigenous musical performance. Students will develop skills to write about musical performance in the broadest sense of the term. However, they will also have chances to seek, explore, and question ethical and political modes to include music in their own artistic practice. The class is structured in a way that allows students to gain tools to engage in detailed listening. Subsequently, these tools will foreground their capacity to richly and productively describe musical performance in their writing. No musical practice or previous knowledge is required.
The course involves attendance to live performance, sound installations and a variety of events involving sound and music. This will give students a unique opportunity to experience the wide range of offers the city has to offer for music and sound experimentation. When possible, these events will coincide with the time of the class but in some instances, attendance will happen outside of the course’s regular schedule.