Fall 2026 Courses

Professor Karen Finley
ASPP-UT 1028-001 (seniors only)
ASPP-GT 2028-001 (graduate students)
Wednesday 3-6:35pm
4 points

Professor Laura Harris
ASPP-UT 1010-001 (open to Sophomores, Juniors, Seniors)
Tuesdays, 2-5:35pm
4 points

This seminar aims to give students both a conceptual and practical grounding in the range of issues and approaches by which arts politics can be understood. The course will be framed by the following considerations: What are the institutional, discursive, and ideological contexts that shape the objects, images, sounds or texts we call “art?” What are the links between cultural spaces-- the museum, the movie-theater, the gallery, the music/dance hall, the bookstore, the fashion runway, the public street, television, cyber space-- and the larger realm of politics? And how do these relationships impact, implicitly or explicitly, the ways we create, curate, or study the arts? How do consumers play an active role in the reception of cultural products? What is the relation between formally promulgated cultural policy and the tacit knowledge that artists call upon to get their work into the world? What dimensions of the broader cultural terrain are made legible through artistic practice? What are the means through which art intervenes in the political arena? “Art” will be studied as a site of contested representations and visions, embedded in power formations-- themselves shaped by specific historical moments and geographical locations. Given contemporary global technologies, cultural practices will also be studied within the transnational transit of people and ideas. Such issues as the legal and constitutional dimensions of censorship, the social formation of taste, the consumption of stars, the bio-politics of the body, transnational copyrights law-- will all necessarily entail intersectional analyses incorporating the insights of critical race, postcolonial, feminist, queer, disability and ecological studies. We will read texts that offer theoretical formulations of key concepts and consider case studies that give us an opportunity to revise and/or extend these concepts. Students will also be invited to explore the questions raised in this class in the context of their own artistic and political practices.

Professor Shanté Paradigm Smalls
ASPP-GT 2001 Open to all NYU MA students, space permitting
PERF-GT 2312-001 Performance Studies only
Mondays, 11am- 2:35pm
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.

Professors Kathy Engel and  Ella Shohat
ASPP-GT 2049-001 Graduate students only
Tuesday 2:30pm - 6:05pm
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 Kathy Engel
ASPP-GT 2002-001 (OPEN ONLY TO ARTS POLITICS STUDENTS – NO EXCEPTIONS)
Wednesdays 10:30am - 2:05pm
4 points

Methods & Criticism I encourages and 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 along with a range of other materials. How do speculative fiction, poetry and essays, along with hybrid forms, imagine new worlds and forms of collectivity amidst dystopian futures? How might boundary crossing, time shifting, multigenerational and multi voiced texts help us to reimagine the political and creative dimensions of our practices? Additionally, how might critical readings and contextualization of thse writings impel us into new possibilities for thinking critically about the terms and forms of our own work?

The invitation is to explore the relationship of the texts with your own practice(s), challenges, and imaginings that unfold for you over the course of this one-year program and into the time beyond the program. How is this current historical moment calling you to reflect, shift and/or lead? What are the frameworks, methodologies, tools, connections and experiences you need in order to evolve and sustain your practice? How do we look back, and forward at the same time, and also engage a senses of the living archive as well as interspecies connection. In addition to our critique sessions, analytical readings and discussions, we’ll write weekly 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 Luis Rincon Alba
ASPP-GT 1006-002 (Seniors only)
ASPP-GT 2006-002 (Graduate Students only)
Thursdays, 2-5:35pm
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.

Professor Luis Rincon Alba
ASPP-GT 1006-001 (Seniors only)
ASPP-GT 2006-001
Fridays, 12-3:35pm

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 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.