Skip to main content

Cultural Studies Course Offerings

2023/24 Course Offerings

Please see the academic calendar for more course information or Browse Classes for scheduling information.

Fall 2023

  • KS100: Studying Popular Culture
  • KS101 (online): Exploring Cultural Studies
  • KS203 (online):  Popular Culture and Ideology
  • KS205 (online): Cartoons and Comics
  • KS340L: Performance Cultures

Winter 2024

  • KS101: Exploring Cultural Studies
  • KS215 (online): Game Cultures
  • KS220: Networked & Digital Cultures
  • KS340m: Being Black in Diaspora
  • KS400q: Post+Punk Cultures

2023/24 Special Topics Descriptions

KS340l Performance Cultures

Performance often describes a specialized domain of aesthetic activity related to the performing arts: we know, for example, that actors, dancers, and musicians perform. But performance also illuminates a wide range of other cultural behaviors and activities: religious clerics “perform” ceremonies, business administrators conduct “performance evaluations,” legislation “acts” upon us as citizens, and as individuals we perform things like our gender, class, nationality, and ethnicity every day through small and often unconscious acts.

This course takes a broad-spectrum approach to the performance concept in order to introduce students to performance as a key concept within culture and communication studies. Throughout the course, we will investigate what performance is, what performance does, and what it means to use performance as a paradigm to analyze culture (“performance as”). We will explore such topics as role-play, ritual, performativity, performative utterances, and state pageantry. The course will be organized in three discrete units: Performance in Everyday Life, Gender and Performance, and Performance and Power. There will be a summative assignment at the end of each unit and a capstone final project.

KS340m Being Black in Diaspora

This course complicates understandings of place and space by thinking through and with various Black and African Studies perspectives to discuss what it means to be Black in diaspora. By considering the ongoing legacies of slavery and colonialism, we will prioritize Black perspectives that are attentive to Black life in ways that illuminate both the overlapping and nuanced experiences of Black people globally. We will also decentre North American experiences, particularly those of African Americans,  by prioritizing Black/African cultural expressions emerging out of Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle Passage. This course will allow students to think about the dynamic implications of neocolonialism and Black resistance worldwide.

KS400q Post+Punk Cultures: Real and Imagined

This course engages questions of punk cultures and post-punk cultures.  It will look at the punk cultures and punk ethics and their realizations in fiction such as cyberpunk, solarpunk, and hopepunk.