This course investigates the role new media – social media, in particular – has played in various large-scale social movements across the Middle East in the last decade. From the prominence of Facebook in the “Arab Spring” and of Twitter during the Gezi Park protests to the critical use of WhatsApp in the Syrian civil war, the region has witnessed the emergence of new media networks and practices in politically volatile contexts. Forging media and politics in unprecedent ways, such cases exemplify a resourceful deploying of media in ways that reconfigure conventional methods of political activity and activism. Moving from case to case, we will first study the emergent agents and the publics of new media across various social movements. Then, we will analyze these movements to critically attend to both the political affordances and limitations in these new media ecologies.

This course considers questions of race, identity, ideology, and urban infrastructure as represented in American cinema (especially during the 1970s) and as interrogated by theorists and thinkers working in the areas of Black Studies and Afro-pessimism, queer theory and affect studies, Indigenous Studies, and other interdisciplinary fields. Placing particular emphasis of films that engage questions concerning white masculinity and set in New York City, including Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, and The French Connection, the course considers the implications of decentering whiteness in film/cultural studies, particularly by putting these films in conversation with the aforementioned scholarly movements. We will likewise look backward, placing 1970s cinema in the context of earlier social problem films from the era of classical Hollywood; look forward, to the emergence the Hollywood “blockbuster” in the 1980s era of Reagan and ascendent neo-liberalism; and, finally, look elsewhere, toward other accounts of race, politics, and sociality as depicted by Black and Brown filmmakers, including Spike Lee, Amir Bahrani, Kasi Lemmons, and Barry Jenkins, among others. Class will be conducted in New York City for the first 2 weeks of the block. .

The 20th century French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, who was central to the history and development of psychoanalytic film theory, describes desire as an insatiable feature of human existence. As Lacan puts it, “Desire is the desire for desire.” In this light, this course examines questions of desire, ethics, politics, sexuality, gender, and power through a survey of major cinematic genres (melodrama, historical drama, comedy, horror, musicals, social problem films, thrillers, etc.) and national cinemas (Soviet montage, Italian neo-realism, the French new wave, and other waves in filmmaking from Iran, Japan, South Korea, and more). Authors/texts likely to be covered in the course include Todd McGowan, Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, Homi Bhabha, Lauren Berlant, Patricia Gherovici, Sheldon George, and more.

This course offers an introduction to canonical texts of psychoanalytic theory, including such luminaries as Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Donald Winnicott, and Nancy Chodorow, among others. We will emphasize the intersections between psychoanalysis and other modes of inquiry, placing special attention on the influence of psychoanalytic theory on contemporary philosophy, political theory, and cultural studies. We will likewise read texts by analysts who have attempted, explicitly, to link psychoanalysis with philosophy, including Robert Stolorow and Donna Orange, both of whom are central figures at the Contemporary Institute for Psychoanalysis (Los Angeles) where our class will meet daily, and we will likewise meet with a variety of other analysts affiliated with the Institute, discussing both their writings and clinical practices. Finally, the course will involve regular field trips to museums, theaters, festivals, and other cultural events around Los Angeles as students learn to develop and apply psychoanalytic theories to a wide range of cultural objects and experiences. Field trips will likely include visits to the Getty Museum, LACMA, the New Beverly Theater, Cinerama Dome, and the Egyptian Theater, as well as music and comedy venues.