Rhetoric of Performance

This course is an experimental lab in performance ethnography and collaborative qualitative research. Students will work through individual and small group projects using participant-observation, reenactment, interviewing, charting, map-making, photography, documentary, collecting, and other methods, in order to investigate the formation of institutional conditions and subjectivities. Readings in history, critical theory, sociology, cultural studies, performance studies, and urban and architectural studies, including texts by Arendt, Foucault, Eco, Kafka, Spivak, Weber, and Zizek, will ground our investigations and our methodologies. Themes we will explore include space, procedure, law, and time.