Understanding cultural politics

Interdisciplinary Elective Course

Cultural politics refers to the way that culture—including people’s attitudes, opinions, beliefs and perspectives, as well as the media and arts—shapes society and political opinion, and gives rise to social, economic and legal realities. This course is designed to address what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture by bringing together text and visual art that offer diverse modes of engagement with theory, cultural production, and politics, to analyse how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, examined, and resolved, and to elucidate how cultural theories and practices intersect with and elucidate analyses of political power. Topics include representation and visual culture; media, film, and communications; popular and elite art forms; the politics of production and consumption; art and aesthetics; the culture industry; cities, architecture, and the spatial; sports and games; global capitalism; value and ideology; power, authority, and institutions; and identity and performance.