Courses :: CULS C701 Topic: Space, Place and Media in a Global Context
The goal of this course is to encourage new critical imaginings on the relationship among:
--film and media technologies,
--the production of space and
--the global dynamics that construct cities
From the last few decades of the 20th century, the English language academy has witnessed
a growing body of scholarship on the built environment, global space and mediated
experience. What experiences are enabled or disabled, represented or unrepresented in
this interface among globalization, urban landscapes and media technologies? Readings
will attend to the interdisciplinary scope of this inquiry across prominent theories of
space (such as Lefebvre), film and media studies (such as Morley and Curtin), urban
studies (such as Sassen), critical geography (such as Massey), feminist critique (such as
Kaplan and Grewal), postcolonial studies (such as Patke and Chen) and theories of
transnational production (such as Naficy and Berry).
It is expected that students will pursue research projects linked to any socio-geographic
context of interest to them. At the same time, in the interest of interrogating how the
theories of the course might be located within a particular geographic arena, screenings
and discussions will focus on recent representations of and interventions into cities of
the Asia Pacific in film and media. During the same period that the above theorizations
have appeared in the academy, urban centers of the Asia Pacific region have emerged as
sites constructed, as Rolando Tolantino has phrased, in a “drive for progress.” What do
these two fields have to say to each other?
--How might attention to film and media representations in the Asia Pacific provide a
corrective to scholarship that can be uncritical of the “location” through which it is
produced?
--How might such theories help us to understand particular urban experiences in the Asia
Pacific?
--And how might both help (or not help) us to see what lies between or below seemingly
“globalized” spaces – geometries of memory, sexuality, gender, trauma or diaspora.
