Courses
Our interdisciplinary courses, offered in different locations in the Americas, combine the face-to-face quality of traditional classrooms with immersive site visits and online collaboration. Whether through semester-length seminars or thematically-based summer intensives, Hemi courses work to expand conventional understandings of about the production and transmission of knowledge. Collaborative pedagogies, interdisciplinary research methodologies, an emphasis on situated and site-specific knowledge, field work, and physical practice comprise some of the strategies through which we are redefining pedagogy and knowledge production. While course materials are accessible only to registered students, course information is available below. To see information about our yearly practice-based course for emerging artists, please visit the EmergeNYC section of our site.
This course explores the many ways in which artists and activists use art (performance, mural paintings, gra ti, writing, music) to make a social intervention in the Americas. We begin the course by examining several theories about art and activism (from Plato and Aristotle to Brecht, Boal, Buenaventura, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Foucault among others) and then focus on issues of agency, space, event, and audience in relation to major political movements (revolution, dictatorship, democracy, globalization, and human rights) as seen in the work of major practitioners. Jesusa Rodriguez will lead an intensive one-week performance workshop as part of the course. Performances, video screenings, guest lectures, and visits to FOMMA, Chiapas Media Project, a Zapatista community and other activist projects will provide an additional dimension to the questions raised by the theoretical readings and discussions. Students are encouraged to develop their own sites of investigation and present their work as a final presentation and paper.
Summer 2011 Intro: Art and Resistance in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico
This course explores the many ways in which theorists and theatre practitioners have thought about the ways in which staged action (whether in film, theatre, or politics) pacifies, activates, interpolates, and manipulates viewers. We will explore concepts such as identification, voyeurism, narcissism, bearing witness, percepticide, spect-actor, and others.