Month: January 2016

For information about student forums that are being offered this semester, check out: https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/departments/Reg/StudentForums/Public/ApprovedStudentForums.pdf.

Interested students should reach out to the student leader(s) to attend the class and sign the Student Forum Registration Roster. The student leader(s) must submit the completed roster to the Registrar’s Office by 5pm on the last day of Drop/Add.

There is a 15 student course limit, and the student leader(s) have already been enrolled in the course.

Here is a  new course we just added to our Spring roster. Anth 309/AMST 311, The Anthropology of Digital Media, taught by Jordan Kraemer, will meet on Tuesdays from 1:10-4 pm in Anthropology, Room 6.

Anthropology of Digital Media

Networked media technologies, from the Internet to mobile phones, are reshaping many aspects of daily life, selfhood, and society. While digital and electronic media seem to make the world smaller, ostensibly facilitating global flows of capital, people, goods, and ideas, this course examines how these technologies co-constitute particular kinds of subjects, accommodating some uses and modes of living more than others. Digital platforms and services, for example, are often designed with elite, technically savvy users in mind, yet are taken up transnationally in diverse and unexpected ways. Media, like other technologies, never exist separately from social life as independent agents of change, but instead emerge through contingent histories, material realities, constellations of discourse, and unequal distributions of power. This course introduces students to the anthropology of digital media and culture, drawing on empirical, ethnographic accounts from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including feminist technology studies, actor-network theory, queer theory critiques, new materialisms, postcolonial studies, and social informatics. Topics include space and place online, media publics, new transnationalisms, design anthropology, big data, social networks, virtuality and embodiment, the social construction of users, mobility and disability, and telecommunication infrastructures.

We will consider emerging media practices in cross-cultural and transnational settings, to examine the situated contexts of design and use, while asking broadly what consequences these technologies have for our social worlds. This course requires intensive reading and writing, including a final project that can be undertaken in a variety of ways, such as an original ethnographic or creative project exploring an emerging media practice.

This is a new course taught by Yotam Hotam who is visiting from the University of Haifa.

Zionism: A Political Theology

CHUM 319 Spring 2016 M 1:10-4:00 CFH 106

This seminar examines the political theology of Zionism by focusing on the intersections of secular aspirations and theological notions embedded in the ideology and practice of the national Jewish mission. To this end, the seminar is designed to explore the modern concept of political theology. In analyzing a range of selected primary and secondary sources, it will also bring this concept to bear on an understanding of the Zionist secular adaptations of theological concepts, such as heresy, faith, inner-experience, and redemption. Finally, the seminar will focus on how this type of political-theology informed the national Jewish language, symbolism, literature, social institutions, and social and political imagination.

https://iasext.wesleyan.edu/regprod/!wesmaps_page.html?crse=014538&term=1161