2024 Spring Classes

IDA SPRING CLASS — 2024!

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Alternative Futurisms and Radical Worldbuilding

Instructor: Professor Adam Banks and Grace Toléqué

1-4 units (variable units) 

Wednesdays 3:30-6:20pm 

Letter Grade + Credit / No Credit

Presented by IDA the Institute for Diversity in the Arts and Faculty Director Adam Banks. In this course we will explore science fiction and speculative fiction as readers, writers, creators, and organizers to learn how artists engage with futurtist thinking to reimagine and build better worlds in the present. Together we will draw from scholarship across Indigenous, Latinx, Pasifica, Arab, African and Afro futurisms; as well as science fiction and other creative traditions to imagine and build better worlds rooted in liberation and solidarity. Students will explore the groundbreaking television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as one example of alternative futurisms, and will be joined by a special visiting artist and actor from the show’s original cast. Visits by guest artists from across genres will round out this year’s IDA Spring Course. (AFRICAAM 197 CSRE 194DS9, PWR 194DS9)

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IDA ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE CLASS — Spring 2024

Conjure Art 2.0: Ritual Dance Theater in the Making

Instructor: amara tabor-smith

2 Units

TU/THU 11:30am-1:20pm Roble 115

In this course students will engage in the early creative process for a new ritual dance-theater work created by tabor-smith. This (as of yet) untitled piece will utilize movement, text, song and guided rituals, to explore the question of how the myths, parables and oracle practices found in many cultures throughout the world might hold the anecdotes for the environmental and social challenges we face in this current moment in time. Students will be introduced to tabor-smith’s Conjure Art making praxis through this early creative process which will culminate in a studio performance of the work in progress material at the end of quarter. (DANCE 161J)

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IDA FACULTY DIRECTOR COURSE — Spring 2024

AFRICAAM 200N: Funkentelechy: Technologies, Social Justice and Black Vernacular Cultures

 

Wednesdays 3:00pm-4:20pm

4-5 units

Letter / Credit / No-Credit

Instructor: Adam Banks

From texts to techne, from artifacts to discourses on science and technology, this course is an examination of how Black people in this society have engaged with the mutually consitutive relationships that endure between humans and technologies. We will focus on these engagements in vernacular cultural spaces, from storytelling traditions to music and move to ways academic and aesthetic movements have imagined these relationships. Finally, we will consider the implications for work with technologies in both school and community contexts for work in the pursuit of social and racial justice.

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Course Listing