See Schedule of Classes for current section offerings. Topics deal with new media and related issues.

Bringing many divergent discourses into dialogue, this course will investigate the paradoxical links between the religious and the secular as it plays out in Western societies today. In the process of interpreting respective instances of dislocation within minority or marginal communities, we will examine how adherence to religious impulses provides systems of social cohesion and gives a sense of continuity and a sense of belonging (historical, familial, personal). Within this context, we will examine the role of ritual and performance to articulate postmodern and post-secular tendencies to produce new ontologies and new modes of being in this world. Specifically, we will look to performance art to provide a new perspective in reading cultural and religious behavior, sanctioned and unsanctioned forms of transgressions/relationships, rituals, incarceration, and other political struggles. In what ways does performance art become a laboratory for reimagining notions of community, citizenship, power and responsibility? How does performance strategy embody these ideas outside the realm of language? How does the enacted fiction of performance complicate the space between an event, its meaning, and its viewer?

Repeat Rules