Entry requirements

Students admitted to any of one or two year Master programmes within the humanities and social sciences or with a B.A. in humanities or social sciences.

Learning outcomes

The aim of the course is to provide an understanding of the anthropological study of interpretive and communicative practices and cultural norms that govern membership, while seeking to understand the experiences and perspectives of those excluded based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. Drawing on Disability Studies, Philosophy, and Education this course explores which sensory, physical, and cognitive abilities are understood as "common sense" requirements for successful communication, correct understanding, and valid interpretation within diverse social, cultural, and aesthetic practices.

Upon successful completion of this course, students are expected to have the skills necessary to

• explain how the production and legitimation of sensory hierarchies within specific cultural practices determine legitimate ways of experiencing and understanding the world
• analyse the normative definitions of sensory and bodily experience that guide theories and philosophies of communication, interpretation, and understanding
• analyse how binary representations of culture (“high”/“low,” “literate”/“non-literate”) legitimize specific ways of making sense of the world at the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, and class
• understand the interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies as a scholarly extension of, and counterpart to rights-based activism and, relatedly, to the educative and communicative practices of disability arts and culture
• explain the congruities and tensions between Disability Studies and other critical fields of inquiry including, but not limited to feminist studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies
• situate their own research interests within recent Disability Studies, Education, and Philosophy scholarship concerning the relationship between politics and aesthetics

Content

Research at the intersection of Disability Studies and Anthropology raises new questions about the vulnerable sensorium across a range of cultural traditions, encompassing verbal and non-verbal forms of sense-making, communication, and interpretation. This course draws on Disability Studies, Philosophy, and Education to uncover the aesthetic and political layers embedded in a cluster of related binary oppositions:

1. communication/miscommunication
2. understanding/misunderstanding, and
3. interpretation/misinterpretation.

This course will explore which sensory, physical, and cognitive abilities are understood as "common sense" requirements for successful communication, correct understanding, and valid interpretation within diverse social, cultural, and aesthetic practices. Individuals and communities excluded from dominant cultural traditions use a variety of approaches, tactics, and media to make sense of their lived experiences: written and oral transmission; communicative forms that include song, dance, poetry, and musical performance. Increasingly, electronic media is used by these groups to remake traditional “texts”. Who decides how to communicate, understand and interpret these forms? In this way, the diverse interpretive practices that different cultures use to draw out the meanings of texts (broadly defined) call into question neat distinctions between successful and unsuccessful communication, and challenge the dominant frameworks of knowledge required for accurate understanding, and valid interpretation. The very forms of membership that shape individual and collective identities within a given aesthetic and cultural context also mark exclusions. They make the marginalized invisible, they silence them, and they render them physically absent from these sites of practice.

The anthropological study of interpretive and communicative practices must therefore encompass the cultural norms that govern membership, while seeking to understand the experiences and perspectives of those excluded based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. Rather than serving only as stable reference points for anthropological study, interpretive and communicative practices may thus be understood as forms of “dissensus”, described by Rancière (2004:139) as the conflict between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it, or between several sensory regimes and/or “bodies”.

With this theoretical framing in mind, and focusing specifically on disabled people, disability, and sensory experience, the course take up two main questions:

1. how do the interpretive practices within different cultures ascribe meaning to texts in relation to a normative sensorium capable of sensory experience, physical movement, and cognition defined as capable of producing good or correct understanding, communication, and interpretation?
2. what forms of “dissensus” emerge through verbal and non-verbal forms of misunderstanding, miscommunication, and misinterpretation, when individuals and communities rendered invisible and inaudible, claim their rights to be present?

Instruction

Teaching activities include series of lectures and seminars. Class attendance is obligatory. The language of instruction is English.

Assessment

Each week, students will submit short responses to assigned readings. Twice in the semester, students will complete sensory studies, relating readings to personal experiences at live events. Students will also prepare a ten-minute class presentation that analyses an ethnographic video of their own choice.