RHET 450YDisability, Philosophy & Media

Catalog

This seminar examines visual media through the lens of Critical Disability Studies (CDS), approaching disability not merely as a representational category but as a philosophical problem concerning embodiment, perception, and knowledge. Drawing on thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Ranciere, and Giorgio Agamben, alongside disability theorists including Lennard J. Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Tobin Siebers, Jasbir Puar, and Erin Manning, the course investigates how visual media-ranging from film and contemporary art to AI-generated images and videos-produce, regulate, or disrupt normative regimes of bodily capacity, sensory experience, and movement. Central questions include how visual and technological dispositifs organize perception, how gesture and motion function as aesthetic and epistemic forms, and how mediation reshapes the conditions of spectatorship and subjectivity. Designed as a theory-and-methods seminar, the course equips students to develop philosophically grounded analyses of visual culture that attend to bodily difference, instability, and variation as sites of ethical, political, and aesthetic significance.