Media Arts Pedagogies, Transcultural Dialogues, & Bioethics

Catalog description

The course explores how emerging technologies impact beliefs, practices, research, and communication regarding the nature of knowledge, learning, teaching, remix culture, visuality, materiality, self, and art. Engage with emerging technologies to learn about media arts and pedagogies that address bioethical issues of injustice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in which the borders of self are questioned. Course content considers the premise that humans are not discreet entities but connected through technologies in ways that are socio-cultural, geopolitical, and techno-biological. Through course experiential activities, gamification pedagogies, and a virtual fieldwork component in building and piloting ethical and accessible educational practices in online teaching, students explore identity formation encoded in social-technological practices. The Transcultural Dialogue project builds international relationships creating collaborative art and generating dialogue. The transcultural dialogue theme weaves, throughout the course, issues of contemporary visual culture, cultural practices in relation to particular places, and pedagogical approaches designed to erode assumptions, ignorance, and misunderstandings. Through media arts pedagogies, the course raises bioethical concerns such as systemic injustice and approaches creativity as a social process in developing curriculum and teaching with emergent technologies.