Social Justice and the Image

Catalog description

How do we perceive injustice? What are the roles of images in our perceptions of justice? If justice lies in the eyes of the observer, as the saying goes, what are the eyes seeing? Creating an image does not only mean creating the strictly visual, but also words that capture the imagination. Where do those words lead us? Social Justice and the Image (GA/GH) prompts students to reflect upon image-making and the reception of images in a variety of social justice contexts, to study the public claims made upon these images, and to explore interdisciplinary texts on social justice that assist us in interpreting those claims. Students will be introduced to a variety of critical approaches to social justice, and reflect upon how these images are connected to social movements, visual rhetoric, poetic protest, and rights-building. Readings will generally be determined by the instructor, and may include the work of authors such as Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Asho Zarathushtra, Mary Wollenstonecraft, Louis Althusser, Gordon Avery, Gloria Anzaldúa, John Rawls, Roland Barthes, Warren J. Blumenfeld, Judith Butler, Virginia Held, Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway, bell hooks, and Seyla Benhabib, and Ximena Zúñiga. The subjects of study will be images, justice, and the categories ascribed to them, but also the possibility of challenging those categories. Rather than focus on how justice and images are treated by various disciplines separately, students will be asked to explain how various disciplines speak to (or perhaps ignore) one another, and what is missing from the analyses. "Interdisciplinary work," Roland Barthes wrote, "is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let itself go) . . . Interdisciplinarity consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one." Social Justice and the Image invites students to "let go" with scholarly intensity, to explore what happens when disciplinary insights converge. ENGL 15 is recommended prior to COMM 222N