New, Revised, and Special Topics Courses (Spring 2025)

While some PMA instructors will allow students to enroll in classes that overlap, not all do. If your proposed Spring 2025 schedule includes overlaps, please consult with the faculty in question before enrolling so that you can adjust your enrollment plans if necessary.

Instructor: Mendi Obadike

Class Schedule: T 11:15 a.m. - 1:45 p.m. (3 credits)

What can sound tell us about culture, power, and ideology? Does it echo the information given to us by images? Does the information translate across media? Or does sonic information speak in a fundamentally different way? Does it tell us about other subjects or does it tell us information that contradicts what vision describes? What do we have to gain when we sharpen our critical tools for interpreting the work of sound or recognizing the cultural values inherent in sonic communication? Critical Listening Strategies answers that last question with a necessarily interdisciplinary approach. We will familiarize ourselves with critical listening strategies offered by sound artists and sound theorists to identify strategies for listening. We will develop new practices of listening critically and creatively as a foundation for further analysis and action.

Instructor: Mendi Obadike and Keith Obadike

Class Schedule: W 11:15 a.m. - 1:45 p.m. (3 credits)

What do we learn when we turn an ear to the commons? Who determines what sounds are desirable or undesirable in a community and what are the stakes of that negotiation when it comes to public space? This seminar will study the ways that individuals and communities use sound and music to self-identify, claim space, and shape their public spaces. We will engage the work of artists who have called our attention to the social aspects of listening. We will listen to public art projects, films, concerts, field recordings, installations, informal sonic practices, and political interventions as we read about the contested control of public space.

Instructor: Kristen Warner

Class schedule: T 11:15 a.m. - 2:15 p.m. (3 credits)

When people (academics usually) write about cult movies they are typically talking about films like Rocky Horror Picture Show or Casablanca or The Big Lebowski. Rarely, if ever, are Coming to America or The Color Purple or Friday--films with predominantly Black casts and seemingly marketed toward Black audiences--also considered within the canon of cult. This kind of exclusion begs the central question of the course: What is Black Cult Media?

Instructor: Sabine Haenni

Class schedule: W 2:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. (4 credits)

Cinema has been understood as a major twentieth-century force that helped reorganize public life, through the ways in which it adapted new technologies, shaped new modes of spectatorship and sociality, and ushered in particular forms of modernity. In the early twenty-first century, digital media are understood as effecting maybe even more radical transformations of public life. We will be reading theoretical works that consider the relationship between cinema, media, and public life, focusing on the multiple and changing ways in which media help shape mainstream and alternative social geographies, publics, and counter-publics, analog and digital public spheres. Theoretical readings are paired with films and possibly other media objects that provide case studies for how cinema and media can help us think through and complicate theoretical questions. 

In the past we’ve read theories of the public sphere and of social space, and looked at urban spaces, leisure spaces, festival spaces, and other aspects of “public life.” Given the scope of the topic, the specific content and the case studies of the syllabus are malleable. I would like to hear from students interested in the seminar topic (how cinema and media shape public life) in order to better incorporate these interests in the 2025 syllabus: what kinds of cinema and/or media are you invested in, what are you currently researching, or want to research? If you’re just interested but don’t know yet in what exactly, it’s great to know that, too. Please contact Sabine Haenni, sh322@cornell.edu, this fall if the seminar topic interests you.

Instructor: Karen Jaime

Class schedule: T/TH 2:30 p.m. - 4:10 p.m. (4 credits)

This hybrid (undergraduate seniors/ graduate) course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self, and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.