The 2024 SIAH application is due on March 1, 2024 at 11:59PM.
More-than-human Worlds: The Poetics and Politics of Life
June 20 – August 16, 2024
What becomes possible when we decenter the human in the arts and humanities? This course aims to cultivate an appreciation of the more-than-human-world —from plants to animals to water to rock—as agentive, animate, and inextricably entangled with human lifeworlds. To this end, the course will introduce frameworks and methods ranging from Indigenous epistemologies to critical animal studies to multispecies ethnography, while reckoning with histories and present realities of racial formation, settler colonialism, extractive industries, captivity, war, and other forms of violence. Ultimately, students in the course will be encouraged to cross disciplinary as well as species boundaries in crafting imaginative responses to the pressing problem of the differential mattering of lives.
In the initial weeks, the Summer Institute teaching team invites students to engage with texts and invited speakers that explore the crisis around conceptions of the human and the toll of human-centeredness, such as climate change and species extinction. With the conceptual tools and frameworks of Indigenous Studies and other critical intellectual traditions, students will explore the more-than-human entanglements at work in multiple forms and genres, like oral narratives, literary fiction and poetry, visual arts, cinema/time-based art, and other forms of storytelling, signifying, and witnessing. The second half of the course allows students to further explore those themes and develop, discuss, and produce in-depth research projects (which can include creative work) with the mentorship of the teaching team. A background in the arts and humanities is not what is most important; rather, it is your interest in joining a respectful, open, and at times difficult conversation about the role of the arts and humanities in reconceptualizing a world that holds many worlds.
Learn more about the 2024 teaching team, application process, and sign up for an information session.