Dr Eray Cayli CBG 7.11

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe and MSc in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe (LSE & Sciences Po). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Since the late 18th century, a growing body of European cultural production has focused on raising awareness about suffering by aestheticizing it. How has this production shaped customary understandings of the relationship between violence and culture and, in so doing, imagined Europe and Europeanness? Specifically, how has it informed widespread understandings of violence and culture being mutually antithetical, and imaginations of Europe and Europeanness premised upon this antithesis? What are the critical responses with which these understandings and imaginaries have been met, and how might they be entangled in the very object of their criticism due to their approach to the relations between power, ethics, and aesthetics? This course explores these questions through contemporary artistic practice, focusing especially on its responses to colonialism, racism, imperialism, patriarchy, and Anthropocene(s). The teaching format comprises seminars, requiring everyone to show up having read the weekly texts, having reflected on them and having prepared to discuss them at length during the seminar. As and when relevant and logistically possible, seminars may involve visits to museums and galleries in London.

This course is delivered through a combination of seminars and lectures totalling a minimum of 22.5 hours across Lent Term.  This year, some or all of this teaching will be delivered through a combination of recorded lectures and student presentations, flipped lectures (online discussion of weekly topics) and in-person and online seminars. This course includes a reading week in Week 6 of the Lent Term.

The formative component of coursework comprises the following:

- a research question and long abstract in preparation for essays, submitted at the end of reading week;

- a new and improved research question and long abstract in preparation for essays, presented orally and in person the final week of term.

In addition to the above, students are required to come to class every week having read the weekly texts and prepared to discuss them at length.

• Susan Sontag (1977) On Photography. New York: Picador.
• Paul Virilio (1989) War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. London and New York: Verso. 
• John Taylor (1998) Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Susan Sontag (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.
• Ariella Azoulay (2003) Death's Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Ariella Azoulay (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books.
• Susan Sliwinski (2011) Human Rights in Camera. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick (2014) The Violence of the Image. London: IB Tauris.
• Forensic Architecture (2014) Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
• Allen Feldman (2015) Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Essay (100%, 5000 words) in the ST.