New Fall 2021 MALAS Seminar! Europe and Terrorism With Professor Veronica Shapovalov

Europe and Terrorism

MALAS 600C /European Studies 501  | T 16:00-18:40   GMCS  307   

Professor Veronica Shapovalov  

In this course we shall explore the complex historical, cultural, and moral dimensions of terrorism—one of the central political and moral issues of the 21st century.  How did “modern” terrorism evolve in Europe? Why has terrorism become the growing problem in Europe? What is the role of European governments in controlling terrorism? What can the artists’ insights in terrorism teach us about both the concept of terror and the reality of terrorists’ attacks?  How do the unimaginable become reality?    

Together we shall explore and analyze  

* extremist ideologies and religious intolerance in the European cultural context 

* many kinds of terrorism that has been existing in Europe 

* the morality of political violence in general and terrorists’ violence in particular 

* the issues of gender and terrorism 

*  complexity of ideological and cultural dimensions of terrorism   

I hope to keep lecturing to a minimum.   Class discussion is the heart of this course. 

                              

Professor Veronica Shapovalov, Department of European Studies    

Professor Veronica Shapovalov teaches at the Department of European Studies in the European Studies and Russian Programs.  I earned my diploma in Germanic Philology from St. Petersburg State University, M. A. in English Literature from University of Illinois, Springfield, and Ph.D. in Slavic Studies from University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.  In Russia I studied at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. I have been teaching at SDSU for more than 30 years.  My field of research is ego-documents--autobiographies, memoirs, letters, journals--of women prisoners of Soviet labor camps and prisons, of women who were deported in 1941 from the Baltics to Siberia and memoirs of children whose parents were arrested as enemies of the people in the Soviet Union in 1930s. Ego documents make you look at historical and political events through the eyes of witnesses, victims, even perpetrators. That is why Europe and Terrorism is one of my favorite courses.  In this course we’ll look at the acts of terror through the eyes of perpetrators and their relatives, bystanders, victims, historians and political analysts. I worked in the archives of Memorial—the organization that collects and preserves documents related to political repressions in the Soviet Union.  The result of my work is a book Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons. I did extensive research on violence against women in the Soviet labor camps (“Sestrenki, mamki, damki: zhenshchiny i  nasilie v GULAGe (Sisters, Moms, Broads: Women and Violence in the GULAG) and several other articles. I am the editorial board member of the journal Gulag Studies.       

MALAS Fall 2021 Seminar! The Rhetoric of Visual Composing with Professor Jennifer Sheppard!

Rhetoric of Visual Composing 

MALAS 600D/RWS 543, Professor Jennie Sheppard

 

Visual messages are a powerful way to inform, persuade, and educate. Within professional settings, the ability to communicate effectively with supervisors, co-workers, clients, and public audiences through a combination of visual, textual, and spatial elements is an invaluable skill. This course takes a rhetorical and professionally-oriented approach to analyzing, organizing, and communicating ideas through visual and multimodal means. Course readings will draw on scholarship in visual rhetoric and information design. Research and practitioner materials will be used as a basis for evaluating the rhetorical choices in the visual communication work of others and for learning how to apply these concepts to visual composing projects such as infographics, visual branding, and texts for workplace and educational contexts. The focus throughout the course will be on learning to evaluate and craft texts that integrate effective visual strategies to create informative, persuasive, and user-friendly texts. No prior design experience is required.

 

Dr. Sheppard has been a faculty member in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies Department at San Diego State University since 2014. Her research focuses on digital writing, visual and multimodal rhetoric, and professional communication. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Journal of Literacy and Technology, Hybrid Pedagogy, and several edited collections, including Designing Texts: Teaching Visual Communication. She is also co-author of Writer/Designer: A Guide to Making Multimodal Projects. Dr. Sheppard is the 2019 recipient of the SDSU College of Arts and Letters Excellence in Teaching Award.

 

 

New Fall 2021 MALAS Seminar! New MALAS-Associated Faculty! Professor Consuelo Salas's DECOLONIAL RHETORICS

DECOLONIAL RHETORICS

Professor Consuelo Salas

MALAS-600D   02 22280 DECOLONIAL RHETORICS 3.0 Seminar 1530-1810 TH SH-320  C. SALAS

RWS-596   01 23505 DECOLONIAL RHETORICS 3.0 Lecture 1530-1810 TH SH-320  C. SALAS  30/30

In this course students will be introduced to theories and practices of decolonial rhetoric to critically think about key theoretical debates in decolonial theory and the convergence of this movement into the field of rhetoric and composition. The body of work of decolonial rhetoric is very large. Thus, this course will be neither comprehensive nor exhaustive. Instead, this course will provide a brief introduction to decolonial theory and then move on to the original intersections of rhetoric and postcolonial theory and then the eventual move to rhetoric and decolonial theory. 

Concentrating on literacy, story, and composing the course will then explore applications of decolonial rhetorics in the areas of Indigenous rhetoric and Latina/o rhetorics. All the readings have been chosen carefully, centering Latina/o and Indigenous to North American rhetorical scholarship.

Consuelo Salas is an Assistant Professor of Border Rhetorics. As a visual rhetorician and a food studies scholar, her areas of interest include commodification and representations of Mexican and Mexican Americans to U.S. based audiences within “food spaces.” Her areas of interest also include foodways rhetoric, the scholarship of teaching and learning, information literacy, and the intersections of translanguaging and monolingual technological interfaces. Dr. Salas is at work on a book that critically explores images associated with the cultural imaginary of Mexico and their relationship to food and identity. Dr. Salas' co-edited collection Latin@s’ Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think About Food, published with University of Arkansas Press, was awarded the Gourmand World Cookbook third best in the world in the category of Professionals in 2017. Her work can also be found in edited collections, such as Visual Imagery, Metadata, and Multimodal Literacies Across the Curriculum, Food Feminism and Rhetoric, as well as in peer reviewed journals, such as the Community Literacy Journal.  

Our Popular MALAS Seminar, Open to All SDSU Graduate Students is Back for Fall 2021!!! Star Trek, Culture, and History, with Professor John Putman, Rides Again, Boldly Going Where No ... (You Know the Rest!)

MALAS 600B/History 537

Star Trek, Culture, and History

Dr. John Putman

Office: AL 557 | Phone: (619)594-4888 

Email: putman@sdsu.edu

MW 2 to 3:15pm

Star Trek, Culture, and History explores the cultural phenomenon known as Star Trek.  By reading critical academic studies of Star Trek and analyzing numerous episodes viewed in class, this course will address how Star Trek—its seven television series, thirteen movies, three animated series, and more than a thousand novels--reflected historical events, forces, and ideas from 1960s to the early 21st century. In particular we will investigate the relationship between the several television series and the larger historical and cultural context in which they took place. The course will also explore how Star Trek addressed important contemporary social and cultural issues, ranging from race and gender to sexuality and politics.

John Putman 

John Putman (Professor, University of California, San Diego, 2000) is a historian of the modern American West (late 19th and 20th centuries), particularly California and the Pacific coast states. His recent research emphasizes class and gender politics in the urban Northwest. His book Class and Gender Politics in Progressive-Era Seattle was published in 2008 by University of Nevada Press. His other publications include "’A Test of Chiffon Politics’: Gender Politics in Seattle, 1897-1917," Pacific Historical Review (November 2000) and “Racism and Temperance: The Politics of Class and Gender in Late 19th-Century Seattle,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly (Spring 2004). Professor Putman’s current project is a comparative analysis of early 20th-century Pacific Coast expositions. He is also interested in the cultural history of the 20th century United States, in particular, science fiction and Cold War films, and the social and cultural meaning of Star Trek. His courses include the California History, the History of the American West, US History since 1945, Constitutional History of the United States and Star Trek, Culture, and History.  Professor Putman has a forthcoming chapter entitled, "Terrorizing Space: Star Trek, Terrorism, and History" in Star Trek and History(Wiley, April 2013) to correspond with the release of next Star Trek movie.

New MALAS Fall 2021 Seminar with Andy Warhol Curatorial Fellow, Professor Kim Stringfellow: ART 596/MALAS 600D - Art, Environment, and Place

MALAS 600D/ART 596 

Art, Environment, and Place   

Fall 2021 T/TT 2 to 3:15 pm  

Professor Kim Stringfellow

Art, Environment, and Place is a hybrid (mostly online instruction) upper-division undergraduate/ graduate seminar exploring the convergence of interdisciplinary art practice, field-based creative research and environmental studies through focused writing, readings, discussions, and presentations that demonstrate how important environmental issues, ecological concerns, and sustainable design practices are incorporated into the work of contemporary artists and designers.

 

Detailed Course Description
Innovative approaches to form and content are evolving in contemporary art practice that transcends traditional boundaries of art-making. Many artists are integrating various field research strategies borrowed from the natural sciences, geography, and other disciplines to create rich transdisciplinary works of art. Offering a critical examination of place, many of these projects focus on regional histories, Indigenous perspectives, environmental issues and ecological concerns including climate change and environmental justice. Some practitioners incorporate sustainable design into their work or propose actual remediation to ecologically challenged sites. Other practitioners offer activist perspectives or are research-driven, implementing tools of documentarians and journalists—using photography, video, audio writing—and often work collaboratively. The interdisciplinary nature of these artworks encourages a diverse and varied audience.

 

This is a transdisciplinary course and does not require art-specific training. However, creative thinking is required. Course activities center on readings, discussions, presentations, and film screenings. Writing and group discussion are primary activities for this course. Students, working in collaborative groups, are required to post written responses to assigned readings in the discussion forum every week. Projects include an artist research presentation. A final project thesis paper and presentation will be due at the end of the semester.

Kim Stringfellow

Kim Stringfellow is an artist, educator, writer, and independent curator based in Joshua Tree, California. She is a professor at San Diego State University’s School of Art + Design. She received her MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. Claremont Graduate University awarded her an honorary doctoral degree in 2018.

For the past twenty years, Stringfellow’s creative practice has focused on the human-driven transformation of some of the American West’s most iconic arid regions through multi-year, research-based projects merging cultural geography, public practice, and experimental documentary into creative, socially engaged transmedia experiences. These art-centered projects combine writing, photography, audio, video, installation, mapping, and community engagement to collectively explore the history of place while also examining how the landscapes we inhabit are socially and culturally constructed. In particular, she is interested in the ecological repercussions of human presence and occupation within these spaces. By focusing on distinct subjects, communities or regions she attempts to foster a discussion of complex, interrelated issues for each site while exposing human values and political agendas that form our collective understanding of these places.

Stringfellow’s projects have been commissioned and funded by leading organizations including California Humanities, Creative Work Fund, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and the Seattle Arts Commission. She is a 2016 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography. In 2012, she became the second recipient of the Theo Westenberger Award for Artistic Excellence. The award honors the achievements of contemporary women who work in photography, film, and new media transforms how we see the American West. To coincide with her receiving this award, Jackrabbit Homestead was exhibited at the Autry National Center’s Irene Helen Jones Parks Gallery of Art from September 13, 2014 – August 23, 2015. Other awards include a Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) “Investing in Artists” equipment grant in 2010.

Kim Stringfellow

www.kimstringfellow.com
www.mojaveproject.org
Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellow
2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography
Honorary PhD, Claremont University
Professor, School of Art + Design
San Diego State University