This course lays the foundation for the core curriculum in media arts at Hampshire College in Film/Video, Photography, Performance and Installation art centering on the analysis and production of visual images. The Film/Photo/Video Program is committed to a "theory/practice" model of teaching and learning. Students are expected to learn to read visual images by focusing on the development of art forms and their relationship to their historical and cultural context.

An exploration of basic concepts and ideas that help one think critically and analytically about race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and the local-transnational divide. Questions we will ask include: How do language, performativity, and political economy function as tools of cultural construction that produce us as we produce them? How do these factors regulate desire and serve to legitimize oppression and violence? In what ways are symbolic systems able to exceed social formations in which they are implicated?

African American dance and music traditions have played critical roles in African American struggles to sustain their humanity-- to express joy and pain through their bodies and through a particular relationship to rhythm. This class will explore the forms, contents and contexts of black traditions, which played a crucial role in shaping American dance in the twentieth century.

Is there such a thing as "objective" or "absolute" truth? Or is everything "relative" - to a particular individual, culture, language, or conceptual scheme? What is truth, anyway? In this course, we will examine the nature of truth, knowledge, and value, and consider a range of challenges to the idea of "objective" or "absolute" truth. We will begin by considering solipsism, skepticism, and subjective relativism and then spend most of the semester discussing various forms of relativism (conceptual, epistemic, ethical, cultural, aesthetic, etc.).

How can culture resist in the political realm? How do you make your screams and sardonic laughter heard? The overarching framework of our course will be the dynamic of authority and resistance in the modern and contemporary era. In the course of the twentieth century, the countries of east-central and eastern Europe experienced monarchical rule, democracy, Nazism, and communism. How and why do given groups attempt to assert their authority? Why, when, and by what means do others resist?

Contemporary Dance Technique 3: Intermediate: This course will be a laboratory exploring the movement capacities of the human body as selected for aesthetic and expressive purposes. Students will investigate expression in movement by working with sensation, space, time, focus and attention to detail. They'll deepen their knowledge of anatomy and biomechanics to increase movement efficiency and safety, and they'll work to expand their rhythmic and dynamic range in longer and more complex movement phrases.

This writing-intensive course is designed for third semester students who would like to explore the methods of art history and who want an opportunity to do independent written projects in art, architectural history, and/or visual culture. In consultation with the faculty, students will be asked to develop and write increasingly advanced papers, based on objects on display in the Five Colleges, a visual or historical issue of their choosing, or to create an in-depth proposal and catalogue for a virtual exhibition in consultation with the professor.

This course will examine the life and teachings of influential Asian spiritual leaders in the West such as J. Krishnamurti, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, D.T. Suzuki, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh. In addition, our examination will also extend to well-known American spiritual teachers trained in Eastern traditions including Joseph Goldstein, Ken Wilber, and Pema Chodron.

This course will continue to develop skills in imagining and composing dances, now focusing on group forms, and the challenges to creating meaning, referential or abstract, in non-verbal, three-dimensional, motional and, most of all, embodied expression. In class we'll explore a variety of composition strategies used in group work, both classical and contemporary, and work with longer, more complex sequences. We'll play with such methods as layering, subtracting, juxtaposing, multiplicity, simultaneity, ambiguity, image, suggestion and statement.

This photography course will focus on the Connecticut River and the surrounding landscape within the jurisdiction of the Pioneer Valley. Students will research historic and contemporary images and literature that pertain to how the river has been represented and then propose and execute their own unique visual project. Prerequisite: Participants should have completed a college-level Photography I course and be prepared to work at an intermediate to advanced level of photography.