ClassInfo

Cultural Studies teaches us to question and criticize the normal and the familiar in their micro operations, in their taken for granted status and in their common sense. For example, if certain practices come to characterize and determine the lives of large number of individuals, the discipline of Cultural Studies help us question this taken for grantedness of the particular practice by drawing our attention to the historical origins, the politics and their meanings and how these practices constitute the individuals in question. By taking a step back, it draws our attention to the way an individual is always living, working and interacting with other individuals in a society. It foregrounds the way these social interactions are never simple and peaceful but diverse and conflicted and are mediated by the spaces we occupy and the subject positions we embody. It helps us engage with the ideas and ideologies behind certain practices through its method of analysis of a diverse range of texts that can include a novel, a film, an advertisement or a simple conversation between two people in a shared space.

Using the tools of Cultural Studies, we will focus on one of the most normal and accepted aspects of our everyday life, that of the classroom. In this course, we will ask the following questions:

• Why do we say that everybody needs education? Why do people say that going to a specific school or college determine our characters, our lives, our worldview? What are the implications of these assumptions?

• Why are some people excluded from these spaces? What are the conditions that lead to such exclusions? Additionally, what are the conditions that determine inclusions of people?

• Why are some departments considered critical and too liberal? Is there a connection between the critic and the classroom? What the hell is a critic!

• Why and when do university spaces become places of conflict and battles, antagonism and death, leading to the posting of cops and arrest of students?

• Why are young people so invested in these spaces? Can these spaces offer hope, shelter and relief from oppression and exploitation? If yes, how does it happen?

• How and when does the classroom fail to deliver its promise?

Our readings, comprising novels, films, autobiographies, histories and theories will work towards the formulation of these questions. Not reading the texts as isolated pieces of art, we will read them as particular interpretations and interventions in understanding and sometimes creating what we understand by classroom. While we will focus on particular styles, language or forms of a novel or a film, we will use them primarily as examples or instance for understanding the above mentioned questions or themes. We work with the assumption that texts and the world interact with each other, co-constitute each other and co-construct each other. Over the course of the semester we will familiarize ourselves with the concepts of "subject", "ideology", "critic", "exclusion", "subversion", "healing", "experience", "responsibility" and "pedagogy". However, the concepts will never be understood in an abstract way but always in relation to specific historical and sociological contexts. Hence, we will have to build these concepts as we read the different texts as opposed to using them as products.