Creative Cities

Winter 2016: ARTSINST 180Q, URBANST 180Q, CEE 131Q - How to be Governed Otherwise: Art, Activism, and the City

This course will introduce you to contemporary art’s engagement with political activism. This introduction will focus on the city as, at once, a field and target of activism – a space of public appearance, artistic intervention, and political action, as well as a target of claims to residence, livelihood, recognition, justice, and collectivity. We will pose activist politics, artistic intervention, and urban space as mutually imbricated, each shaping the possibilities, programs, and histories of the other – a perspective that offers insights into the spatiality, materiality, and visuality of political identity, agency, and action. Over the quarter, we will study some of the many artistic interventions that are encompassed by urban activism, from informal and everyday practices to protest, resistance, and occupation. Comparative case studies will be drawn from a global context. You will investigate these case studies through both research on urban activism and activist practice; the seminar will invite you to explore the militant possibilities of research, the research possibilities of activism, and the implications of each for the production of art.

This course also offers an optional spring break Arts Immersion trip through the Stanford Arts Institute, which will take place in Detroit from March 25 to April 1, 2017. More information below.

Spring Break 2017: ARTSINST 180A – Detroit Arts Immersion

This Arts Immersion trip is offered over the spring break and is organized by the Stanford Arts Institute. Students travel with Creative Cities Fellow, Andrew Herscher, for a weeklong immersive experience of contemporary art in Detroit. The focus is on the intersections between art, activism, race, and austerity politics. The course is open to all undergraduate students, with priority to those enrolled in ARTSINST 180Q: How to be Governed Otherwise: Art, Activism, and the City. For further details and application instructions, please visit the Arts Immersions page here.

Andrew Herscher is a Creative Cities Fellow at the Stanford Arts Institute and an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan with appointments in the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Department of the History of Art, and Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. Trained as an architect and historian of architecture, he writes on the spatial politics of violence, humanitarian and human rights issues, exile and migration, and contemporary art and design. His research and writing is informed by his long-term participant-observation in Kosovo’s post-conflict environment, including work with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, and the Kosovo Cultural Heritage Project, a nongovernmental organization he co-founded and co-directed. During his time in Michigan, he has also been involved in a number of collaborative projects in Detroit, including the Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, an open-access platform for the study of urban crisis using Detroit as a focal point; Detroit Resists, a coalition of activists, artists, architects, and community members working on behalf of an inclusive, equitable, and democratic city; and the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective. Among his publications are Violence Taking Place: The Architecture of the Kosovo Conflict, published by Stanford University Press in 2010, The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2012, and the forthcoming Displacements: Architecture and Refugee and Spatial Violence, co-edited with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi. While at Stanford, he proposes to complete Creative Class Conflict, a book exploring the role of art in both the neoliberal restructuring of post-bankruptcy Detroit and activist resistance to that restructuring.