REFLECTIVE SEMINAR in Fall 2020 (RS0001FB3B)

What would we learn about ourselves, our societies, and our technologies, by imagining ourselves back in time? What is the value of historical imagination in our attempts to invent the present and the future? In this First-Bridge pairing, we will be concentrating on the year 1984. Through the study of popular culture, archival information, intellectual history, and media technologies, we will build an ‘archaeology’ of discourses of masculinity in that year, and a ‘genealogy’ of ways in which people related to those discourses. We will discover how events and processes in that year led to our present world, and we’ll excavate possibilities that were not realized. We will explore those areas in analytical work, interviews with people across the world who lived through that year, and exercises of creative reconstruction. We’ll bond during study trips across the city of Paris, looking for traces of 1984, and experiencing the new possibilities for discourses of masculinity emerging in 2019. Across all of these sites and practices, we will ask how discourses of masculinity infiltrated bodies, styles, actions, and ways of thinking in 1984, and what traces remain in 2019.