StudiOC: Oberlin Center for Convergence

From Bombay to Cairo: Cinema and Social Change

India and Egypt were colonized by the British Empire for many long decades, and they have developed prolific film industries since their independence. Students in this learning community will explore the postcolonial cinemas of cosmopolitan Bombay and Cairo, which are widely influential in both societies.

This learning community will focus especially on how these cinemas subversively adapt key literary texts of global literature, represent radical thought, and actively depict resistance movements. While filmmakers in Bombay have adventurously introduced revisionary appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays, others in Egypt fearlessly participated in major movements of social reform and used their art as a medium of political activism.

In the course, English 247 Shakespeare in the Colonies, students will explore examples of Indian cinema and postcolonial literary works to analyze what happens to Shakespeare when he travels to the colonies. In History 247 Cinema Social Movements and Revolution in Egypt, students will read historical analyses and watch important films that served as cornerstones in the formation of the country’s rebellious ideologies and movements of resistance against social and state repression. This period includes the 1950s until the 2011 youth uprisings known as the “Arab spring.”

Each course in the learning community focuses on cinematic and literary adaptations; each course is linked as well through its use of the postcolonial and social movement theories that frame how (non-western) postcolonial cultures have interacted with the culture of their former (English) colonizers, as well as account for social change.  

Oberlin students in From Bombay to Cairo will have the opportunity to connect with their peers and discuss these topics with comparative literature students at the American University in Cairo.

ENGL 247 and HIST 247 are both required for enrollment in this learning community.

Reimagining Maker Culture(s): from Fabrication to Curation

The Reimagining Maker Culture(s): from Fabrication to Curation examines contemporary and historical making (creating/crafting) and keeping (curating/stewarding) practices in an effort to define and imagine inclusive, just, and sustainable models for making and keeping in an age of rapid cultural and environmental change. What practical and ethical lessons can we learn from contemporary movements to make things anew, and to regain the wisdom of objects crafted in the past?

Today is a particularly significant moment in the history of physical media. Shared knowledge (online tutorials) and resources (community makerspaces) make it easier than ever for anyone to learn to design and fabricate their own inventions or to reclaim knowledge about traditional crafts.  And while industrially derived fabrication tools are becoming more powerful, less costly, and increasingly easy to use, climate change is quickly altering the distribution and availability of many of the raw materials that indigenous communities, especially those from arctic regions, once relied on to craft tools for their economic and cultural survival. 

While maker spaces have become increasingly common at large research universities, maker culture at liberal arts institutions is still in its infancy.

This learning community provides space to imagine what maker culture might look like if it were driven by a liberal arts ethos. With our emphasis on inclusion, social justice, sustainability, and interdisciplinary collaborations, liberal arts institutions have much to offer and much to gain from intentionally engaging with and growing maker culture on campus.  

As we make, we accumulate objects and artifacts. Deciding what to keep and how becomes an ethical quandary from both cultural and environmental perspectives. This same liberal arts ethos will inform our study of current practices for curating made things, and in particular indigenous material culture.

Collecting for museums has deep colonial roots, yet collections are also reservoirs of knowledge about past social, spiritual and economic practices that can be re-claimed by studying, first-hand, the tools, clothing, and ritual objects stored on museum shelves. Recent trends in cocuration and digital curation are opening new ways for both indigenous community members and Oberlin students to learn from ancestral things. 

For instance, all students will engage with Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, who we plan to bring to campus toward the beginning of the semester to continue her consultation work on Oberlin’s collection of indigenous artifacts from Alaska. 

Ahtuangaruak first consulted for us in spring 2017, an extraordinary visit that spurred a number of ongoing student research projects. Students in fall 2019 will help record, transcribe, and disseminate information gained from her second consultation. The experience will be the launching point for student exploration of the (often simultaneous) social, aesthetic, and scientific values which ethnographic and archaeological collections may embody in the current day.  

Similarly, all students will attend portions of the Crafting Sound Symposiumin in which we turn a critical eye toward the technologies of sound and examine unspoken and unquestioned value systems inherent in these technologies.

We will come together as a learning community to explore hands-on, lo-fi, DIY alternatives to traditional technologies, and consider how these alternatives might engage new audiences in creative sound-making practices. 

TECH 361 and ANTH 211 are both required for enrollment in this learning community.

The Student as Artist and Intellectual: Gleaning from the Legacy of Shirley Graham DuBois

The Student as Artist and Intellectual is inspired by Oberlin alumna Shirley Graham DuBois and her engagement with history, art, theater performance, philosophy, and the archive. The community is designed around experiential learning methods to engage the student as artists and intellectuals in their own right. Each course will involve projects that will culminate in the design of their own intellectual and artistic dossiers inspired by the life and work of DuBois.

Am I a writer? Am I an artist or composer? These are questions that students often ask themselves as they discover their passions and map their aspirations onto their courses and majors.

Renowned composer and intellectual Shirley Graham DuBois arrived on Oberlin’s campus in 1831 with those same questions. As a student at Oberlin, she composed and directed TomTom, the first opera written and staged by an African American woman. The debut of TomTom drew an audience of over 25,000. She went on to author seven plays, 10 biographies, two novels, and served as the founding director of Ghana Broadcasting Corporation.

The Student as Artist and Intellectual invites students (composers, historians, dancers, writers, artists, and playwrights, etc.) to reflect on her legacy to explore the ways that innovation can begin at Oberlin.

HIST 221 and ETHN 216 are both required for enrollment in this learning community.

Surveillance, its Histories, Cultures, and Technologies

Surveillance, its Histories, Cultures, and Technologies

We can’t turn around today without bumping into surveillance technologies, to say nothing of the invisible gaze of governmental spying apparatuses. Yet long before algorithmic technologies or the drone was invented, bodies, images, and words have been tracked, sorted, profiled, and stored in databases. In colonial North America, for example, settler colonists used writing and print as surveillance technologies to document, track, enslave, and dispossess black and indigenous populations.

Today, NSA data collection practices continue to draw from long histories of militarized perception to generate ‘actionable’ security outcomes. In response, citizens have sought to invert the relationship between watcher and watched, seeking to challenge the surveillance state in creative ways.

Although no one is immune, the deployment of surveillance technologies has had vastly unequal impacts on marginalized and vulnerable communities. This learning community will provide students with an informed understanding of the historical and contemporary workings of surveillance. Across the courses, we will interrogate state surveillance practices like census taking and national drone spying, as well as cultural practices employed by citizens that seek to monitor the state.

Be engaging a broad array of sources-academic research, social theory, fiction, film, and social media-we will debate the role of the surveillance gaze in generating security, but also consider cultural activists who work to disrupt and reconfigure surveillance cultures.

ENGL 233 and CAST 312 are both required for enrollment in this learning community.

Recasting Innovation

In the popular imagination, innovation can seem to lack context, as if all great ideas sprang from a vacuum or the brain of a brilliant lone inventor. In reality, all the innovations that have changed our world-for example, movable type, the aqueduct, or the zipper-have answered specific questions, problems, or challenges and were situated in particular places and moments in time. Many were collaborative enterprises, and many changed the world in ways their inventors could never have imagined.

Students in this learning community will explore the histories of innovation in three disciplines-history, fiction writing, and dance. Recasting Innovation traces the lineage of ideas, inventions, and practices we may take for granted. Through crafting creative/intellectual/corporeal experiences, students will embody and explore historical innovations and challenge themselves to experiment with success and failure.

HIST 278 and either DANC 205 or CRWR 256 are required for this learning community.