Admission requirements
None.
Description
Cultural objects and narratives give meaning to human lives. Because mental constructs such as stories and images are anchored in places of vital symbolic and political import, and are mutually reinforced in social life, culture can be slippery and hard to assess. This course gives students a theoritical toolkit to make sense of how cultural narratives and meanings are generated, disseminated, and normalized.
We will examine how cultural conventions are nurtured at different scales – such as the domestic sphere of the family and public space of the nation – and how we filter our self-understandings through socialization. This course details how scholars of literature, film, and art as well as in related fields in the social sciences and humanities, have developed critical frameworks that allow us to acquire perspective on particular (as well as more widely shared) forms of culture.
This course moves between the concrete manifestations of culture – books, images, museums, cities – and the analytical reflections which scholars from art history to film studies to cultural anthropology have developed to make sense of this proliferation of culture. We will examine topics such such as the relationship of knowledge to power, producer to creation, self to other, and politics to poetics. In doing so, we will enrich our panorama of cultural productions, and gain insight into how cultural forms are critiqued and innovated.
Course Objectives
Students will enhance their skills through proficiency in humanistic and social science analysis. They will learn the vocabulary and methods of various fields including anthropology, sociology, art history, literature, and journalism. An emphasis on debate and discussion will improve confidence in verbal argumentation, and the capacity to assess what is convincing and coherent in intellectual debate. Throughout the course, students will write weekly reflections, as part of a course portfolio, to hone their reading comprehension and interpretation skills. A final exam will foster the capacity to apply conceptual theories to the contemporary world and improve interdisciplinary analysis.
In terms of knowledge, this course gives students a comparative and interdisciplinary introduction to the ways that cultural productions can be assessed, critiqued, and innovated.
Timetable
Timetables for courses offered at Leiden University College in 2025-2026 will be published on this page of the e-Prospectus.
Mode of instruction
This course employs interrelated formats for instruction and includes visual, digital, and textual materials. The first weekly class explores the weekly theme through analysis of assigned readings. This first weekly session provides context, highlights key concepts, shows different disciplinary approaches, and engages with the course texts. Attending these sessions and conducting the weekly readings is critical for students to write their weekly reflection, due 24 hours before the second session of the week.
The second class per week is devoted to deeper discussion of the assigned texts, supplemented with visual material that illustrate cultural productions. The course uses texts and films to introduce students to different forms of analysis and argumentation to help make sense of culture in its moral, social, and political aspects.
Assessment Method
Students are assessed on different parameters that correspond to discrete learning aims.
First, the learning aim of reading comprehension and critical understanding is assessed through a portfolio of weekly reflections from Weeks 1-7. This portfolio of seven reflections is worth 40% of the overall grade. Each weekly reflection is due on Wednesday (24 hours before the second seminar of the week on Thursday) and will be on the week’s texts. These reflections have two components: first, a close description of the weekly readings, which shows awareness of the author’s argument and reasoning, and second, your own analysis of their claims, and capacity to apply their ideas to the world.
Second, conceptual application is evaluated through a group digital production worth 30% and due in Week 6. For this assessment, students will be organized early in the course into groups and produce a digital production using online and artificial-intelligence tools.
Third, a written in-class final exam judges analytical and interpretive capacities. This exam will respond to set questions on the course themes and will occur in Reading Week. This is worth 30% of the overall grade. Students will formulate an argument, and empirically substantiate their position, using only course materials. Non-course texts and external references are not permitted in this exam.
Reading list
Students will be given access to the course readings by the first week of classes.
Registration
Courses offered at Leiden University College (LUC) are usually only open to LUC students and LUC exchange students. Leiden University students who participate in one of the university’s Honours tracks or programmes may register for one LUC course, if availability permits. Registration is coordinated by the Education Coordinator, course.administration@luc.leidenuniv.nl.
Contact
Dr. Ajay Gandhi, a.gandhi@luc.leidenuniv.nl
Remarks
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