Political Arts

Complementing the more conventional political sciences, LUC hosts the innovative and creative academic discipline of political arts to question and analyse how human beings interact with, compose, and express political ideas and actions through the various, diverse media of technology and the arts. Political Arts explores the ways in which dance, drama, film, literature, music, performance, photography, poetry, rhetoric, and the practical and creative arts interleave with political life, either as vehicles for criticism, elaboration, theorisation, intervention, or activism. Quizzing definitions and boundaries of the political, students of this major will inspect the communicative, reflexive, and transformative aspects of individual and collective political agency; taking performance and artistic practice seriously as modes of scholarship, students of this major will dismantle the disciplinary edifices of the traditional university and discover new insights into what it means to be a political animal as a human being.

In collaboration with the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) and the Royal Conservatory (KC) in The Hague, as well as the Academy for Creative and Performing Arts in Leiden, this LUC major offers students a diversity of investigatory trajectories: those who enter LUC with high proficiency in performance can continue to hone their practical talents at the KABK or KC, while joining those who concentrate on the philosophical aspects of political and visual aesthetics, phenomenology, semiotics, and communication, thus bringing practice into constant and dynamic dialogue with theory. Knowledge, especially of ourselves as political beings, requires the confluence of participation and reception – from the musical to the theatrical, from the literary to the journalistic, students will also reflect on the ontological, ethical, and political status of art, artifact, and artistry.

Methodology courses:
Performance as Citizenship,
Performance as Scholarship