“Creative Citizens” courses build students' skills in creative activism and civic engagement. Course topics may include social justice, environmental activism, civic or political engagement, activist movements, forms of protest, social practice, community engagement, design activism, and more.

Architecture

Janette Kim

ARCHT-5800-1: UR: Urban & Landscape Elect (From Public Engagement to Collective Power)

MARCH-6800-1: UR: Urban & Landscape Elect (From Public Engagement to Collective Power)

This is a vertical elective combining students in their fourth and fifth year of the BArch program with students from the architecture graduate programs. The content of the elective options varies from year to year, and covers advanced topics that invite critical thinking and innovation in the area of urbanism.Section Description: Students in this seminar will experiment with inventive techniques of public engagement that can empower activism in the housing justice movement. For many decades, architects and urban designers have used surveys, post-it notes, town hall meetings, and collaborative design sessions to fold public opinion into their designs. However, this work–often called public engagement or participatory design practice–is often criticized for creating the mere impression of community consultation without meaningfully sharing power or enabling systemic change. Instead, this course advocates for a shift in the focus of public engagement to the creation of collective power. To do this, we will learn how to build decision-making tools for community activists to use in advocating for systemic change in the housing system. Our goal will be to reveal a range of alternatives to the housing market–such as investment models, ownership structures, and spatial arrangements–that can build housing with permanent affordability and cultural belonging, especially for BIPOC residents. We will aspire to enable a lively, open, and generative conversation about these options and illuminate a path towards their realization and inhabitation.

Critical Ethnic Studies

Kim Anno

ETHST-2000-1: Artists, Designers, Journalists come lend me your ears!

This course looks at the position of journalistic truth telling, and critical thinking and acknowledges the resistance movement in America today. We will interview and document leaders of color that are: businesspeople, cultural producers, and religious leaders to paint a picture of what is happening on the ground in the United States today. We will create podcasts, zines, posters, videos and a public panel discussion on the role the arts can play in the face of mounting adversity. What is Academic Freedom and how can creativity impact the challenges? What about public health? How are immigrants, transpeople, and vulnerable communities impacted? We will witness the local/regional impacts of the U.S. national government and everyday people in light of the DOGE challenges to the constitution. What can art/design do in a national catastrophe? Students will find a middle path to create awareness and find solutions to the chaotic influence of the national government. We will have field studies opportunities and create and an articulate contribution to the public discourse.

Amana Harris

ETHST-2000-2: Your Art Your Impact

This course takes a new look at community based and contemporary art practices from a self-exploratory, education, social justice and civic engagement lens. We will investigate values, ethics and self-development concepts; explore education from a historical and present day context; learn about activist artists; and infuse all of these concepts to inform and push the boundaries of your own art practice. Art that incorporates spiritual and ethical renewal, as well as social responsiveness and environmental transformation is a primary focus as we investigate methods employed by a growing movement of activist artists. Students will work in the ways they are accustomed to as studio artists, while also developing arts projects that address local social and environmental concerns.

Shalini Agrawal

ETHST-2000-3: Radical Redesign

Decolonizing design and architecture practices starts with understanding the roots and steadfast legacy of colonization to resurface narratives that have been hidden, erased and forgotten. We can disrupt our biases and blindspots towards anti-racism and decoloniality by taking time to learn about forgotten history, and reflect on the unreconciled impacts of colonization. How might we acknowledge the injustices, colonial practices and racism in design and architecture, and acknowledge the resulting long lasting and harmful impacts? This studio begins by identifying areas of Radical Redesign within the traditional design process starting with researching colonization and its correlation with issues of diversity, identity, race, gender and culture. Building on this knowledge, we identify and confront our personal biases that have maintained systems of dominance, while challenging formulaic design processes. Moving from individualism, perfectionism and urgency, we prioritize non-Western methods of knowing, doing with the goal of defining and achieving personal translations of belonging, care and healing. We reexamine traditional design processes and propose new methods of designing with, instead of for, positioning ourselves as agents of care with traditional design processes.

Jack Leamy

ETHST-2000-4: Mural Art
This course explores murals as public living spaces, visual geographical multi-layered zones for political activism, expressing cultural identity and liberation, social/cultural awareness and aesthetic advancement. The overarching goal is to inform the students rapidly into the domain in which they will create. By using a series of documentary films, starting with Mexican social realist painters from the early 1930’s to the present murals brought forth from the BLM movement, we will look at these movements as sources of meaning and forms of social justice activism. Students will also center their Critical Ethnic Studies pedagogy as a means to focus and polish their artist vision. We ask, what is the role of mural art as it is displayed strategically in public spaces? Where does public space become available and to whom? Who claims public spaces and how? How do we define public space and who has the authority to have a voice and be heard in the public realm and why?The Mural Project will provide an historical and current day context. Students have the opportunity to contribute to a mural site in East Oakland at Bret Harte Middle School by contributing to The Heroic Murals Pedagogy Project. This is organized based on student choice and availability. We will plan to travel to two mural sites in San Francisco for our continuous learning and grounding in the epistemology of mural art through a CES lens. Decolonial, Culturally Relevant and Community Responsive and Social Justice Based. As a student you will need to be prepared to travel to these locations.

Erin Algeo

ETHSM-2000-5: Tryin' to get Free: Foundations and Futures of Intersectionality

Representation, equity, diversity, and inclusion are all words that characterize contemporary perspectives on racial, gender, economic, and other forms of social justice. Cutting across all justice-oriented movements is another keyword: intersectionality. Many identify as having an intersectional approach, but not everyone shares an understanding of what the term means, its historical origins, and present-day debates about it. By the end of this course, students will develop deeper historical, philosophical and political literacies of diversity and inclusion through the lens of intersectionality. While this course is structured by historical, theoretical, and philosophical texts produced by peoples in struggle globally, it centers how Black women have engaged such thinking, transnationally. By the end of this course, students will develop representational pieces that situate their own evolving relationship to intersectionality historically.

Shylah Pacheco Hamilton

ETHSM-2000-6: Spirituality as Resistance

In this course we will learn about the significance of spirituality through the legacy of ancestral societies, the freedom struggles of BIPOC, and the power of diasporic people. We will delve into the philosophies and practices that shaped the formation of spirituality since time immemorial; closely examining the cyclical context of these sensibilities prior to and after the apocalypse of 1492. We will collectively analyze the impact of the last 500+ years of imposed colonial forces using critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality. Simultaneously we will celebrate and put into practice ancestral wisdom—passed down, safeguarded despite genocide, ecocide, censorship, enslavement, displacement and forced assimilation. Our course has twin components, theory and embodiment, through which we will reflect and act on the importance of ritual, of remembrance and of gratitude within liberatory movements and within our lives. Our focus for this course will be the autonomies sprouting and permeating, despite the power configurations of nation/states and transnational corporations, in Turtle Island, Anahuac, Abya Yala (Americas) and beyond.This course requires rigorous interdisciplinary study of ourselves, ancestral lineage, red medicine, art, astronomy, archeology, art history, biology and traditional ecological knowledge.

Gail Williams

ETHST-2000-8: Digging in the World

Critical Ethnic Studies Studio introduce students to the interrelations between race/ethnicity, art making and design practices. These courses complement the Critical Ethnic Studies Seminars with their hands-on approach in which themes of ethnic identity are incorporated into studio and community practices. Digging in the World studio researches the garden as an urban site of cultural production. We will look into the ways that artists/designers/architects and citizen’s work in and with gardens as a social form and collective tool for building community, cultural knowledge and economic and social equity. Seeking inspiration from Bay Area garden and farming projects, and some from across the globe, students will learn how cities, schools, neighborhoods, prisons and immigrants garden to build social fabric, reorient human economies, preserve knowledge and heal. Talks on permaculture principles, cooperative mutual aid and social histories of urban farming in the Bay Area will set the stage for the creation of our own visionary models and experiments. We will visit several local garden and farm projects working alongside them to learn the story of their garden and community. Through a series of short performance based activities students will muse and instigate site responsive projects working with human and non human collaborators exploring plants, relationship and place. Students will develop a final proposal and prototype that re-imagines the future of the CCA campus or their own community and neighborhood, whether a backyard or apartment balcony through the lens of "the garden as present and future imaginary".

Steve Jones

ETHST-2000-7: Agitprop

agitprop | ˈajətˌpräp |noun - political (originally communist) propaganda, especially in art or literature: [as modifier] : agitprop painters.Origin - 1930s: Russian, blend of agitatsiya ‘agitation’ and propaganda. Agitprop, “agitation” and “propaganda,” is political (originally communist) propaganda, especially in art or literature. Propaganda involves persuasive strategies, but is different than persuasion in its intended outcome. A graphic design approach to propaganda will involve an examination of the relationship of message to context, focusing on the intentionality and responses of an audience, and lead to an understanding of propaganda as a communication process. This course will explore the history of propaganda from the mid 19th century to its modern day manifestation in American/global politics. Each student will have an opportunity to explore her/his individual values to establish a theme for a campaign and attempt to persuade a targeted audience through several class assignments.

Stephanie Sherman

ETHSM-2000-7: Non-Conforming: Disability and the Arts

How and why have some human bodies and minds been regarded as incompatible with full participation in social-cultural life or competent citizenship? Through wide-ranging readings, screenings, conversations, writing and creative work this hybrid seminar with studio practice elements, we will explore and unsettle societal constructions of ability and disability. Placing focus on the arts and visual culture, we’ll consider such questions as, which bodies and minds have access to representation, education, reception and creative work itself? How are our habits of both looking and making conditioned by norms of ableism and associated qualities including “skill,” “stamina,” “beauty” and “criticality”? We will examine deep intersections between disability justice and social struggles in the areas of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class; as well as urgent issues of the environment, labor, and poverty. For help engaging these themes, we’ll delve into practices of artists and designers, who take them on with passion, humor, irony and radical imagination from within the lived experience of disability. Underlying our work this semester is a challenge raised by artists with disabilities and cultural workers to understand disability not simply as a form of living to be accommodated by normative, so-called abled-bodied society , but an embodied form of knowledge offering unique insights into the vast diversity of body-minds inhabiting the world, including our own.

Valencia James

ETHST-2000-10: The Body's Wisdom: Performance and Resistance

This undergraduate studio course explores the rich wellspring of knowledge-making and truth-telling that can be found in everyone’s body. Starting from the basis that everyone performs in daily life, we will investigate the role of our identities and lived experiences in the creation of performance art. We will ground our practice in Black feminist and intersectional theory, as well as global historical and contemporary performance practices. Particular attention will be placed on the role of performance in social justice and civic engagement efforts. Students will learn how to develop a personal movement practice, build body awareness and skills in self-motivated movement exploration, which will open up the incorporation of performance into their artistic practices. No prior dance or performance experience is necessary but a high level of motivation and commitment to process and transformation is required.

Critical Studies

Rebekah L Edwards

CRTSD-1500-1: Foundations in Critical Studies: Amends

What does it mean to make amends? To amend a fire, or to amend the soil means to add something to it that strengthens it. To amend a book or a law means to correct errors found within it, or to modify, revise, or alter it. Older uses of “amend” were closer to what we now speak of as “mending”—that is, to repair, or fix; or to repurpose and alter something for a new use. In medical contexts to amend is to heal or to mitigate symptoms. Often when we speak of amends we are talking about acts taken to rectify or atone for a wrong that was done, either by oneself, one’s community, one’s ancestors, or one’s nation. As artists, we may ask: how and when does our making become a form of amends? In this class, we will develop our critical thinking skills by exploring the multiple connotations, metaphors, histories, and applications of amends. We will turn to the work of artists, theorists, scientists, farmers, healers, activists, and spiritual practitioners and discuss practices of making amends (such as mending and repurposing; individual apologies or atonement practices in different spiritual contexts; soil amending, river restoration, or community gardens) and different social and political movements focused on amends (such as Restorative and Transformative Justice, Reparations, and Land Back.) We will study how amends are practiced at an individual, collective, and global scale and consider how these practices might offer useful metaphors and strategies for our own lives and creative praxis.

Julian Carter

CRTSD-1500-2: Foundations in Critical Studies: Body Politics

Politics is always physical. We literally live and die according to the flow of resources, force, and freedom. This course uses contemporary journalism (print and video) to consider some areas of contemporary U.S. American life where well-informed people legitimately disagree. We’ll talk about using psychedelic drugs to treat trauma; whether eating meat is bad for the planet; some ethical dilemmas in the beauty industry, and other topics. This course won’t teach you what to think, but it will teach you how to think critically and well about complicated and significant subjects. Foundations in Critical Studies introduces critical thinking skills essential to college-level work in the humanities and sciences. Students develop their critical capacities through close reading and active response to cultural texts and phenomena drawn from multiple disciplines and reflecting diverse perspectives on major themes or topics in contemporary life.

Grad Wide Electives

Deena Chalabi

GELCT-6800-1: VCS: Methodologies

VISCR-6120-1: Methodologies 2

VISCR-6100-1: Methodologies 1

The methodologies seminar is a unique feature of the VCS curriculum and is a requirement for all VCS students. Operating in tandem with the VCS Forum visiting artist/scholar/critic series to support pursuit of the M.A. and Dual Degree, the course takes full advantage of our acclaimed VCS Forum programming. The VCS Forum has been a unique feature of VCS since 2000. The Forum guest speaker series enables students and faculty to converse with practitioners shaping diverse scholarly and creative disciplines. Forum speakers include emerging and established artists, curators, critics, theorists, architects, designers, historians of visual culture, and activists engaged with crucial issues on local, national, and global fronts. The VCS methodologies seminar serves as a discussion section for the Forum, where the dialogue is continued and further enhanced by incorporating in-depth analysis of readings furnished by the Forum speakers. Students consider the author’s theoretical allegiances, modes of argumentation, forms of evidence, presentational strategies, career choices, and the discursive field(s) into which their work intervenes. The Forum/methodologies dyad provides VCS students with an interdisciplinary foundation for their individual practices and their degree work at CCA.

History of Art and Visual Culture

Katherine Lambert

HAAVC-2000-3: Designing for the Body

We are witnessing quantum leaps in 21st-century technological and biological developments that promise new dimensions of embodied spatial experience within our built environments. For years, these advancements have posed implicit challenges to architecture, interior environments, designed objects, and social justice. From the evolutionary genesis of the Disability Rights Movement in Berkeley, CA, in the 1960s to present-day futuristic models envisioned by Silicon Valley and MIT, our bodies undergo continuous retrofits within the shifting frames of space and time. Universal Design, an aspirational outgrowth of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), informs all areas of design as a holistic approach to inclusivity and diversity. However, it is the post-ADA world that now inspires young designers and holds the key to reshaping our relationship with built space. We are moving beyond traditional conceptions of the body, its abilities, and its adaptive qualities. Our environments now hold the potential to adapt to us in ways that were inconceivable just 30 years ago. Historically, the environment was perceived as static, while the body was an active agent working against it at the interface of ability. Today, adaptive environments and shifting boundaries offer the promise of liberating outdated paradigms of physical embodiment. In this seminar, we will survey contemporary and historical writings on the body and its relationship to physical and social worlds, forging an experimental approach to designing for the body.

Philosophy and Critical Theory

Melinda De Jesus

PHCRT-2000-6: Philosophy & Critical Theory: Monster Culture

This course explores the construction of monsters and "the monstrous" through diverse cultures and historical periods. Analyzing selected examples in literature, art and film, we will discuss the interdependent relationship between our conceptions of humanity/"normality" and monsters/the "abnormal."Philosophy and Critical Theory (PHCRT) courses focus on developing critical reading and thinking skills, with an emphasis on learning to frame and explore meaningful questions. Students consider multiple perspectives and claims in the process of formulating independent, well-founded opinions.

Rebekah L Edwards

PHCRT-2000-5: Philosophy & Critical Theory: Disabled Imaginaries

What do we mean when we say “disability”? Who is considered “normal”? As Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha asks in The Future is Disabled, what if in the near future, the majority of people will be disabled - and what if that's not a bad thing? What if disability justice and disabled wisdom are crucial to surviving the crisis of global conditions we currently face? What is post-apocalyptic crip-futurity? How do we imagine ourselves in it - with joy? Our class introduces Disability Studies through the work of contemporary disabled-identified artists, activists, and philosophers who use speculative imaginaries to critique current and historic formulations of disability, exposing how such formulations have constructed a normal/disabled binary through intersections of ableism, racism, and (cis)sexism, and imagining instead, radically-inclusive futures in which all our social identities “are understood as interdependent and intertwined.” Crip-futurity draws on the collective knowledge of disabled people to speculate a more just, creative, and sustainable social architecture. We will study essays, manifestos, science fiction, and memoir alongside 2D, 3D, and 4D work by disabled-identified artists/theorists. We will engage with this work through discussions, critical writing, and small creative projects.

Social Science and History

Maxwell Leung

SSHIS-2000-2: Social Science/History: American Politics
This course offers a solid overview of the American political system beginning with studying its foundation and its development over time. The course will analyze the increasingly important role of campaign financing, social media, and other modes of representation in elections in contemporary American politics and how civil society as well as political units such as interest groups, political parties, political action committees (PACs), super PACs, and the media influence the policy making process. The course will introduce how Congress, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court operate, both in theory and in practice, and how they work for, and sometimes fail, the interests of the nation. Through various pedagogical tools, students learn to think analytically and systematically about American politics, and the importance of the study of American government. This course has two secondary objectives. First, the course reviews the contours of democracy in contemporary political and civic life and asks these questions: What facilitates democratic life? What is civil discourse and its engagement? How do we attend to questions of identity and difference (e.g., gender, class, race, gender identity and expression, religious affiliation, etc.) in democratic practices? Second, as the semester progresses, you will be required to not only interrogate political discourses, but also be asked to reflect upon your own positions and how to situate it in the broader context of local, national, and international discourses. In other words, this course compels students to ask where are we headed as a nation, what criteria do we use to evaluate a desirable outcome and for whom, and if it is not on a suitable course for yourself and others, then what can we do to change it, if at all?

Maxwell Leung

SSHIS-3000-1: Social Science/History: Social Problems

From economic inequality and digital labor exploitation to climate change and global conflict, the modern world is shaped by complex social problems that demand critical inquiry and creative solutions. This course examines the structural forces that drive social stratification and global inequality, analyzing how these dynamics manifest in issues such as poverty, war, environmental instability, and the rise of artificial intelligence. Students will explore case studies on digital sweatshops, climate displacement, social media’s role in identity formation, and the geopolitics of armed conflicts to understand how social problems develop and persist. By engaging with contemporary research, data analysis, and interdisciplinary perspectives, we will examine how power, privilege, and systemic inequalities shape individual and collective experiences. Whether tackling the ethics of AI-driven economies, the loneliness epidemic, or educational disparities, this course aims to cultivate a nuanced understanding of the world’s most pressing social issues and the possibilities for change.

Eddie Yuen

SSHIS-3000-2: Social Science/History: Apocalypse How? Politics and Aesthetics of Catastrophe

We live in catastrophic times. The world is reeling from the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, millenarian religious movements are in ascendency worldwide, zombie apocalypse is ubiquitous in popular culture, and the dire consequences of climate change are becoming more evident each day. This course will consider the various narratives of apocalypse from historical, semiotic, political, sociological and ecological perspectives, with an emphasis on the environmental crisis in all of its manifestations. We will consider such themes as “overpopulation,” resource scarcity, the enclosure of “commons,” warfare and counterinsurgency, “failed states” and environmental “sacrifice zones,” the emergence of “collapsitarian” politics, and the uneven geography of catastrophe in the current world system. Throughout the course we will critically scrutinize cultural and aesthetic interventions on the subject of social and environmental apocalypse. Social Science and History (SSHIS) courses develop students' critical thinking skills through the study of history and the social sciences (e.g. sociology, psychology, economics, political science, anthropology, geography), as well as through contemporary interdisciplines that draw heavily on these fields (e.g. feminist and queer studies, media studies, urban studies, ethnic studies). Subject matter in these courses contributes to students' cultural literacy while instructional materials and classroom assignments introduce basic research problems and techniques.

Upper Division Interdisciplinary Studio (UDIST)

Shalini Agrawal and Julia Grinkrug

UDIST-3000-4: Care in Commons

“Care in Commons” studio introduces practices of restorative care by learning from the human and other ecosystems of species with a focus on climate change. This course aims to promote climate awareness and importance of mutual care through relational imagination. We will explore non-Western European epistemologies and techniques of creative inquiry in order to address climate anxiety in face of global threats and structural racism. Aiming to restore a sense of individual agency in response to systemic issues, we will focus on various forms of care from personal to collective. With water as praxis, we will work inter-disciplinarily to reinvent traditional methods of knowledge production by reconnecting with embodied practices, sensory observation, collective flow and collaborative ways of thinking, knowing and doing. This course invites students to envision a possibility of fluid and dynamic relationships that embrace change and adaptability, extending from individual reflective practices to classroom community building.