Whitney D. Johnson

First Year Seminar I provides guided experience in college-level expository writing inspired by a topic in the liberal arts. This section will introduce the topic of gender and social movements to prompt analytical thought, reading, and writing. Specifically, we will ask how different views of gender have prompted social action. Particularly as gender intersects with other social identities, such as race, class, sexuality, nationality, and ability, we can assess the successes of gender activist groups from a diversity of viewpoints. In addition to feminism and transfeminism, we will discuss conservative activist groups, as well. Some of the scholars and artists we will study in this course include Davis, Beauvoir, Stryker, Srinivasan, and Lorde. Students should expect to write at least 15 pages over the course of the semester, with opportunities for planning and revision built into each of the longer essays. As an applied component of the course, students will have an opportunity to describe imagined or enacted participation in gender activism alongside the core component of analytical writing.

Studio Techniques is an intermediate-level course that approaches the analog recording studio and its technologies as a creative environment for sound manipulation and exploration. Beginning with the sound sample as a material basis, the course combines a detailed approach to the fundamentals of acoustics and auditory perception with thorough instruction on analog signal processing and mixing. Students produce assigned and independent projects using these sample-based analog techniques. Topics are supplemented by listening exercises and examples of various artists? works to give historical and cultural context. Topics in acoustics and auditory perception include sound localization, spatial characteristics of sound, frequency spectrum, and dynamics and loudness. Artists and musicians whose works serve as examples include Carl Stone, Jaap Blonk, John Wall, Laetitia Sonami, Moreno Veloso, and others. Assigned projects include generating disparate sound materials from simple sources; composing sound/music works using self-generated samples and sources; live mixing/composing using analog technologies; independent projects using technologies and strategies introduced in the course content.

Mirrors, alter egos, polarities, doppelgängers, gender binaries, impostors, twins, and shadows. Many auditory illusions also arise from doubles. For example, the two sides of the human head can produce psychoacoustic phenomena, such as binaural beats. The dual nature of audio-visual experiences can produce complex illusions, such as the McGurk effect. To knock at the door of these doubles, we will read a few words on doubles by doubles--Jung and Lacan, Sontag and Butler, Sartre and Fosse, Fanon and Said, Artaud and Bataille--and listen to sonic doubles in contemporary practice. Automatic writing will prepare us to create our own auditory illusions in recorded and performed stereophonic sound. Will these doubles sublate?

Gender theory is mobilized in feminist activism toward a variety of goals. This course will offer a survey of social theories of gender and will proceed to identify them as the foundations and justifications of social movements in each wave of feminism. Theories include de Beauvoir, Crenshaw, Rubin, Schilt, and Butler. Social movements will include suffragettes, NOW, the Combahee River Collective, riot grrrl, Sisters in Islam, and transgender social movements.

This course will situate the sociological knowledge of the aesthetic ?good? in the corporeal techniques of hearing and listening, particularly when the artistic medium of sound crosses the boundaries of the brain, body, architectural space, and material objects. As auditory culture has moved from the concert hall and music venue into galleries, museums, and outdoor public spaces, cultural practitioners have been prompted to ask how bodies perceive, understand, and evaluate the sounds they encounter. With a rich literature on sound, space, and embodiment, this course will not only survey sonic works in art music and the gallery arts but also the ways that technological advancements have changed exhibition practices and the perceptual capabilities of bodies. In combination with sound studies, a nexus of social theory and phenomenology will draw out the connection between bodies and technologies.

This class is co-taught by Visiting Sick Professor Raven Chacon and Associate Professor Adjunct Whitney Johnson. Drawing on traditional and alternative knowledge systems from Indigenous and de-colonialized perspectives, this interdisciplinary seminar investigates the embodied experiences, practices and discourses that can arise at the intersection of sound, performance, and land. Students must be willing to meet at off-campus locations to be determined by the class, and at times beyond the scheduled class times, in order to engage in collaborative research and production. Resources for concrete outcome(s) will be available, such as a performance, book, video, LP, or other substantial work for public presentation or engagement.