Experiments in Minoritarian Aesthetics (EMA)
EMA is a graduate seminar led by Professor Sandra Ruiz that travels with and across the senses and aesthetic genres. Seminar studiers read and experiment across texts in performance studies, feminist, trans, and queer studies, visual culture, cultural studies, sound studies, and relational ethnic studies by moving through the entanglement of aesthetics and politics. Honoring the idea that aesthetics instructs not only representations and judgements of the social world, but the encounters and bonds that form between objects, subjects, entities, histories, narratives, the seminar pays close attention to forms of resistance, revolt, survival, everyday endurance strategies, and diverse cultural labor witnessed in study, art making, and writing. In doing so, the seminar experiments with how the minor voice writes and recreates the aesthetic into new styles, studies, and existences. Seminar studiers will be asked to take on new writerly gestures, to think of writing as a minoritarian aesthetic practice, and to think of study writ large as an act of new world-making. The final symposium took place on May 9, 2023.
EMA Final Symposium Program
Final Symposium Program
- Ceazar Augusto Castañeda, Department of English
- “Passion that cannot be contained!: Excess, roleplaying games, & the burden of liveness”
- Hannah Charity, Department of English
- “An Arrow/that joins a split heart: Revisiting my archive of rooms”
- Mitchel Civello, Department of Theatre
- “Notes toward a performative theory of class”
- Laura Coby, Department of English
- “We cannot survive in a vacuum. We must be part of a community: Forging brown commons and inscrutability in Fefu & Her Friends“
- Natalia Espinel & Samantha Shoppell, Art Education
- “Un/wrapping Vulnerability”
- Trinidad Gomez, Department of English
- “Dungeons and Dragons and Disidentification: Tabletop explorations of self”
- Maria Rivera Lopez, Department of English
- “Dis(place)ment”
- Issy Marquez, Department of English
- “Love is not just a verb”: The epistolary form & transformative theorists”
- Daniel Myers, Department of English
- “Debt and infrastructural time”
- V Millen, Department of English
- “Enacting ephemera: understanding how young adult authors and readers create community in fan spaces”
- Emerson Parker Pehl, Department of English
- “Close reading, close feeling: attentive (anticolonial) sensibilities”
