Course information

This module focuses on the role art and aesthetics play in conflict. Aesthetic forms such as photography, films, paintings, music, and poetry are often used to inspire, motivate, antagonise, as well as document the interactions, history, and formation of groups. They are the texts and images that shape collective imaginaries, both in the connectivity of a group and as the visions of the enemy-other. The module explores the ways in which these aesthetic works contribute to our understanding of politics, the established order, modes of subversion, and by extension our understanding of the social. Can works of art - works of the imagination - make us think or feel in ways that other works do not? How?