Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/California College of the Arts/PHCRT 300 Queer Worldings (Spring)

This course page is an automatically-updated version of the main course page at dashboard.wikiedu.org. Please do not edit this page directly; any changes will be overwritten the next time the main course page gets updated.

In this course we will explore the critical, creative and activist possibilities put in motion by placing the terms “queer” and “worldings” in conversation.

As a noun, "queer" has been reclaimed from an insult hurled, to a self-nominated category of identity and pride for folks whose sexuality and gender does not fall easily into heteronormative categories. One definition of queer is that which questions, upsets, opposes, or subverts ideas and practices of normality, particularly in relation to (but not limited to) the binary relationship of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” as the main axis on which human sexuality is mapped, and the binary structure of “male” and “female” as the main axis on which gender is categorized. As an adjective, "queer" may mean strange, odd, peculiar. "Worlding" is a concept first used by Heidegger in his work "Being and Time" (1927). Used differently in different contexts, one definition of “worlding” that we may find useful is as a verb that points to the complex assemblage of sensations, meanings, perceptions, realities through which we create, experience and come to terms with our world.

Queer worlding, understood with these connotations, is a useful concept for understanding the way queer peoples have navigated, survived and co-created “worlds” (art, families, networks of being). We will use it to discuss non-normative modes of relationality and creativity, not only in terms of communities, linages of scholarship and art, and private and public intimacies but also in terms of the potential for, and the organizing practices of, activist, cross-community political coalitions.

This course is interested in how the queer worlding practices of past communities do (or do not) get documented and what these practices may add to our current possibilities of queer worlding. As such, knowledge production is a central concern of this course; that is, how is knowledge produced, by whom, and why (both in the larger world and in our own classroom and studies). The central assignment structure of this course engages with encyclopedic knowledge production. We will study Wikipedia as a culture and we will spend the semester learning how to contribute to this site. We will concern ourselves with developing our ability to read and research “queerly” as we focus on training and honing our critical thinking and writing skills. At the end of the semester you will have added documentation of "queer worlding" to Wikipedia through an entry on a queer person, community, event, practice, piece of art, etc.

We will also “queer” our experience as a learning community by attending not only to “what” we are learning but “how” we are learning it and how we might further extend, and put to use, what we learn.