Theorizing Anonymity - 4 Weeks

Mon+Th, 6-8pm ET

4 weeks, Feb 3-Apr 27

Is visibility unavoidable? Contemporary media has saturated much of contemporary life with spectacle. Philosopher Michele Foucault described the mass media world as a "panopticon," a psychological internalization of surveillance. That is, people feel and thus act as if they are being watched. People are indeed observing other and being observed on an unprecedented scale by security cameras, data mining platforms, and their own social media followers. Under these conditions, what is left as private or anonymous? This course considers documentaries, influencer culture, and the surveillance state, while drawing from theorists like Alexander Galloway, Christina Sharpe, and Édouard Glissant to consider alternatives to the apparent omnipresence of identification.

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Instructor: Sloane McNulty is an adjunct professor of Critical Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art, holding a PhD in American studies from Rutgers University. They research gender, ecology, and capital, and are currently writing about the production of gender, AI as fascist aesthetic, and the political economy of "recursive enclosure."