VCS FORUM SERIES
The Visual & Critical Studies Forum, which convenes regularly throughout the semester and is open to all members of the CCA community, including Alumni, opens dialogues on contemporary issues in the visual arena. Students and faculty have the opportunity to engage with leaders in a range of creative and scholarly fields, including visual studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, journalism, film studies, design, architecture, curatorial practice, and fine arts. Over our program’s twenty-year history, the Forum has hosted such luminaries as Indira Allegra, Sampade Aranke, Karen Barad, Martin Berger, Judith Butler, Jeff Chang, Mel Chen, Douglas Crimp, Ann Cvetkovich, David Eng, Elizabeth Freeman, Ken Gonzales-Day, Jennifer González, Donna Haraway, Teresa DeLauretis, Claire Jean Kim, Glen Ligon, Catherine Lord, Trinh T. Minh-ha, José Esteban Muñoz, Jerome Reyes, Kaja Silverman, Svati Shah, Rebecca Solnit, Dean Spade, Eric Stanley, and Ronaldo Wilson.
Watch this space and check our calendar for upcoming events in the series. For information about past events, including links to selected recordings, please see below.
Fall Series
Latipa and Louise J. Miranda Ramirez| Un/settled Contractions: Archives, Ancestral Futurisms, and Shared Intimacies | September 14, 2023 | Blattner Hall, 75 Arkansas Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 | 6:00 pm
Mazyar Lotfalian | What People Do with Images: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Production of Iranian Visual Culture in Transnational Circuits | September 21, 2023 | 195 De Haro, San Francisco, California, 94107 | 5:00 pm
Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa (2023 VCS Alumni Award recipient) | Erotic Resistance and Ethnographic Stripping | October 5, 2023 | 195 De Haro, San Francisco, California, 94107 | 5:00 pm
Grace Yasumura and Serena Qiu | Sketching the Shape of a Potential Asian American and Diasporic Art History | October 26, 2023 | ZOOM | 5:00 pm
Sài Gòn Sàn Art Mini Symposium: Patrick Flores (Taipei), Philippe Peycam (Netherlands); Vicky Do; Abbey Chen (Asian Art Museum SF); et al. | November 2023 (date TBA) | (location TBA)
Ming Wong | November 2023 (date TBA) | (location TBA)
Spring Series
Rose Salseda | Unrest in Black and White: Visualizing the 1992 Los Angeles Riots in the Artwork of Adrian Piper | February 2, 2023 | 195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA 94107 | 5:30 pm
Deirdre Visser | Learning to Write History | February 9, 2023 | 195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA 94107 | 5:00 pm
Nana Adusei-Poku | Black Melancholia as Critical Practice | February 23, 2023 | Timken Lecture Hall, 1111 8th Street in San Francisco | 5:00 pm
julia elizabeth neal | Transnational Scholarship: Performance, Race, and Archives | March 2, 2023 | Zoom | 5:00 pm
John Yau | Wait by the Coat Room | March 30, 2023 | Timken Lecture Hall, 1111 8th Street in San Francisco | 5:00 pm | Co-sponsored by CCA Grad Fine Arts, Grad Writing, Undergrad Writing & Literature, and Undergrad Critical Ethnic Studies Departments
Sara Ahmed | Killing Joy as a Queer Project | April 6, 2023 |Timken Lecture Hall, 1111 8th Street in San Francisco | 5:00 pm | a QCCA event!
Panel participants forthcoming | Modernism and the Appropriation of Black Women's Bodies | April 13, 2023 | Zoom | 4:00 pm
Fall Series
Elena Gross | Critic as Curator as Queer Historian | September 22, 2022 | 195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107
Ramzi Fawaz | Queer Love on Barbary Lane: The Serial Experience of Coming Out of the Closet with Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City | September 29, 2022 | Blattner Multipurpose Room - 75 Arkansas Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107
Christina Moretta | Embodying Archives: Care as We Process | October 6, 2022 | 195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107
Dorothy R. Santos | Sonic Futures: World Building Through Docu-Poetics | October 27, 2022 | 195 De Haro, San Francisco, CA, 94107
Jorella Andrews | Radical Description: Why it matters and how to do it | November 17, 2022 | Zoom
2021/2022 VCS Forum Series:
Da'Shaun Harrison, with Ajuan Mance | Anti-Black Anti-Fatness and Desire | May 5, 2022 |
Eunsong Kim & Jarrett Martin Drake | Against Accumulation: On Archives & Racial Capitalism | April 21, 2022 |
PJ DiPietro | Trans of Color Is an Oxymoron: Humans, Nonhuman Animals, and Bodies Beneath Animals | April 7, 2022 |
Elaine Yau | Curating African American-made Quilts at BAMPFA | March 31, 2022 |
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz | Settler-colonialism and the Founding of the US State | March 17, 2022 |
Richard Hylton | Donald Rodney's Doublethink and the Psychic Life of Race | February 24, 2022 |
Nelson Chan | Punk, Publishing, and Photography | January 27, 2022 |
Mitchell Schwarzer | Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption | November 17, 2021 |
Claire Kim | Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World | November 10, 2021 |
Eric Stanley | Clocked: Surveillance, Opacity, and the Image of Force | October 20, 2021 |
Dean Spade | Mutual Aid: Survival and Resistance in Times of Disaster | October 13, 2021 | View Recording |
Svati P. Shah | Brothels and Big Screen Rescues: Thinking With Visuality in Representations of Transactional Sex | September 29, 2021 |
Carolina Magis Weinberg | Reading Images: The Practical Complexities of a Critical Approach to Visuality | September 22, 2021 |
2020/2021 VCS Forum Series:
Tao Leigh Goffe | Archive, Mixtape, Method: A Decolonial Remix | April 14, 2021 |
Melinda Luisa de Jesús | A storm of a girl silently gathering force: Peminist Girlhoods in the Comics of Trinidad Escobar and Malaka Gharib | April 7, 2021 |
Charisse Burden-Stelly | Between Radicalism and Repression: U.S. Black Communists Against Racial Capitalism | March 24, 2021 | View Recording |
Shylah Pacheco Hamilton | You Get What You Give - Creating Belonging and the Paradox of Decolonial Aesthetic | March 3, 2021 |
Janette Kim | Another Kind of Power | February 10, 2021 |
Ayesha Hameed | The End of Eating Everything | December 19, 2020 | View Recording |
Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik | Reflections on the Pencil: From Blueberry to Bronze (Or, Notes on Writing, Criticality, and Belonging in Visual and Critical Studies) | November 11, 2020 |
Joshua Myers | A Poetics of Liberation | October 21, 2020 | View Recording |
Irene Cheng | Forest, Plantation, Bungalow: The Material Constitutions of a Building | September 30, 2020 |
Sam Vernon | Notes on Belonging | September 16, 2020 |
2019/2020 VCS Forum Series:
Vivian Sming | Locating Ethics | February 26, 2020 |
Mia Yinxing Liu | Early Spring in February: Reframing the Problems of Utopia in Chinese Cinema in the 1960s | February 12, 2020 |
Weston Teruya | Reflections on Material Dislocation and the Visual Language of Hyper-development in Honolulu | November 20, 2019 |
Joan Kee | Afro-Asia: Frames, Boundaries, Mythologies | November 6, 2019 |
Bridget Cooks | The Desert as Site of Black Mythology | October 16, 2019 |
Anna Martine Whitehead | Objects Among Subjects in the Quantum Field | October 2, 2019 |
Elizabeth Mangini | Passive Process: Arte Povera and the Politics of Autonomia | September 25, 2019 |