Fall 2018, AlexandriaCore Course
On Political Ideologies and Artistic Practices
Course details
- Cycle
- Fall 2018, Alexandria
- Taught in
- English / Arabic
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About the course
If any saying was to be true about the 20th century, it would be that it was a century of ideologies and great narratives, and it might be said now that the 21st century is about the death of ideologies and the end of great narratives. Although we can find that ideologies did not really go extinct, but are transformed into a more liquid state, and maybe looking at them in their past solid state could help us understand their state of liquidity that flows into our daily lives today.
This course is designed to take us on a journey to explore many of the political ideologies that dominated the 20th century in philosophy, arts, and visual culture, and aims to offer access to a range of approaches to an interdisciplinary study of theory and practice of these three fields using the lens of literature, visual arts and cinema. The course critically engages cultural tendencies like feminism and racism, art movements like surrealism and futurism, and philosophical schools like utilitarianism and libertarianism, to understand the social characteristics and historical conditions that the modernist project imply.
Who teaches it
Hussein El-Hajj is a cultural activist and researcher in the field of radical pedagogy and alternative higher education. From 2015 to 2017 he worked as a librarian at the Cairo Contemporary Image Collective. He is currently the coordinator of the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences in Alexandria (CILAS Alex) where he also teaches translation of the humanities and social sciences. He has published an Arabic-language poetry collection, Tuyuf / Spectres (2015). His published translations include A User's Guide to Demanding the Impossible by Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Yadawia for handmade books, 2018) and two online anthologies (2018) on alternative higher education in association with CILAS: On the Emergence of Pigeon Towers and a collection of collaborative student translations, Education as Translation. At CILAS Alex, he will serve as the teaching fellow for the Skills Lab's theoretical accompaniment.
Batool El-Hennawy is from Cairo, Egypt. She is currently completing her degree in Fine Arts at Helwan University. She has worked at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS), as a co-fellow, pedagogical coordinator, and media lab director. She is interested in the transnational dimension of education and social justice with a particular focus on collective learning and storytelling as pedagogical forms. She will serve as a Skills Lab facilitator at CILAS Alex.
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