Courses
310 courses since 2014
What we cover at CILAS matters less than what a student discovers.
310 courses
- 121
Reading Feminism/Writing To Live
Reading Feminism/Writing To Live explores the power of language, rhythm and imagination. It is both a Creative Writing lab and a close-reading course. We indulge in the words of novelists and poets, to conjure up energy and courage for our own writing endeavours. What do stori…
View course - 122
- 123
The Social Under our skin. Who Else is in our Body?
This course put forth the body as a methodology to understand critical and complex social realities. Looking at the body and embodiment, this course aims to anthropologically understand what is under our skin? By asking this question we sophisticate our relationship with “our”…
View course - 124
Intimate Archives: On Feminist Movements & Emotions
This is a poetic investigation, and the subject is ourselves. Archives, when combined with movements, become a documentation of those who rebelled; when combined with intimacy, they lose their coldness and distance. In Intimate Archives: On Feminist Movements and Emotions, we…
View course - 125
Feminist Phenomenology: The Body and the World
The body is the most familiar and natural thing we perceive. It is through the body that we first become aware of our surroundings. We experience the world around uswithand throughour bodies, and as we exist in the world, we soon realize that our body is not just for us to per…
View course - 126
Archives of Memory and Forgetting in the Middle East
Milan Kundera tells us in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting that “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This observation– that how and why we collectively remember is intimately connected to struggle and power– is the guiding theme…
View course - 127
Anthropology of Religion: History of Religion and Rituals
Anthropology is the study of people, cultures, and the human condition. This course introduces the concepts of religion and spirituality with an anthropological, historical, social, and cultural lens that focuses on rituals and healing. Our question does not focus on the synop…
View course - 128
How do we talk about Death?
Nothing can be more unsettling than pondering one’s mortality. Death is ubiquitous, and yet never really spoken about. It remains a powerful taboo. And although we are definitely better off than our ancestors were, two hundred years ago, death can still find ways to rattle us…
View course - 129
Why do we obey?: Ideology in Daily Life
How does authority re-produce itself in our everyday lives? What is ideology? How does ideology shape our attitudes, perceptions, and every day interactions? What can the works of Louis Althusser, Slavoj Zizek, Jacques Lacan, and other theorists of ideology tell us about ourse…
View course - 130
Towards a History of Islamicate Print
Revolution and Continuity between Colonialism, Religion, and Gender
View course - 131
The Whatness of Cinematic Urbanism
The aim of this course is to fuel further curiosity in discovering and understanding cities through cinematic images; to use films as tools to analyze the spatial relationships between society and its surrounding urban scenery. The main idea is not mere camera movement and ang…
View course - 132
The Threshold of Fire: Incendiarism, Hysteria, and Civilization
Fire is imagined as the first invention of “man.” It inaugurates humanity into technology, it fuels civilization, and arms its march and its ability to defend itself. It is also imagined as a destructive force, something that flows out of control, defies logic and subverts or…
View course - 133
- 134
- 135
Intercessing with artistic research
"Intercessing with artistic research” is an interdisciplinary class that offers insights into minor performative artistic research strategies. While continuously asking what else artistic research can do, the class explores the multiplicities of processes operating in the peri…
View course - 136
- 137
The Politics of Language and Alphabets: History, Power, and Community
What lies behind the languages and alphabets we use? Although they may appear as mundane and neutral means of communication, languages and scripts have functioned, historically and today, as powerful social, cultural, and political tools. Since the nineteenth century, imperial…
View course - 138
Killjoy: A Guide to Everyday Feminism
In the past few years discourses around feminism centered on the rise of rape/harrasment survivors’ testmonials have spread on social media. The use of the term “feminism” has become wide-spread and a mining field for different memes with the stereotype of the loud angry femin…
View course - 139
Egypt's Surrealists, the Avant-Garde and the Sixties Generation
This course will explore the different iterations of the avant-garde in Egypt across the 20th Century, their historical specificity, and political orientations. Avant-Garde artistic and literary movements in Egypt stand out because of the importance domestic and international…
View course - 140
Community Wellbeing and Resilience; Introduction to Community Psychology
During the last few years, mental health started to be an essential topic. Mental Health is not discussed only in theory or as a luxury but rather as a necessity to thrive and pursue meaning and purpose in life. Saying so, we usually connect Mental Health to individuals but in…
View course
