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GLOBALISING ART, ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN HISTORY

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GLAADH Outcomes

Between 2001 and 2003 GLAADH supported 10 initiatives at universities across the UK to develop new and existing courses which aimed at embedding cultural diversity within the art, architecture and design history curriculum. This section of the website presents outlines of the resulting courses. Please see the list of courses below and choose which ever format suits you best.

If you would like to know more about the context within which the courses were developed you can go to the GLAADH Outcomes section of the website and read the case study reports by the 10 initiatives.

Anglia Polytechnic University

King's College Chapel

This seminar looks the Chapel in the context of the discourses and institutions of Christendom, its universities, churches, theologies, dynasties, courts, regions etc. It also extends the perimeter of the context to include the Islamic world and, specifically, the madrasa, to establish visual comparisons between Muslim places of learning and those of Christianity.

Anglia Polytechnic University

Objects in Space

This module begins with a four-week block that introduces students to representations of the human figure in three-dimensional form across different cultures and periods (European, Classical Greek, Medieval, African). Site visits introduce students to different types of collections and displays, while dealing with issues of value, representation and context.

Anglia Polytechnic University

Visual Theories

This module includes a week's study (lecture and two-hour seminar) entitled 'cultural difference and anthropology'. The purpose is to consider the legitimacy of western methods when applied to the investigation of 'non-western' images and objects. Readings from Firth, Faure, Fagg, Baldwin, Oguibe and Davies are discussed in the seminar.

Birkbeck College, University of London

Perspectives on World Cinema

The course introduces films of outstanding importance that have made significant contributions to the concept of 'world cinema' but are also difficult to see in this country and derive from unfamiliar film cultures. The course is then designed to introduce these film cultures, with a certain amount of interdisciplinary study, through their reflection of and contribution to contemporary political and aesthetic debates. Most particularly, the course will address ways in which history and memory are represented in these marginal cinemas from the 'developing' world. The course is divided into two sections: 1) Cinema and Social Change: the Brazilian case; 2) From Third Cinema to World Cinema

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Birkbeck College, University of London

Summer Term Series of Invited Speaker Talks, 2003

De Montfort University

Studies in Material Culture: Contemporary Crafts

This module will examine issues raised by contemporary craft production. Students will engage in debates on the significance of skill and creativity in defining the crafts; the distinction between art and craft; function and decoration in the crafts; the relation to industry and use of technology; the relevance of vernacular tradition; the relation between professional status and amateur handicrafts; and the ethics of sustainable production. The module will take a global perspective on these issues, with particular involvement from specialists in South Asian crafts.

De Montfort University

Cultural Identity Module

This module provides students with an opportunity to research and analyse their specialist discipline in relation to issues of identity. The module will introduce a broad range of cultural theory, relevant to current debate on issues of identity, nationality, gender, the body, virtual realities and consumption, as applied to design of interiors, product ranges, craft and the promotion of organisations. Postmodernism, and its theoretical approaches, acts as a basis for interpreting multiple voices and sites of identity.

University of Edinburgh

The Contemporary City

This is a course about the city as an aesthetic object in contemporary thought. Its sources are the body of ideas that currently surround the city in architectural discourse and cultural theory. The majority of these cities are western, and the literature is dominated by books and journals published in the US and Europe. But it inserts material from three important Latin American cities, Brasília, Rio de Janeiro, and México City in the belief that in these places are integral to an international discourse about the contemporary city.

University of Edinburgh

Architecture and Modernity

This is a course about modernity and the city. Its historical scope takes in the whole of the twentieth century, up to and including some contemporary developments. Its geographical scope is wide, encompassing developments in key cities in Europe and the US, as well as two Latin American countries (Brazil and México) where the idea of modernity has been given spectacular built form. In this way the course has a number of important material foci (cities and buildings), but its primary purpose is to analyse a set of interconnecting debates about the city, in international architectural discourse.

Kingston University

Exploring Contexts

The module focuses on the resources of London and its environs. It investigates the different ways in which these may be used to enhance a critical understanding of the objects of visual and material culture and their mediation in contemporary culture. This will include assessing key research resources, including internet sources, close analysis of particular works, objects or sites, and the study of different modes of visual and critical presentation.

Kingston University

Gender and Identity

This module considers the conditioning of the body and body image. In doing so it engages various discourses regarding the construction, performance and representation of gendered, ethnic and sexual identities. The representation of appearance and its projection through media and cultural production is a key theme of the module and provides the opportunity to engage different modes of representation such as film, advertising, fashion photography, texts, and magazines. In doing so the module focuses upon deployment of strategies of distinction and conformity in the performance identity.

Kingston University

Modernisms and Post-Modernisms: Design and Architecture after 1945

This module explores architecture and design after the Second World War. They will be studied in the context of important economic and cultural shifts in the second half of the 20th Century. This will include issues of Modernisms and Post-Modernisms, youth culture, globalization and the commodification of place.

Kingston University

Object Analysis

This module focuses upon the role of objects and material culture within contemporary Western society. The course presents an introduction to critical and theoretical perspectives for analysing and explaining the ways objects are used to construct, reflect and project notions of social identity. The course attempts to project a trajectory across the production, representation, and consumption of designed objects and environments. The module includes a visit to the Islamic Art Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum which will allow us to investigate and question the ways the museum space categorises, presents and represents objects.

Kingston University

Contextualising Photography

This module explores and considers the development of photography as a both a technical and cultural process. The sessions take a thematic approach to the subject so that photography may be considered in its various and multiple contexts. It aims to explain some of the various approaches and understandings of photography, whilst questioning the history which has been constructed around it. The module includes a session on 'Imagining Race' which will look at the ways that photography has been used to construct and represent issues of race, ethnicity and identity. We will consider contemporary fine art approaches such as those of Zineb Sedira alongside precedent photographic images of early Western anthropologists.

University of Manchester

Globalising Art and Architecture

This series of six lectures makes up one theme within the course 'Introduction to Art History'. This theme is intended to introduce you to issues of cultural diversity in Art and Architecture. You will be exposed to specific case studies from Africa and Asia, as well as issues such as colonialism, post-colonialism and representation.

University of Plymouth

Myths of Primitivism

This module introduces students to ways of examining and learning about cultures and arts outside Europe, especially the material culture of Africa, Amerindian North America and the Pacific Islands. It looks particularly at the museological questions raised by exhibitions of these items and objects and the current need to find appropriate means of interpretation of such works. A second element of the course concerns modernism's response to the visual cultures from around the world. Here students will engage with historical terminology such as the concepts of 'primitivism', 'Orientalism', and exoticism in Western visual culture.

University of Plymouth

Collecting and Exhibiting Cultures in the 19th century

This module is designed to focus on a crucial issue in the study of world cultures, namely, the ways in which their material artefacts are displayed in Western museums. We will examine how these displays constructed representations of 'exotic' cultures, which confirmed the West's self-image. The module will also assess the extent to which twenty-first century museum practice has moved on from nineteenth and early twentieth century practice.

University of Plymouth

Cultural Difference

The aim of this seminar course is to examine the formation of cultural identities via the agency of the arts in modern democratic and/or totalitarian societies. In a series of case studies (organised and presented by groups of two students each) it will examine those moments when the arts were mobilised to define and valorise a particular society's self-image. The basis for such examination comes from the recent growth in historical and art historical study of mentalities, national identities and cultural distinctions.

Sheffield Hallam University

Transculturation

The aims of this module are to consider the relationship of dominant visual culture to visual arts from outside the 'European' tradition. The module will address contemporary practice within the visual arts and the historic reception of 'non-Western' visual culture within the context of the politics of cultural representation and cultural resistance. Visual culture will be considered as a dynamic, fluid force involving acquisition but also loss, transculturation. The module will consider the signifying practices employed in the institutional appropriation of cultural difference as well as the concept of reciprocal cultural exchange and fusion.