Representations: Presenting Realities and Realizing New Worlds in Film

politics of film

This course asks you to take film seriously as a political practice — one that is not only about what we see on screen, but about how those images come to be, who they are for, and what they do in the world.

What is a film? What does it mean to say something is political? In this course, we approach film as a way of thinking about politics, not only as something that represents the world, but as something that actively participates in producing our realities. Films do not simply tell stories; they organize ways of seeing, feeling, and knowing. They shape who or what is made visible, how that visibility is structured, and what is pushed outside of our frames of view. Films ask us to consider who is speaking, who is being spoken for, and who is not being heard at all.

Across the summer session, we will build a shared set of questions for engaging film as a political practice. We will begin with key concepts from film theory and political analysis, and then move through a range of films and readings that take up Indigeneity, gender and sexual orientation, race, nuclear politics, cultural appropriation, and archival loss. We will spend time with films from Hawai‘i and across Turtle Island beyond merely the “mainland” of the United States, asking how film has taken up questions of occupation, resistance, and sovereignty, and how those representations have shifted over time and across different forms of media.

Throughout the course, you will also be participating in producing or critiquing films. The assignments will help you tackle the following lines of questioning: What does it mean to represent a political issue responsibly? What does it mean to create something that is accountable to the people, places, and relations it engages? And, what might it look like to use film to imagine otherwises—to create worlds that do not yet exist, but could?

By the end of the course, you will develop tools to analyze films with both specificity and care, to situate them within broader political and historical contexts, and to create your own work that pays attention to power, representation, and relation.

Reflections: Presenting Realities and Realizing New Worlds in Film

politics of film

This course explores the multiple dimensions of films across both their creation, whether by major Hollywood studios or small-scale productions, and their consumption by audiences both public and private. Students will learn ways to analyze films and video-based media on their political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. Today, we are immersed in a media environment filled with film, from short-form TikToks and Instagram reels to the proliferation of full-length features since the inception of the genre 130 years ago. This course builds a set of analytical tools through bell hooks’ foundational theory in Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies, alongside watching films and speaking with filmmakers. For their midterm and final assignments, students will create short films. The expectation is to learn what it means to understand the politics of film by doing the politics of film, rather than being experts in filmmaking (so, no experience required!).

Worlds: Radical, Abundant More-than-Human Futures

political design & futures studies

This course foregrounds futures making strategies and kinship collectives that pursue radical, abundant presents and futures and engage more-than-human communities across multiple temporalities to build our shared futures. This course is designed to think the future at various scales from the granularity of microbes and gut bacteria to the human scale of bodies and communities to the ecological scale of our environments. Thinking, dreaming, and building the future at various intervals allows us to pursue the complicated project of building futures that do not sacrifice near-present conditions and kin to death, destruction, and dismay for the sake of never-reached dreamworlds.

To do so, our reading, listening, and viewing practices center more-than-human worldbuilding, Indigenous relations and futures, queer kinships, and Afrofuturist worlds. We first analyze our intertwined ecologies with more-than-humans to expand our understanding of liveliness on our planet toward creating collective assemblages of abundant life on the home we share. Our discussions grapple with the ethics of entanglements with more-than-human kin whose lifeworlds we inhabit, pollute, and terraform. We find joy in living within more-than-human worlds. Rather than a project of despair or saviorism, our collective world-building is one of solidarity and delight. We consider the ecological implications of our everyday actions, from eating to energy usage to recreation and education. Finally, we wrap-up with Indigenous more-than-human kinships before we move into our second unit which prioritizes Indigenous futurisms.

Our second unit considers not only the impact of extraction, extermination, and elimination on Indigenous peoples, beings, lands, bodies, lifeways, and futures, but the otherwises that Indigenous relations to other humans and other nonhuman beings provide. We begin by analyzing commonly accepted futures paradigms and seeing their holes: who is excluded and how. To dream and create worlds that do not continue to recreate these historical and present social conditions, we look to Indigenous, queer, and Afrofuturist visions of futures. These worlds have survived within these erasures and attempted extinctions. They offer us tools, not to take for ourselves but to understand refusal as a political strategy, the ethical commitments of reciprocity, and what ends of the world really mean materially. During this unit, students collectively read and present an Afrofuturist text that speculates a form of Black feminist life after catastrophe and envisions just, liberated futures.

Finally, our last unit after the spring recess has us bring together all that we have learned during the first 11 weeks of the semester to work toward our collective futures. To understand the complexities of futures, we first needed to understand contemporary and future issues in our shared world and the critical histories whose undercurrents continue to ripple through our presents today and our futures tomorrow. Now, students can engage in actions needed to either bring about futures they would want to see for their communities or to forestall those they would find disastrous. Both aspects of futures building are crucial. To do this, students will present not only on their more-than-human kinship practice from earlier in the term but also materialize these envisioned futures into the present through constructing and presenting futures artifacts to their peers. Finally, we’ll wrap up with a student-selected day and then weave together what we learned during 17 weeks together and how each class member plans to bring these learnings and actions into their futures.

Collective: Futures in the Making

political design & futures studies

This course engages students in the practices of dreaming, designing, and evaluating possible futures to co-create ones that better serve their communities. This semester we investigate how futures-making is always a collective endeavor. World-building can never be a singular act because we come into these efforts as our microbial more-than-human selves, we read and write about futures through tree-bodies of paper and pulp, and we exchange water droplets through our shared breath during class discussions.

This course foregrounds futures making and kinship collectives that pursue radical, abundant presents and futures and that engage in more-than-human communities across multiple temporalities. Our reading, listening, and viewing practices center more-than-human worldbuilding, Indigenous relations and futures, queer kinship, and Afrofuturism and social justice movements. This course is designed to help us think about the future at various scales, not only of time but of beings, from the granular level of microbes and gut bacteria to the human scale of bodies and communities to the ecological scale of our environments and celestial bodies. Thinking, dreaming, and building the future at various intervals allows us to pursue the complicated project of building futures that do not sacrifice near-present conditions and kin to death, destruction, and dismay for the sake of never-reached dreamworlds.

The semester begins by focusing on our intertwined ecologies with more-than-humans. We use this expanded understanding of liveliness on our planet to think through how we can create collective assemblages of abundant life on the home we share. Our class discussions grapple with the ethics of entanglements with more-than-human kin whose lifeworlds we inhabit, pollute, and terraform. We consider the ecological implications of our everyday actions, from eating to energy usage to recreation and education. We then move to consider the impact of extraction, extermination, and elimination on Indigenous peoples, beings, lands, bodies, lifeways, and futures. We learn from queer worlds that have survived within these erasures and attempted extinctions. Finally, we collectively read two Afrofuturist texts that speculate Black feminist life after catastrophe and envision just, liberated futures.

As we examine collective practices of co-creating futures for a multitude of beings, our practices in this class are necessarily collective. This means rather than a hierarchical structure where an expert lectures at students whose aim is to absorb information, each class participant will bring the multitudes of their being, the collectives they are invested in, and their capacities as teacher and learner to class every day. Both in preparing for and during class, we utilize a shared Miro board to amass the wealth of this shared knowledge. All participants—students, guests, and instructor alike—pull threads from texts that resonate with them and add color from their own lived experiences to Miro to create dense layers of meaning to what we examine.

More-Than-Human: Law and Politics Beyond the Borders of the Human

environmental law & politics

Nature or the environment — this course grapples with texts, films, and other works of art that critically engage with how humans are always enmeshed in the environment. In fact, neatly delineating such borders of one individual or even one species is fraught, as the readings will show. Moving across distinct and diverse geographies from the Arctic to the Pacific, the course considers how environmental politics and more-than-human relations are practiced and represented across various cultural contexts. By the end of the course, students will be able to analyze how legal frameworks and political decisions structure relations between humans, our environments, and other beings.

Drawing on political theory, Indigenous studies, environmental law, and environmental humanities, the course is structured into five three-week units. The first unit provides students with a foothold into key political theory for understanding environmental politics and its players, namely humans and the environment. The second unit focuses on the people who protect the majority of the Earth’s biodiversity — Indigenous peoples, their environmental politics, and the more-than-human relations that undergird them. The third unit tackles how the law interfaces with the environment, in particular through the rights to clean water, notions of legal personhood for more-than-human beings, and acts that focus on endangered species. The second-to-last unit focuses on how environmental politics are represented across various forms of art, including films, songs, prose, and poetry. The final unit considers what we can practice to bring about abundant more-than-human futures.

Bodies: Making American Politics

American politics

The scope of American politics is not limited to a two-party-dominated system. To understand the complexities of American politics, we need to understand contemporary and future issues in American politics and the critical histories whose undercurrents continue to ripple through American politics today. 

This course considers how particular bodies constitute, construct, and complicate American politics. We will ask what mechanics undergird American politics? Who and what are sacrificed to create visions of America? Guest speakers include voting and queer rights activists, foreign service officers, cybersecurity experts, and climate change mitigation specialists.

As the entire remit of American politics is too broad to cover thoroughly in one semester, we will focus our efforts into four units. Our first unit thinks through lands, waters, and disasters or how Black and Indigenous bodies are made and unmade in America. We’ll discuss climate change and other unnatural disasters and look at how cartographic imagery has made America. This unit will introduce us to the intersections of Black and Indigenous studies as they affect American politics. Our second unit takes up art and resistance. We will focus on how art, from sculpture to paintings to music and poetry, makes bodies, is made by bodies, and how it helps us to understand the everyday and generational implications of politics. Our third unit takes up questions of security and representation, both foreign and domestic, as we think through old and new frontiers of cybersecurity, AI, representation, and militarization. We’ll speak with cybersecurity experts, consider how issues of representation have been taken up in Indigenous communities, and look at war in and by the United States of America. Our final unit considers the futures of American politics and the actions needed to either bring about futures we’d like to see or how we forestall those we find disastrous.

Water: Politics of Power and Protest

introduction to political science

This course considers the politics of power and protest by examining the ecologies and hydropolitics of water. Water is all around us, within us, and all water is political: from the flowing liquid that comes out of the tap to the rain showers and rolling waves that bring food from and to this island. Each of us has a unique yet unifying entry point to water which allows us to look through its watery lens to learn about political thought and practice. As water-filled beings whose education takes place surrounded by an oceanic body of water, water provides us with a common frame of reference to assess the systems, ideologies, and actions that create and break down our worlds, pasts, and futures.

The media we engage in this course traces the undercurrents of political action, structures of power, and modes of protest that flow through our collective experiences with water. This course will (re)introduce you to texts and thinkers from across different subfields of political science from alternative futures to international relations and Indigenous politics to political theory. As humans, water provides us with nourishment, community, physical activity, spiritual connection, and a source of curiosity. Following water as a method, the materials for this course seek to inspire you, make you question your previously held assumptions, and engage in the physical acts of reading, writing, and presenting.

Rather than studying water externally to it, we will model our engagement by following the paths of water itself. We will submerge deeply into the pieces we read, and our topics will ebb and flow from week to week without hard, impermeable boundaries between themes as these water issues are interrelated as all issues of politics are. As an invitation to engage in deep thinking about how political our everyday decisions are, much of your work in this course will be to examine how water streams throughout your life. Using the case study of water to springboard considerations of the political beyond water, we will engage personally in political issues in which we find ourselves and our communities entrenched, from articulating the significance of events in the news to direct political action. Throughout the semester, experts in areas of water politics as well as community organizers who focus on issues beyond water politics will join our class to share their experiences.

In this course, we will examine pasts, presents, and futures of water and what that means for the communities we count ourselves in and ecologies in which we are embedded. Because the politics of water is as vast and deep as the ocean, this course skims across the surface of some of the many ways in which water is imagined and engaged with politically. At the end of this course, you will have examined a breadth of the ways in which water is political and the ways political science theorizes and works. Together, we will navigate Indigenous relationships to water and water protection, infrastructures of water management, water-related natural disasters and catastrophes, water scarcity narratives, rights to/of water, and water as sustenance for community building. We will trace currents of exploitation, extraction, and subjugation, and we will dive into resistance, resurgence, and abundance as political philosophies, practices, and realities.