Cultural Studies Short Courses in London and Online

Twenty-first century culture is becoming increasingly strange: from conspiracy theories and climate anxiety to compulsive doom-scrolling and the meme-ification of everyday life. This course will explore these and other phenomenon endemic to the present, analysing and exploring their significance through texts, films, artworks, cultural objects and psychoanalytic theory.

In this course, we will rely on psychoanalytic theory as the interpretive framework of David Bowie’s music videos and filmography, with a focus on his personas, experience of childhood trauma, struggle with mental illness, addiction, isolation, resilience, and creative autonomy. This course is a celebration of a unique musical genius, our dearly departed glamorous alien, one so evolved that he turned his own death into a work of art.

This Culture course will give you an opportunity to explore the variety of ways that embodiment has been thought and theorised. Across six weeks we will cover a variety of influential approaches to embodied life in the twentieth and twenty-first century, including biopolitics, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, affect theory, science and technology studies, feminism and queer theory.

Come and join us at the Eco Ciné-Club, where you will have the opportunity to view and discuss the work of innovative filmmakers whose work uses visual culture as a means of re-framing our relationships with changing landscapes, climates and more-than-human beings. A development from our existing Cultureplex Ciné-Club courses and taking its cue from the famous Parisian Ciné-club set up by the celebrated critic and writer, André Bazin, this incarnation of the film club will allow for the viewing of a different film each week, followed by detailed discussion and debate. The film will be introduced, and placed in both its cinematic, cultural and historic context. In sharing our viewing in City Lit’s premier screening room, the Cultureplex, we will approximate the experience of watching film in the cinema, one that is intense and fully focussed in a way that other modes of viewing often are not. After the screening we will devote the rest of the class to a collective exploration of the film, led by the tutor, but involving everyone in a participatory discussion that will allow all to express their responses, their views, their thoughts on the film screened.