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A4780syllabus Fall 2016

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A4780syllabus Fall 2016 Professor: Felicity D. Scott E-mail: [email protected] A4780: Architecture. Human Rights. Spatial Politics Fall 2016 Monday 11 to 1 PM, Buell 300 South Description: This seminar will investigate contemporary trajectories of architectural research and practice that intersect with questions of human rights, notions of democratic public space, and spatial politics. We will ask what role the discipline plays (or might play) in current debates over questions of political representation, defense, the organization of territory, surveillance, warfare, political conflict, and cultural heritage as well as in questions of citizenship, diaspora, humanitarian intervention, and justice. These questions mark out a profoundly fascinating and highly complicated field of study, and there is a growing body of important literature pertaining to them. The seminar will provide a forum for considering aspects of this literature and practices associated with it, as well as for identifying new lines of research and further critical prospects for the discipline of architecture. Architecture and the city have long been understood to provide an infrastructure for citizenship and democracy—for instance in the sense of organizing and of giving a formal and aesthetic identity to public space and to cultural and political institutions. In the first half of the 20th century, modern architecture was largely identified with ideals of social progress and radical spatial transformation, and the discipline soon came to be embraced after the Second World War by the United Nations as having a role to play not only in addressing rights issues, such as housing, but in the world of international relations. Such enlightenment ideals are not without their own difficult legacy and specific critiques of human rights and humanitarian intervention and aid will be addressed during the class. Architecture and urban sites have also, of course, frequently been the location of (or even provided techniques for) inequity, colonization, terrorism, and exclusion, raising the question of the discipline’s possible responsibility to address its imbrication within such forms of violence. Finally, as will be addressed in the seminar, architecture’s current role in the organization of public space is further complicated by the increasingly interconnected and mediated if dispersed condition we know as globalization, and by the post-national politics to which it has given rise. Indeed, the very notion of space and of a public within it has been profoundly transformed since World War II, raising not only questions but also significant critical prospects for architecture. To investigate this complex set of issues, students will address relevant work and research by architects and architectural theorists as well as working through important literature and critiques of human rights, public space, the public sphere, surveillance, and citizenship. We will look at topics including camps, borders, apartheid planning, as well as architectures of warfare, displacement, and occupation. In addition we will identify and discuss contemporary practices that have forged critical and strategic interventions within these fields. Requirements and Grades: Students are expected to attend all sessions and to keep up with required readings. Each student will be required to give a brief presentation on two- 1 selected readings (from a single week) and a 15-minute final presentation of his or her research for the seminar during the last four weeks of class, which will form the basis of a final paper. All work submitted should be original and written for this course. Students should familiarize themselves with Columbia’s Faculty Statement on Academic Integrity, found at http://www.college.columbia.edu/academics/integrity-statement The grade for this class will be determined as follows: Class Presentations and Participation 50% Final Paper 50% Readings: Required readings are available either through Courseworks, unless otherwise noted on syllabus. The Courseworks readings are found under “Class Files,” then the sub- file “Shared Files,” and are organized by week. Further readings are not provided. Schedule of Classes and Readings 09/12 Introduction: National, International, Postnational (No reading in week 1) 09/19 Democracy, Rights, Justice, Public Space Required Reading: • Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava, “The Claims of Human Rights: An Introduction” and Wendy Brown, “‘The Most We Can Hope For…’: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,” in “And Justice For All?: The Claims of Human Rights,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004), special issue edited by Balfour and Cadava. • Giorgio Agamben, "Beyond Human Rights," trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 15- 26. • Judith Butler, "Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street," in Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, ed. Meg McLagen and Yates McKee (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 117-137. • Rosalyn Deutsche, "Agoraphobia," in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 269-327. Further reading: • United Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948,” http://www.un.org/english/ See also Basic Documents on Human Rights, ed. Ian Brownlie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). • Claude Lefort, "Politics and Human Rights," in The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986). 2 • Etienne Balibar, "Rights of Man and Rights of the Citizen," in Masses, Classes Ideas (New York: Routledge, 1994), 39-59. • Michael Ignatieff, "Human Rights," in Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia, ed. Carla Hesse and Robert Post (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 313-324. • Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2010). • Etienne Balibar, "Cosmopolitanism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations," Grey Room 44 (July 2011): 6-25. • Michel Feher, "The Governed in Politics," in Nongovernmental Politics, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 12-27. • Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, eds. In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). • Chantal Mouffe, ""Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension": Interview by Rosalyn Deutsche, Branden W. Joseph and Thomas Keenan," Grey Room 02 (Winter 2001): 98-125. • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "Globalization and Democracy," in Democracy Unrealized, ed. Okwui Enwezor et al. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002), 323-336. • Claudio Lomnitz, "2006 Immigrant Mobilizations in the United States," in Nongovernmental Politics, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 434-445. • Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Judith Butler, Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (2007). • Michael Sorkin, "Introduction: Traffic in Democracy," in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (London: Verso, 1999), 1-15. 09/26 Extraterritorial Space/Camps Required Reading: • Hannah Arendt, "The Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of Man," in The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1966), 267-302. • Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Camp?,” in Means Without End, 37-45. • Bridget Conley, “What Barbed Wire Does Not Enclose,” Alphabet City: Social Insecurity 7 (2000): 102-111. • Manuel Herz, "Refugee Camps or Ideal Cities in Dust and Dirt?," in Urban TransFormations, ed. Ilka and Andreas Ruby (Berlin: Ruby Press, 2008). • Charlie Hailey, “Introduction,” in Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 1-19. Further reading: 3 • An Architektur, “Extra-Territorial Spaces and Camps in the 'War on Terrorism',” in Territories, ed. Anselm Franke (Berlin: KW- Institute for Contemporary Art, 2003): 20-29. • Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004). • Etienne Balibar, "(De)Constructing the Human as Human Institution: A Reflection on the Coherence of Hannah Arendt's Practical Philosophy," Social Research 74, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 727- 738. • Sean Nazerali, "The Roma and Democracy: A Nation without a State," in Democracy Unrealized, 133-150. • Warwick Anderson, "Leprosy and Citizenship," Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 6, no. 3 (Winter 1998): 707-730. • Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). • Bruce Elleman, Japanese-American Civilian Prisoner Exchanges and Detention Camps, 1941-45 (New York: Routledge, 2006). • David Campbell, “Atrocity, Memory, Photography: Imaging the Concentration Camps of Bosnia--The Case of ITN versus Living Marxism, Part I,” Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 1 (2002): 1-33; and Part II, in following issue, 143-172. 10/03 Humanitarianism and its Discontents Required Reading: • Emily Apter, Thomas Keenan, et al., “Humanism without Borders: A Dossier on the Human, Humanitarianism, and Human Rights,” Alphabet City: Social Insecurity 7 (2000): 40-67. • Rony Brauman, "Learning from Dilemmas (Interview with Rony Brauman)," in Nongovernmental Politics, 131-147. • Eyal Weizman, “Arendt in Ethiopia,” in The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London and New York: Verso, 2011), 27-62. • Cameron Sinclair, “Introduction: “I Hope it’s a Long List...,” and Kate Stohr, “100 Years of Humanitarian
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