CSCL1915: Representation in the Time of Pandemics: Culture and Politics from AIDS to COVID-19.

This course starts from the premise that representation is where culture and politics meet, and it tests the hypothesis that pandemics radically transform representation. There are times in history when it takes a global pandemic to see the world in a different light: these are times when a pandemic makes us understand our place in the world differently. How and why do pandemics change the ways we represent the world and ourselves? Or, do they? To answer these questions, we will examine a great variety of representations of life, culture, and society in the time of pandemics: we will watch films, documentaries, and musicals; we will look at photography, paintings, memes, and other visual arts; we will read novels, poems, diaries, and autobiographies; we will study works of philosophy, essays of cultural criticism, and political commentary from various media sources. We will do all that by focusing on two current and ongoing pandemics—theHIV/AIDS pandemic and the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we will consider the cultural and political responses to the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and 1990s and to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, both in the U.S. and worldwide: we will investigate how these pandemics are linked to systemic oppressions (e.g., racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia), how they have transformed the relation between our individual rights and our responsibilities to society, how they have impacted sex and love and friendship, how they have changed the way we think about life and death, how they have enabled new and different forms of sociality, communication, and representation. Ultimately, however, it is not only a matter of representing the world differently: it is also a question of changing it. This is where culture meets politics. The word “representation,” in fact, means not only cultural or aesthetic representation (e.g., as in the way a film represents an aspect of reality); it also means political representation (e.g., as in the way elected officials represent us in democratic governance). Pandemics radically transform representation in both these senses: they transform both culture and politics. In the end, thus, the fundamental question of the course is: how can our representations of the world help bring about the change we want in the world?

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