Spring 2007 • HUM 596 (SLN 13698)/ANTHRO 536a (SLN 10267) • 5 credits

Visual Documentation Praxis • Download e-Flyer

Mondays, 9:00 am-12:20 pm • Communications 202, UW Seattle Campus

Instructors: Danny Hoffman (Anthropology) and Kari Lerum (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, Bothell)

This course will explore a diverse range of visual practices, from video activism to graphic political journalism. At a time when so much knowledge transmission outside the university depends on the production and circulation of images, students will focus on building the skills and the relationships to participate meaningfully as scholars, activists, and partners.

Participants will explore how literature from visual anthropology and sociology, participatory action research, and activist ethnography intersects with efforts to democratize visual technologies and techniques. Drawing from examples on and off campus, we will consider how new visual technologies can generate alternative community archives. Through visual production exercises, on-site visits with collaborating institutions, and classroom discussion, students will explore how visual production can expand their research interests and forge unexpected connections within and beyond the university. By translating their "vision" of research from text to digital videos and photographs, participants will consider how their work intersects with other spheres of visual production, from public access television to grassroots community documentary and video activism programs.

This course is part of a year-long series of talks, workshops, and courses developed as a collaboration between the cross-institutional Cultural Studies Praxis Collective and the Simpson Center's Institute on the Public Humanities for Doctoral Students. The series focuses on building arts and cultural bridges for research and teaching that enable and enhance various forms of public scholarship.

Danny Hoffman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology. He teaches courses on the anthropology of Africa, violence, visual anthropology and ethnographic methods.  His publications include work on militia movements in Sierra Leone and Liberia and on fieldwork in unstable contexts. Hoffman has also worked as a photojournalist in Africa and the Balkans.

Kari Lerum is Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences program at UW Bothell. She teaches the sociology of family, sexuality, inequality, feminist theory, and qualitative methods. Her ethnographic research examines the organization of work in low status jobs. She has worked with the Pat Graney Dance Company as videographer, and has produced several local documentaries, examining topics such as sex work, pirate radio, and heroin use in the Seattle music scene.