This crash course introduces students to the basic debates surrounding the seas from a historical point of view. It encapsulates three approaches: 1) histories of capitalism and histories of science and technology studies, 2) the colonial encounter in the Mediterranean and 3) how space has come to shift and change as a result of man’s endeavour to tame the Seas in the anthropomorphic age. It surveys the major claims and originary tales that the conquerors of the seas have produced about themselves. Doing so allows for the problematization of the promise of Utopia at sea as an area free and accessible to all. It inverts this picture by looking at the Dystopian history of the seas as a space that was controlled by European colonialism and capitalism through colonial mercantile corporations. In so doing it also broaches socio-cultural histories of the seas that include the depiction and production of the ‘Other’ as a ‘pirate’, ‘barbar’ or ‘corsair’ that was to be chased in order to protect this ‘Utopia’. Lastly, it reflects on the meaning of a Utopia of the Seas by considering the present predicament that capitalism in the 20th century has produced in reordering space and the life of communities of fishermen and sailors in the face of containerization. It concludes by raising questions about the viability of a communitarian future centered around the seas away from corporations, imperialism and capitalism.

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Public pedagogy is the use of a public medium and/or space such as the Internet, films, television, magazines, beaches, schools to promote social change in diverse contexts of educational practice.

This course explores ocean campaigning that addresses and enacts public pedagogy through interactions of cultural interfaces such as humans, technologies, localities, and the sciences. Such campaigns are performed and embodied within networks of relations.

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Maps of all forms are artifacts through which much of the world is rendered visible. While maps may in fact be matter, their mass, texture, and form do
not constitute space in and of themselves. Yet in our experience of space, territory, and boundaries, maps are synonymous with visual representation, translation, and the performance of socio-political and spatial fabrics. Mapping Body, Mapping Sea undertakes the study—and making—of alternative cartographies of the body and of the sea. Through a series of five linked and iterative modules, students will produce body|sea mappings which provide critical alternatives to increasingly privatized and surveyed notions of public space.

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These 5 modules seek to provide a manner of thinking with the sea. They proceed, via a series of intersecting problematics, to disturb and critically undo the historical and cultural frames of Occidental provenance and their manner of disciplining and defining the modern Mediterranean.

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