JAPN Arts and Beyond

Students develop critical literacies through critiquing visual and performing arts by Japanese, Zainichi Korean, and Indigenous Ainu artists. Course enhances students’ linguistic skills and critical literacy in understanding and contextualizing content and promotes interactive and experiential learning by engaging with a different range of sources (texts and art forms) in and outside the classroom. Students learn about artists and their artwork through reading texts and visual materials including artists’ own writings, articles, and audio-visual media in Japanese and English. Students also learn to develop criticality in discussing and analyzing aesthetic, cultural, sociopolitical aspects of artwork related to social engagements, self and other, (im)mortality, feminism, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and indigeneity in their target language.