The programme in Materialist, Anticolonial, and Diasporic (MAD) Studies invites cultural workers, scholars, artists, and activists seeking a curriculum and community through which to ground and refresh their practice and to produce and empower shared knowledges. It nurtures transdisciplinarity and collaboration across various fields of interest and profession accountable to and in conversation with imperatives of materialist, anticolonial, and diasporic study and practice. Our pedagogy and curriculum affirm and build on the ways in which knowledge production, cultural work, and transformative and liberatory practice overlap and reinforce each other across various domains of our lifeworlds.
CERTIFICATE & DIPLOMA IN MAD STUDIES
The What
The Certificate and Post-Bac Diploma Programme in Materialist, Anticolonial, and Diasporic (MAD) Studies invites cultural workers, scholars, artists, and activists seeking a curriculum and community through which to ground and refresh their practice and to produce and empower shared knowledges. Students enrolled in the MAD Studies Certificate Programme towards a GCAS (GCAS-Jəhān or other) post-baccalaureate degree will have completed a US BA programme or equivalent. Those who have not yet completed an undergraduate degree may apply to pursue the MAD Studies Certificate independent of institutional credits toward a degree.
The Why
The primary objective of the MAD Studies programme is to nurture transdisciplinarity and collaboration across various fields of interest and profession accountable to and in conversation with imperatives of materialist, anticolonial, and diasporic study and practice. The pedagogy and curriculum affirm and build on the ways in which knowledge production, cultural work, and transformative and liberatory practice overlap and reinforce each other across various domains of our lifeworlds.
In their form, content, and disposition, MAD Studies suspend the presumptions that normalize settler colonial orders in the academy and in the polity, in spheres of learning and in worldmaking alike, as we imagine a futurity hospitable to what is unsettled and insurgent in our time.
The Who
The programme is designed for advanced undergraduate, post-baccalaureate, and graduate students who wish to return to certain issues and conversations concurrent with their advanced undergraduate study, or after graduation or work. However, its courses may also complement and support other relevant GCAS certificates and degrees, as well as degree programmes outside of GCAS.
The How
The programme’s various components—the communities of reading, the short courses and term studios, independent projects, and the summer residencies and festival—will provide continuity and community, and have us returning to our practices, projects, and fields afresh, not to defend and finalise them but to approach them anew with different tools, new accountabilities, and now outcomes.
MADly thinking, a materialist understanding of history together with a historical understanding of materialism implicates us in the present moment in a unique way, forcing us to reckon not only with our unfulfilled desires lying in a rubble at the doorstep of the oppressor, but with some of the fulfilled ones as well. The approach, thus, sees political desire in this moment as inseparable from our history of political attachments, and politics inseparable from aesthetics.
It takes up, and goes beyond, the mandate that discussions of capitalism must always accompany a discussion of colonialism and fascism. It resists methodological nationalisms and pious secularisms in the discussion of race and religion, as well as the temptation to repeat history by severing the emergencies of fascism from those of decolonisation, a tactic that has everything to do with the ugly denouement of the “new world order” after WWII.
The Where
In sync with Céline Chuang’s invocation of the “diasporic descendents of the displaced,” and Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” and “the open boat,” our method and politics seeks to channel epistemological practices beyond the academy — and a kind of narrow christian liberal secularism which carries its own kind of deathly orientalism — in a space between art, education, and politics.
Collaborative, deterritorial, and diasporic work also takes us to questions of sensibility, materialist politics, and anticoloniality that reach beyond the state imaginary, recovering motion and relation.
We wish to carve a space away from the programmatic ideological policings on the left no less than from the casual fascisms on the right, and to move toward life-affirming and worldmaking knowledge work and practice, away from ideas of “research” and knowledge production that abandon politics and education as vocations in favour of an extractive regime of value within which so many of us still delusionally desire inclusion and justice, often pandering to what Sunaina Maira and Piya Chatterjee call the “imperial university.”
COURSES
Each course entails three-week taught weekend intensives, followed by a week of studio. Each course is built around one triangulation of force, domain, and practice that addresses the relations and structures constitutive of these transformations. The GCAS-Jəhān Teaching Co-op/Collective, in consultation with the Advisory Board, and the GCAS Academic Council, determines these courses.
Students can take single courses without committing to the certificate or post-bac diploma programmes. Should they choose to continue in the programme/s, their courses will count toward it, in consultation with the mentor.
You do not need to be enrolled in any other programme in order to enroll in these courses. Courses can be taken over any stretch of time toward the certificate, or diploma, even though the recommended duration is mentioned below.
The “term studio” is the equivalent of a final assessment that will ensures that the objectives of the programme as set out at the beginning, in conversation with the mentor have been fulfilled. Students will interact with other students who took courses during the term, and produce a final project that integrates study and practice, and will be assessed by the faculty who taught the semester, and an external member from the Advisory Board or beyond. This will entail a written component as well.
STRUCTURE
Certificate Programme
1 CORE workshop
3 courses across any Sirocco and Foehn terms
1 term studio
Any 1 term from among Eurus, Ghibli, Levanter, and Monsoon terms
Final exam/paper
Post-Baccalaureate Diploma
1 CORE workshop
6 courses across any Sirocco and Foehn terms
2 term studios
Any 2 terms from among Eurus, Ghibli, Levanter, and Monsoon terms
Final exam/paper/project
Degree Programme
2 Levanter or Monsoon CORE Workshops
6 courses across any Sirocco and Foehn terms
2 Term Studios
Any 3 terms from among Eurus, Ghibli, Levanter, and Monsoon terms
Final exam and dissertation
TUITION [2022-2023]
Taught Course | 265€
Term Studio | 120€
MAD Studies Certificate Programme | 1850€
MAD Studies Post-Bacc Diploma | 3700€
MAD Studies Master’s | 5500€
All fees quoted in terms of cost of living in the extended Global North, suited to the global professional and upper middle classes, wherever they may be found geographically. Our tuition remission plan seeks to, as much as possible, adjust these to the cost of living index (purchasing power parity) in various middle and working class locations in the Global South, no matter what their geolocation. So, please talk to us!