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Apply for Spring IntroSems by February 10th at 4PM!

Calling all Frosh, Sophomores, and First-year Transfers! It’s your final opportunity to apply for priority enrollment in IntroSems this year! For best system experience, don’t wait until the last minute to apply. Lags may be encountered if too many students access the IntroSems’ VCA all at once. Strong interest in Spring Seminars is expected. Apply early!

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ANTHRO 54Q: For Makers and Thinkers: How to Use Art in Research and Vice Versa

Application Deadline: February 10

General Education Requirements

Not currently certified for a requirement. Courses are typically considered for Ways certification a quarter in advance.


Course Description

This course is designed for social science and humanities students wanting to develop an art practice to expand their research questions, and for arts students who want to deeply engage research in their practice. No prior art experience is required. The course will:

  1. Introduce students to the work of artists who used their practice to deeply engage social issues (Ian Rowland, Cornelia Parker, Fred Wilson and others). These artists will be contextualized with readings including: critical commentaries on their work; theoretical literature; and primary literature on the issues they address (in these examples, slavery, material culture, museum studies). Critical questions will include: Why did the artist select particular media for their work? How does art provide a different perspective on, engagement with, or relationship to the issues they address? How does the meaning of the art change with or without contextualization? How do artists draw on and expand art history and other artists' work?
  2. The first half of the term will be dedicated to development, in the lab, of a silver-smithing project. Students will learn wax carving, casting, and finishing, to make their own small silver or bronze work. Regular group crit/support sessions will be held in class based on clear deadlines. 
  3. The second half of the class will introduce students to various methods of working with primary and source materials for arts-based projects, building on the questions launched with their cast object. These include improvisation, juxtaposition, performance, role-play, "moment work" and scenography.  

Students will complete the course with a solid introduction to silver smithing and the literature in material culture. They will also have experience in building and completing their own project and learn how to justify their work, understand how different art media impact their exploration and ultimate product, and work through various challenges in the process. They will also gain experience in crit sessions, which will be directed by the professor with a question-based format, in both giving and receiving feedback. They will document their work and learn how to produce a portfolio of the project.


Meet the Instructor: Lochlann Jain

Lochlann Jain

As a professor at Stanford for the last 23 years, Lochlann Jain has been fascinated by the ways that different disciplines, particularly medicine and law but also including fiction, art, history, and science, organize systems of legibility, rendering forms of violence visible and invisible in different ways at different moments. Jain has studied this question through culturally shifting understandings disease and injury from cancer, HIV and blood-borne illnesses to cigarettes and car design. Jain’s artwork also examines these questions, aiming to find ways to elicit an affective engagement that is so easy to miss or over-ride in the prose and argument style of social sciences. The work strives to strike a balance: just short of humor but close enough to the bone to provoke a jolt of recognition and a new way of thinking. Jain has published three books, including a book of drawings, and multiple articles. Jain’s work has won multiple awards and opened the discipline of anthropology to new ways of thinking and writing.

Jain has presented his artwork in Berlin, Denver, North Carolina, New York, London, and on Stanford’s campus and taught art workshops in London, University Chicago, and University of Hawaii. Jain has taken numerous courses in drawing, color, poetry, taxidermy, photography, and improvisation in Vancouver, New York, London, and The Bay Area.

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