This unit focuses on key themes for understanding meaning in the Anthropocene, an age of human planetary impact: human-nature relations, social and environmental activism. Students will learn how the various disciplines in the School of Literature, Art and Media engage with the Anthropocene in literary, visual, digital and performative modes. Collaborating with the Sydney Environment Institute, the unit underscores the contribution of the arts to the ethics and aesthetics of meaning in an age of global economic crisis. This unit is team-taught and assessment will accommodate a student's research interests.

We will explore how we might think about 'work' in the arts and humanities. First: works of art, culture, literature, film. What is a work of art? How do works ‘work’? How do they function? Second, labour in the humanities and arts: the industrial conditions cultural work in contemporary conditions of precarity and uberisation? Third, how the arts and humanities are put to work. What values are associated with these fields, to the labour involved? How are the knowledges generated in the arts and humanities put to use, appropriated, marginalised, dismissed? The unit is team taught and accessible to students from diverse backgrounds; assessment tailored to student’s research interests.

This unit of study introduces you to the language of art through venue and media publications created for the dissemination, critique and promotion of contemporary art. We will critically examine different forms of contemporary writing for the arts including the journal article, exhibition catalogue, online blogging, press releases, reviews, conference papers, and anthology chapters to discover the various structures of description and argument used and how they change across media publications. Through practical workshops, group critiques and individual tasks you will develop your capacity to produce effective writing for eventual publication in the field of contemporary art.

Each student will develop, in consultation with their teacher, a project involving the application of contemporary scholarship in their discipline to a question arising within their disciplinary specialisation, for example: issues concerned with cultural, institutional or digital archives (with links to Fisher Library or other libraries/online data repositories/community organisations); the creation and development of contemporary practice[s]; or how cultural practices, from arts-based work through to the practice of language, address futures, dystopian, utopian or otherwise.

Each student will complete, in consultation with their teacher, a project involving the application of contemporary scholarship in their discipline to a question arising within their disciplinary specialisation, for example: issues concerned with cultural, institutional or digital archives (with links to Fisher Library or other libraries/online data repositories/community organisations); the creation and development of contemporary practice[s]; or how cultural practices, from arts-based work through to the practice of language, address futures, dystopian, utopian or otherwise.

This unit allows students to work collaboratively in interdisciplinary teams on complex "real world" problems under a theme developed in collaboration with industry and community partners. Briefed by the partners and guided by project supervisors, students use systems thinking approaches to design their own projects and engage in self-directed inquiry-based research to provide final recommendations. In this unit, students will develop their own professional identity through participation in communities of practice and reflective practice, together with an in-depth understanding of specific project-related matters. This experience will equip students with an agile mindset and skillset that will assist them to successfully navigate dynamic future environments and career paths. See the ICPU website for further information here:
https://www.sydney.edu.au/students/industry-and-community-projects/4000-level-projects.html

This unit allows students to work collaboratively in interdisciplinary teams on complex "real world" problems under a theme developed in collaboration with industry and community partners. Briefed by the partners and guided by project supervisors, students use systems thinking approaches to design their own projects and engage in self-directed inquiry-based research to provide final recommendations. In this unit, students will develop their own professional identity through participation in communities of practice and reflective practice, together with an in-depth understanding of specific project-related matters. This experience will equip students with an agile mindset and skillset that will assist them to successfully navigate dynamic future environments and career paths. See the ICPU website for further information here:
https://www.sydney.edu.au/students/industry-and-community-projects/4000-level-projects.html