Sohail Karmani

From its invention in 1839, photography has been heralded as objective. Few doubt the veracity of a photo-finish, an endoscopic medical image, a traffic camera's violation report, or a surveillance shot of a crime scene. Photographs bear witness to the Mai Lai massacre, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, the Sahel famine of the 1980s, and refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war. Though most readily embrace such visual testimony, we might also cede Susan Sontag's point that photos are a "species of rhetoric" that "simplify" and "create the illusion of consensus." In what ways do a photographer's choices of what to include and exclude suggest self-conscious framing from a specific vantage point? What ethical questions emerge from this tension between the medium's supposed objectivity and the photographer's admitted subjectivity? Students will explore ethical scenarios in photojournalism, travel photography, street photography, portraiture, and commercial photography as they confront questions about consent, privacy, representation, citizen responsibility, and propaganda. Coursework includes response papers, case study reports, photo-critiques, photography tasks, and photo essays.

Antirequisite: WRIT-UH 1110

Photographs are endowed with a unique power to immerse us in other people’s stories, engage us emotionally, inform us, raise public awareness, and serve as a catalyst for action. But what exactly is it about some photos—for instance, Nik Ut’s Napalm Girl, Stuart Franklin’s Tank Man, or Alberto Korda’s portrait of Che Guevara—that makes them uniquely alluring and memorable? What can we learn from the iconic images of our times that can help us to construct compelling photo essays? What can the masters of photography teach us about making images that captivate us and inspire us to action? By analyzing examples of effective storytelling, students will learn to better understand the building blocks of a strong visual essay. The course will help students to discover their visual voice and develop their own visual language. They will also reflect on the ethical implications of their workflow. It will be taught through classroom discussions, photo critiques, field trips, editing sessions, and photo workshops. Students will be assessed on the completion of five short photography assignments and three photo essays. At the end of the course, they will present a portfolio of their coursework.

Scarcely a day goes by without some controversy or critical comment about “Islam.” Yet trying to make sense of the sheer volume of information and diversity of opinions about what constitutes Islam, who speaks for it, what it represents for the modern era, and how it relates to the non-Muslim world can seem an almost impossible task. To complicate matters further, what tends to pass as informed commentary on Islam often turns out to be colored by competing agendas, experiences, and narratives. With these challenges in mind, this FYWS focuses on contemporary debates about the history, society, and culture of Islam. The course begins by grappling with contesting representations of Islam by Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, Robert Spencer, and Samuel Huntington. It then delves into some prominent sites of conflict and tension brought to the fore by such events as the Charlie Hebdo affair and the burqa controversy as well as the rise in Islamophobia in Europe. For the research paper, students will focus on the role of struggle and conflict in Islam.

Prerequisite: Must be a first-year Abu Dhabi student.

Since its invention in 1839, photography has come to dominate our lives in ways that would have been unthinkable to the medium's pioneers - so much so that it's almost impossible to imagine what a world without photographs might look like. The recent rise in smartphone technology and social media networks raises old and new questions about how photography alters the way we see and know the world, including important ethical questions about the medium’s intrusive and seductive nature. Drawing on the writings of Sontag, Sischy, Said and others, this FYWS analyzes photography’s power in shaping our collective consciousness, but also the limitations on capturing reality. Beginning with a fundamental division between "art" and "documentary" photography, students will delve into the ethics and aesthetics of portraying pain, tragedy, and death. They will explore how cameras can create illusions and how photographic representations of "otherness" can help reinforce existing power structures and dominant narratives about "us" and "them." In addition to drafting and writing three argumentative essays, students will create and present a photo-essay of 8 to 10 images.

Antirequisite: CADT-UH 1040

There appears to be a lot of it sloshing around these days. The exponential rise in fake news, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation would suggest that we're churning out much more of it than we used to. It's tempting to believe that our "post-truth era" is a strictly 21st-century phenomenon - driven by a lethal combination of new communication technologies, bad faith actors, and an increasingly polarized world. But in truth, the preponderance of nonsense has a long history - going at least as far back as when Plato called out Gorgias for being a fraudster or when Niccolò Machiavelli turned deception and equivocation into a public art form. It's also tempting to believe that so much of today's nonsense is little more than the social media protestations of an increasingly angry, distrusting, and disenfranchised mob. On the contrary, it's everywhere, and to some extent, we all knowingly indulge in it - smearing each other with our own nonsense and wallowing in the nonsense of others. It permeates almost every domain of our public lives - the media, business, law, politics, and corporate culture, but perhaps most troublingly of all where we should least expect to find it - in our intellectual culture: in the arts, the humanities, the social and natural sciences. So, what constitutes nonsense? Why is there so much of it around? What might we do to curb its spread? Why do some of us fall for it more than others? What can we do to call it out? And if we could wipe away all the world's nonsense, what might a world without nonsense look like? By drawing on the writings of Harry G. Frankfurt, G. A. Cohen, John Petrocelli, and Gordon Pennycook, these are some of the philosophical, sociological, and psychological questions we'll be exploring in the course.

Prerequisite: Must be a first-year Abu Dhabi student.