Diaspora Dialogs [.com]

Diaspora Dialogs is a conversation about artistic practice amongst artists scattered around the globe. They are part of a black 'diaspora', a term increasingly used to describe the New World experience of Africans dispersed in post-slavery and post-colonial communities. Diaspora Dialogs maintains a conversation with these scattered voices in real time, talking about their historical dislocation and how this impacts cultural production. Diaspora Dialogs is set up as a teaching tool, exchanging this information with small groups of engaged students. It is their ideas and responses to artists, images, and selected texts that populate this site. Students are actively developing content for this site using a wiki and a weekly 'blog'. Each semester, new 'editorials' are posted that deal with contemporary culture. In turn, invited artists view and participate in these conversations, making contributions about their thoughts and work. We hope that these dialogs are maintained even after the semester's teaching is over.

Diaspora Dialogs is a pilot project that explores the possibility of distance learning for students of art history normally removed from sites of artistic productivity. Their engagement with artists exploits available technology in a way more usually equated with their leisure time and 'blogging' as opposed to their studies. Diaspora Dialogs tries to bridge such informal and formal modes of study by providing a learning experience that is both integrated and dynamic.

Cornell upper level and graduates that comprise a small seminar group that meets on campus here at Ithaca once weekly for two hours. Most of the students are majoring in Art History, Africana or Visual Studies. Their participation in Diaspora Dialogs represents a departure from their classroom experience since it extends the teaching offered beyond the university into the real world of cultural exchange and practice.

Download Course Syllabus