Note about overlapping courses
While some PMA instructors will allow students to enroll in classes that overlap, not all do. If your proposed Spring 2027 schedule includes overlaps, please consult with the faculty in question before enrolling so that you can adjust your enrollment plans if necessary.
PMA 3242 Choreographing Community: Civic to Public & Socially Engaged Art-Making
Instructor: Danielle Russo
Class schedule: W 7:30pm - 10:00pm (3 credits)
What are the distinctions among service, advocacy, activism, and community organizing? How can art and the creative process function as social practice? This is a new design studio course that examines and implements dance, theater, and performance as mechanisms for service-learning through community-based and community-driven art grounded in mutual aid, collective action, social transformation, and continuous critical reflection. Through studying and practicing skills and frameworks for action research, archival practice, identity and positionality, ethics of care and facilitation, resource-sharing, place-making, and participatory meaning-making and co-production, students will engage in sustained, experiential learning and fieldwork with a Community Partner, culminating in a collaborative community art practice and original project of local import at Cornell or across the greater Ithaca area.
PMA 3462 Film Genres: The Basketball Film
Instructor: Samantha N. Sheppard
Class Schedule: W 11:15am - 1:45pm (3 credit)
This course is a film genres courses dedicated to the basketball film. It provides a cultural and transmedia history of the sport and genre.
PMA 4412/6412 Media Metaphors
Instructor: Mendi Obadike
Class Schedule: T 11:15 am - 1:45 pm (4 credits)
This course focuses on the mutually constitutive relationship between media technologies and society, approaching media not as a set of technologies but as a set of practices, infrastructures, and struggles over meaning and power. Central to the course is a practice of reading one thing and/as another. We will read media objects in terms of their visual, aural, spatial, or informational registers, but also as sites of mediation structured by systems of power and difference. Throughout the course, we will think with artists and/as theorists, attending to arguments made through artistic gestures and to the creative, at times deeply experimental practices of scholars whose need and ability to hold two ideas in various forms of relation to one another mirrors an artistic practice.
PMA 4702/6702 Performing Queer Masculinities
Instructor: Karen Jaime
Class Schedule: TR 12:20 pm - 2:15 pm (4 credits)
In this upper-level undergraduate/graduate seminar, students will analyze the survival strategies employed by people (of color) assigned female at birth as they perform versions of queer masculinities—on stage, on screen, in literature, in visual culture, and in everyday life.