| |
|
| |
Undergraduate Education Overview

Courses Offered
for the Upcoming Semester – Fall 2008 Courses

Current
and Past Semester Courses – Spring 2008 Courses

Instructors

Undergraduate Certificate

Documentary Studies Courses and
Cross-Listed Courses

Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in
Documentary Studies and American Studies

Student Opportunities at CDS
Overview
Documentary work is creative and artistic, driven by personal motivations
and talents; it is also a public process of engagement and a powerful
tool for communication and for fostering understanding and change.
Documentary Studies courses allow undergraduate students to connect
their educational experiences and creative expression to broader community
life through documentary fieldwork projects, while they also examine
theoretical and practical issues related to this work through readings,
screenings, and classroom discussion. Taught by CDS staff, faculty
members, and adjunct instructors, these courses provide community-based
experiences using the mediums of photography, film and video, audio,
and narrative writing.
CDS undergraduate courses at Duke University supplement and enrich
students’ work in a broad range of academic disciplines. Some
courses, with permission of the instructor, may be taken as early
as freshman year. If students choose, they may complete the Certificate
in Documentary Studies, which requires a minimum of six courses, including
the survey course Traditions in Documentary Studies (DOCST 101) and
the capstone course Seminar in Documentary Studies (DOCST 196S), and
completion of a final project.
The survey course Traditions in Documentary Studies looks at documentary
work through an interdisciplinary perspective, with an emphasis on
twentieth-century practice. The course introduces students to a range
of documentary idioms and voices, including the work of photographers,
filmmakers, oral historians, folklorists, musicologists, radio documentarians,
and writers. The course also stresses aesthetic, scholarly, and ethical
considerations involved in representing other people and cultures.
Other courses are more specifically involved with documenting local
communities through the use of a particular medium, such as The Documentary
Experience: A Video Approach, Literacy Through Photography, Introduction
to Oral History, American Communities: Introduction to Documentary
Photography, and Documentary Photography and the Southern Cultural
Landscape.
Additional special topics courses are offered each semester. These
have included explorations of children and the experience of illness,
farmworker advocacy, immigration, reframing Asian America, black women
in the Jim Crow South, large format photography, and the documentary
imagination, among other topics.
See courses
offered during the upcoming semester
See current
and past semester courses
See instructors
Download Documentary
Studies Resource Guide for Duke University and the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill
(168 kb)
For more information about the undergraduate program at the Center
for Documentary Studies at Duke University, contact Charlie Thompson,
education and curriculum director, at 919-660-3657 or cdthomps@duke.edu.

Undergraduate Education Gallery
During the week of her exhibition opening at the Center for Documentary
Studies, the artist Tone Stockenström gave a public talk about
her projects and led a workshop on collaborative documentary techniques.
For undergraduate students enrolled in the course "Traditions
in Documentary Studies," she also led a special tour of the exhibition.
An excerpt of the tour is presented in this video gallery.
An exhibition of toned black-and-white silver gelatin contact prints
made from 4-x-5-inch negatives by students using large-format view
cameras. Duke University students in a Fall 2004 course at the Center
for Documentary Studies were encouraged to find their own visual language
to investigate and describe something deeply held.
banner image:
Untitled, from
the series Latino Pastimes—La
Vida y el Fútbol. Photograph by William L. Plaxico, from the
course "Documentary Photography and the Southern Cultural Landscape,"
taught by Professor Tom Rankin.
|
|
|
|