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The Arts in Jamaica: Exploring Knowledge Production, Community, and Resistance

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Program Quick Facts

  • Location: Kingston, Jamaica
  • Faculty Leaders: Katie Dieter
  • Arrival Date: June 30, 2025
  • Departure Date: July 27, 2025
  • Program Cost: $1000
  • Academic Prerequisites: Spring Quarter course: AFRICAAM 126: Prelude to Jamaica: Exploring Knowledge Production, Community, and Resistance in the Arts
    • Grading Basis: Credit/No Credit
    • Unit count: 1
  • Center for Disease Control and Prevention: Health Information for Travelers to Jamaica
  • US State Department Country Information: Jamaica
  • Visa Information: Embassy of Jamaica
  • Application Deadline: Monday, January 27, 2025 at 11:59 am PT

General Description

Take a journey through the vibrant artistic landscape of Kingston, Jamaica, including public art, visual arts, music, dance, storytelling, DJing and sound systems, theater, and culinary traditions. Emphasizing the themes of knowledge production, community, and resistance, students will analyze how artistic expressions in Jamaica have historically shaped representations of Black identity, liberation, and cultural heritage through theoretical exploration, field trips, and sustained interaction with local artists, scholars, and students. This course invites students to deepen their understandings of Jamaica by immersing themselves in its rich culture and history, engaging critically with its artistic expressions and traditions, and appreciating how art can be used as forms of knowledge production, community-building, and resistance in their own lives.

Learning Goals

  1. Explore the centrality and diversity of artistic expressions in Jamaican culture, encompassing music, public arts, dance, visual arts, literature, DJing and sounds systems, culinary arts, and theater.
  2. Examine how Jamaican art influences and reflects representations of Black identity, resistance movements, and cultural heritage, both past and present.
  3. Appreciate how art can be used as knowledge-production, community-building, and resistance in Jamaican culture, as well as other contexts.

Living and Travel Conditions

Students will reside in hotels in all locations of the program and be transported by bus.

Location

While the program primarily takes place in Kingston, Jamaica, there will be field trips to Montego Bay, Jamaica and Treasure Beach, Jamaica.

Prerequisites and Expectation

Students must participate in a Spring quarter prerequisite course, Prelude to Jamaica: Exploring Knowledge Production, Community, and Resistance in the Arts, that will outline the cultural, historical, and social climate of Jamaica and include preliminary information ahead of the Global Seminar in Kingston. The Spring Quarter course will take place on Tuesday, starting at 1:30 pm and ending at 3:20 pm. Students will also participate in a post-course public-facing output project upon returning to Stanford in the 2025-2026 academic year.

Faculty

Dr. Katie Dieter is the Director of Advanced Studies & Community Engaged Learning in the Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. Before arriving to Stanford in 2020, she was a Senior Lecturer at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica for four years where she was housed in both the Art & Art History and Humanities departments. She was also adjunct faculty at the University of the West Indies, Mona (UWI), in the Cultural Studies Department. With a background in African American and African Diaspora Studies, Gender Studies, and Studio Art (metal sculpture, furniture design, and painting), Katie’s research and art focus on the ways the visual and performing arts can be used as methods of knowledge production and resistance often combining themes of Black diasporic identity, personal narrative, and meanings of home and belonging.

Grading Basis

Letter Grade