Ethics in the Arts:
Creative Practice, Social Justice, and the Creative Industries
Ethics in the Arts is a third year course in the Integrative Arts program at York University School of Art, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD).
Fall 2023
Instructors: Emilia White
Course Description:
This course explores various ethical considerations and approaches to ethics in the intersection of creative practice, social justice, and the creative industries. Focus will be on the history of art and social change and the ethical responsibility of members of the creative industries to develop an ethical framework to drive their practices. Topics covered include ethical considerations in media communication, feminism, decolonization, racism, transhumanism, and new technologies (such as Al, surveillance, etc.) and how creative practice and the creative industries can be continually challenged and revised by diverse perspectives, including those of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, near and Middle Eastern, and perspectives by racialized people with intersectional attention to feminist, queer, trans, and critical disability studies, among others. At the end of the course students applied their own ethical frameworks to a creative project that responded to one of the artists/collectives/movements that was discussed in the class.
Notes created during a visiting artist workshop and presentation by Vasuki Shanmuganathan from the Tamil Archive Project. In her presentation, Vasuki prompted a series of discussions about ethics, care, and cultural accessibility: