Ugh I love Davida so much--she's such an engaging, rigorous but approachable professor that really cares about her class and her students. Overall, this was a good class; it basically functions as an intro to museology/museum studies, but there's a lot of reading. I wish we did learn how to analyze specific museum artifacts and curatorial practices, but the museum visits were fun and the final project (curating your own museum exhibit) was super cool.

Love love loveeeeee this class. Davida is such an amazing professor, and she does such an excellent job of making the class material both accessible and engaging. Especially in what is basically an intro to theory class, she manages to challenge students with difficult (but interesting!) readings while also being a very encouraging and helpful instructor. The prompts for papers are very open-ended, interesting, and honestly fun to take on--she really does encourage each student to make their own unique contributions to every class discussion, which makes this course a very inclusive and enriching space.

Looked at everything that has to do with museums, like curation, architecture/exhibition design, public programming/education, repatriation, etc, and how to make museums ethical and accessible to all audiences and partners. Almost all of it was REALLY interesting and relevant to me, but some of the content seemed to go right against its large theme of museum decolonization and spoke/treated non-American cultures as things to be extracted from... this felt strange and I wasn't sure if we were meant to be critical or feed on these ideas.

The final project was to curate and design both a paper and presentation of an exhibition of our own. This allowed everyone to get extremely creative and into the whole process-- some of the course material was boring or "traditional" to me, but seeing what people came up with for the final was really fun!

BEAUTIFUL class. Most of the material covered cultural theory-- how culture is created, how we view culture, how cultures interact with each other-- not specific cultures themselves. Classes were both lectures and discussions, and are long but very engaging. There was a TON of reading that you didn't absolutely have to do to follow along, but the material was interesting and helpful in the long run for your three papers (basically two midterms and final). Prompts are broad and allow you to apply these learned theories to literally anything that fits-- in our first paper, peers in my class connected topics like cultural relativism to police surveillance, the cartoon "Infinity Train," Instagram, the ban on hijabs, etc etc etc highly recommend!

This class is 3 hrs long (mandatory attendance) but it honestly went by so quick! Every lecture begins with guest speakers talking about their different art-based organizations and we conclude with a panel. We're then given a 10-minute break and continue on with different exercises and activities. That's basically the breakdown of class.

Work-wise, it's not very heavy but you are expected to do weekly discussion posts on readings and creative praxis (which is started in class). There's also a small group video that is very simple!

The midterm and final are relatively easy IMO. It's a case study paper on an LA arts-based organization (the midterm is 6 pages, and it basically gets you started for your final paper). The final paper is an expansion of the midterm (10 pages), you are expected to interview the organization (not as bad as you'd think) and delve deeper into the organization and their work while also including class materials.

I highly recommend this course! Persaud and the TA's made this class very engaging, I really enjoyed my time in this class!