Brian Goldfarb

Goldfarb's research and creative practice focuses on contemporary visual and digital culture, disability studies and education. His book, Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures in and beyond the Classroom, considers how media technologies were used in the second half of the 20th century to advance models of pedagogy across the arts, education, and postcolonial politics in the United States and globally. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled “Environmental Knowledge and Knowledge Environments: Cultures of Learning and Global Ecosystems” with co-author Judith Faifman. This manuscript examines the dynamic relationships among environmental activism, digital communication, and education since the last quarter of the 20th Century.

Goldfarb's media projects include: Global Tourette, a digital documentary and media exchange project that engages cultural and professional responses to Tourette Syndrome in the US, Argentina and other contexts internationally. Seeing Our Stories, visual narratives co-developed with members of the San Diego refugee community to be used in a peer facilitated narrative therapy intervention for mental wellness.

Goldfarb was curator of education at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC from 1994-7 where he organized exhibitions and directed the education program. Goldfarb’s media and art projects have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Ph.D., Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester (1998)

Undergraduate Courses

• COMM 108: Media, Technology and [Dis]ability
• COMM 190: Politics and Cultures of Display
• COMM 120P: Media Pedagogy
• COMM 20 Introduction to Communication

Graduate Courses

• COGR 275: Mediated Ability: [Dis]ability and Audio-Visual Culture
• COGR 275: Cultures of Care
• COGR 201L: Qualitative Methods and Information Technology

Books

• Visual Pedagogy: Media Cultures of Education in and Beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2002)

Articles/Book Chapters

• “Inserting Disability Pedagogies in Mutable Configurations of Space and Interaction,” co-author, Suzanne Stolz in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Disability: Looking Towards the Future, eds, Garland-Thomson, Ellis, Kent and Robertson (Routledge Press, forthcoming Winter 2018)
• “Articulating Vulnerability and Interdependence in Networked Social Space,” co-author John Armenta, in Disability and Social Media, ed, Ellis and Kent (Routledge Press, 2016)
• Brian Goldfarb and Judith Faifman, “Teaching the Unteachable: Networked media, Simulation and Community Research/Activism,” in Media and Educational in the Digital Age, ed. Stocchetti (Hamburg: Peter Lang, 2014)
• “On the Subject of Neural and Sensory Prostheses,” co-author Lisa Cartwright, in The Prosthetic Impulse, ed. Smith and Morra, (MIT Press, 2005)
• “Fragments on Prosthetics and the Virtual: Ocular Prosthetics and the Embodiment of Digital Visuality,” co-author Lisa Cartwright, Documentary and the Practice of the Visual, ed. Lammer (Vienna: Verlag Turia & Kant, 2002)
• “Local Television and Community Politics in Brazil: São Paulo's TV Anhembi,” Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video, ed, Noriega (University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
• “A Pedagogical Cinema: Development Theory, Colonialism, and Post-Liberation African Film,” Iris (1995),
• “Intimate Interactivity: New Safer Sex Software,” The Independent 16, no. 10 (1993)
• “Video Activism and Critical Pedagogy,” Afterimage 20, no. 10 (May 1993). Reprinted in Art Activism and Oppositionality, ed. Grant Kestor and Lynn Love (Duke University Press, 1998)
• “Cultural Contagion: On Disney’s Health Education Films for Latin America,” co-author Lisa Cartwright, in Disney Discourse, ed. Smoodin (Routledge Press, 1994)
• “Radiography, Cinematography, and the Decline of the Lens, 1920-1970,” co-author Lisa Cartwright, Incorporations, Zone Vol. 6, eds. Crary and Kwinter (MIT Press, 1992)

Media Projects

• Seeing Our Stories: A Visual Narrative Intervention for Refugee Mental Wellness (2016-present)
• Global Tourette (2005-2012)
• Shut the F***t Door: Compulsive Animation, (2007)
• Pictures of Waiting Children. (web-based project 20001)
• Ocular Convergence (interactive CD-ROM/Web project, 1999)

Curatorial Projects

• Senses of Care: Mediated Ability and Interdependence, 2014, Gallery@CALIT2, San Diego, CA
• alt.youth.media, 1996, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC
• Temporarily Possessed: The Semi-Permanent Collection, 1995, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC