Media Studies

Explores the different roles that language plays in the lives of people, communities, and nations. Topics include language and thought, language and power, poetics and verbal art, bilingualism, African-American English (“Ebonics”), pidgin and Creole languages, Native American language revitalization, “politically correct”; language, and the rise of English as a global language.

Credits: 3

An introductory survey of music, theatre, and dance in Western and non-Western cultures, including the relationships between music and religion, dance and weddings, theatre and curing. The course also explores the performing arts as aesthetic phenomena in their own right. Live performances by non-Western performers and optional field trips are planned.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or MSA1050 Or NME1050

Students examine and interrogate commonsense distinctions between ‘traditional’ museums and other spaces of cultural-historical exhibition. The aim is to partner with local communities to mount shows that resonate with community aesthetic, political, social and ecological concerns and, in the process, teach apprenticing curators how cultural institutions might become more inclusive and achieve relevance in the daily lives of their patrons.

Credits: 3

Investigates magic and witchcraft in the shadow of technology, industrialization, and capitalism. Readings range from athletes who employ superstition to cope with uncertainty, to more challenging case studies on witchcraft, spirit possession, shamanism, and other forms of magic as healing. Alongside classical anthropological texts, concepts such as fetishism, fantasy, and enchantment are explored in contemporary contexts, including film, art, and literature.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or MSA1050

A survey of theoretical orientations and methodologies for the study of musical production, performance, and consumption in particular cultural contexts and within global flows of materials, ideas, cultural forms, and people. Focuses on music as a communication medium and collective poetic process. Students attend and critically engage musical performances and/or engage directly in musical production and performances.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or MSA1050

Begins with historical examples of ethnographic work on black diasporic cultures and then moves to contemporary anthropological work on black life from around the world. Underscores the history of anthropology in understanding race and racial politics and also draws on an array of topical issues, from mass incarceration to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Credits: 3

Examines both foundational and newer critical approaches to understanding religion from an anthropological perspective. Texts cover a diversity of topics from a variety of cultures, including the construction of religion as an analytical category; religion’s relation to secularism, law, and political ideology; religion and gender; and embodied religious experience. In particular, the relationships between media and religion are explored. Not intended as a general survey of religious traditions.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or NME1050 Or MSA1050

How have myth, ritual, and performance functioned as ways to comprehend, organize, and even generate the world around us? What are the values and constraints of symbolic structures as they shape and influence bodies and environments? Students consider both structural and poststructural approaches to performance as a medium for exploring, but also transgressing, structures of everyday life.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or THP2020 Or MSA1050 Or MSA1050

Students perform close readings and engage in in-depth discussions of theoretical texts, illustrative ethnographic works, and audio/video recordings on the relationships between language and culture. Questions explored include: What assumptions about culture are implicit in any given method of analyzing language practices? What lies beyond the reach of language? Topics covered include affect, gesture, semiotics, and symbolic violence.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500

An anthropological and ethnomusicological approach to sound and listening with emphasis on the politics of sound. Topics include sound and the senses, weaponization of sound, music as torture, sounds of protest and police surveillance, and background music and consumption.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or MSA1050

What theories of embodiment, mind, and matter must be adopted to adequately grasp experiences of time, space, color, emotion, and attention? How can people conceptualize forms of experience without purging them of poetic resonance? Students explore this interdisciplinary field in connection with the arts. Includes readings in cognitive science, anthropology, and poetry, plus collaborative art projects, sensory experiments, and excursions.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: ANT1500 Or PSY1530 Or MSA1050

Explore the rural as a meeting place of working-class expressive cultures, an atmosphere of slow or strange time, a dramatic history of industry and agriculture, a notoriously tense racial zone, and a place of exuberant stories and poetics. Examine the vital ideological function of the rural as the urban's dark twin in American myth throughout history and today.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: MSA1050 Or ANT1500

Third cinema was a movement proposed by Latin American directors in the 1960s and further developed by African directors in the 1970s. It addresses important questions about independent national cinemas, colonialism, race, and identity. This course examines the movement and its global influence, with emphasis on the cinemas of Latin America, Africa, black Britain, and American minorities.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: CIN1500 And CIN1510

As people migrate across the globe, their media forms move with them—sometimes following them, documenting their movement, other times traveling with them, as traces of their home cultures. Focusing on a variety of transnational media forms, this course examines how media producers treat themes of home, nation, belonging, migration, immigration, displacement, alienation, border crossing, and mobile identities.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: (CIN1500 And CIN1510 ) Or MSA2200 Or NME2100

In this course, affect is considered as a form of power—the embodied capacity to affect and be affected. Students explore affective genres of visual culture, such as horror, comedy, melodrama, and pornography. The course draws on a range of theoretical perspectives on affect and emotion, emphasizing work from psychoanalysis, philosophy, feminism, and queer theory.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: CIN1500 And CIN1510

Networked computing has reconfigured cultural production, distribution, textual practices, and consumption. Students investigate how cinema registers these shifts by analyzing films that address the internet and by examining the ways that computing technologies renew film’s significance. Readings cover the latest conversations in media theory, addressing such issues as photographic indexicality, database narratives, digital aesthetics, software studies, and social media.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: CIN1500 And CIN1510

Emerging queer cinema is explored in its historical contexts and its relation to contemporary theories of gender, sexuality, and their intersection with race, class, and nationality. The course focuses on the “queering of the gaze,” interrogating conventional notions of representation, desire, identification, filmmaking, and spectatorship. Featured directors: Warhol, Fassbinder, Haynes, Von Trotta, Akerman, Rozema, La Bruce, Araki, Denis, Jarman.

Credits: 4

An introduction to theories of the media, visual, and performing arts. Using semiotics as a point of departure, students explore the language and iconography of visual communication. The course focuses on works of art, advertising, television, and the web as social contexts of cultural production and analyses the role that ordinary people play in the production of media.

Credits: 3

An examination of media forms (e.g., postcards, radio, TV, internet, mobile media technologies) and media institutions (e.g., movie studios, marketing and advertising companies, regulatory agencies) within historical and cultural contexts. Students explore the multiple ways that human engagements with the world are mediated and how media forms contribute to the production of social norms, practices, and senses of identity and community.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: MSA1050 Or NME1050

Students focus on how humans are represented and configured across media platforms, how the self is culturally constructed, and how technology continually redefines the meaning of “human.” The class also considers what these figurations indicate about contemporary political subjectivities, gender identities, and species belonging. The work of notable thinkers, including William Gibson, Masamune Shiroh, Stellarc, and Spike Jonze, is studied.

Credits: 3

Examines the connections between computers and culture, with a critical look at how computers may be changing and shaping culture, and how culture affects people’s use and understanding of computers. The course focuses in particular on the ways in which gender, race, and class affect people’s experiences with and understanding of computers. Both work and leisure uses of computers are considered.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: NME1050 Or MSA1050

Examines cultural representations of poverty, work, and wealth in American popular culture. Students consider how mediated narratives of class conflict reflect and reinforce divisions between social classes (the 99 and 1%) and within them (immigrants and "white working class"). Students develop a deeper appreciation of how class “works” as an economic and political system, and how it is lived.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: MSA1050 Or NME1050

In 1991, The Real World pioneered a genre of “unscripted” television that reshaped national media culture, culminating in the reality of the 2016 election. Students study theories of Hall, Habermas and Gramsci to explore how the genre reflects and shapes attitudes of U.S. audiences to surveillance, class conflict, and the performance of truths. Examples include Jersey Shore and American Idol.

Credits: 4

Media convergence refers to large-scale changes in the ownership and production of media content, as well as the role that audiences and consumers have in its development. This course examines media convergence from the perspectives of queer theory and history, and asks how queer identities, sensibilities, styles, and practices both shape and are shaped by media convergence.

Credits: 4

An intensive examination of critical and theoretical work on media, society, and the arts. Classic and contemporary theories (e.g., Marxism, structuralism, organizational and cultural production, various cultural studies approaches) and topics (e.g., hegemony, cultural capital, high vs. low culture, elite and commercialized culture) are explored.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: (MSA1050 Or NME1050 ) And MSA2200

Ethnography, one of the key methodological innovations of anthropology, is used in this course to examine life in a media-saturated world. Focusing on an emergent ethnographic literature that examines the relationships between mass media, popular culture, and social and technological networking, the course situates everyday interactions with media within broader theoretical, historical, and cultural contexts.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: (MSA1050 Or NME1050 ) And MSA2200

Students look at forms of production and exchange in various contexts throughout the world that are alternatives to dominant, formal economies. These include trash picking and trash art-making, piracy and counterfeiting, independent farming, and alternative banking. Students consider the notion of value in a variety of ways and trace how production, exchange, circulation, and consumption elaborate new forms of social life.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: MSA1050 Or ANT1500

In recent years, anthropologists, physical and cultural geographers, biologists, and media theorists have tried to account for the more-than-human world in order to emplace humans in a general ecology of liveliness. Using methods from multiple disciplines, students explore the animacy of ordinary and extraordinary places. Topics include landscape as a contingent process, geological time, energetics, dwelling, regenerative design, and industrial-chemical ecologies.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: (MSA1050 Or NME1050 ) Or ANT1500

Focuses the politics and aesthetics of drag. Engage classic and contemporary work in gender theory, and also learn how to do drag through a series of practice-based workshops.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: MSA1050

The topics, which vary, are selected from among the special interests of faculty.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: MSA1050 Or NME1050

Examines the interplay between new art forms and technologies from early modernism through today. Focusing on how the two fields have developed in relation to each other, the course addresses two questions: what is the relationship between technology, technique, and art, and how has it changed over time? This is both an art survey course and a study of related philosophical questions.

Credits: 3

PREREQ: NME1050 Or MSA1050

Students collaborate with students in other cultures, using the Internet to produce videos on subjects of mutual interest. Because the focus is on developing a cross-cultural dialogue, basic video production experience is expected. Before moving to video, the two groups collaboratively write fiction. During the semester, they meet in video conferences with their peers abroad to discuss their productions. Previous semesters have included collaborations with students at universities in Belarus, Turkey, Mexico, Germany, and Lithuania.

Credits: 4

Students explore the social construction of the genre of outsider art through an examination of institutional discourses and practices. Emphasis is placed on how the work of marginalized people comes to be viewed as artistically legitimate. Works of asylum art, folk art, prison art, and other genres are analyzed in relationship to creativity, local cultural tradition, and mental illness.

Credits: 3

An examination of the impact of feminist thinking on the visual and performing arts. Emphasis is placed on the historical absence of women in art worlds and the creation of work that critiques dominant modes of cultural production. A plurality of feminisms and attention to the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality inform investigations of craft, performance, and collaboration.

Credits: 4

People’s everyday lives are monitored on multiple levels through mechanisms they take for granted. Surveillance systems and technologies provide knowledge about people through identification, monitoring, and analysis of individuals, groups, data, or systems. These systems are examined as social entities that organize and shape cultural values and norms. Issues of identity, security, fear, control, and vulnerability are also explored.

Credits: 4

PREREQ: SOC1500

Students explore the relationship between art and society through an investigation of cultural objects and practices, and within the context of individual and collective identity. Emphasis is placed on the social production, consumption, and distribution of art, the role of art institutions, and the relationship between art and social change.

Credits: 4