Courses

This course offers students an introduction to television studies, and it explores how television operates within industrial, political, aesthetic, cultural, and technological contexts.

This course provides an introduction to the study of media to better understand how media impact culture and society. We will explore how our everyday engagements with media are influenced and structured by broader industrial, political, ideological, and social contexts.

This course offers students an introduction to television studies, and it explores how television operates within industrial, political, aesthetic, cultural, and technological contexts.

This course accepts that we comprehend much of our experience in and through media constructions and aims to assess this experience with an analytical approach to media texts and media as text. We will primarily focus on film and television by analyzing their various aesthetic, representational, and ideological forms.

This course explores digital aesthetics through the investigation of a specific question: what do we learn about digitality when we examine the aesthetic form of audiovisual media and technologies when they fail? To answer this question, this course will ask you to reframe normative assumptions about failure (as an experience with or judgment about unsuccessful execution or inadequacy, or, more broadly, as a definitive problem to overcome). In doing so, this course will allow us to expand our understanding of digital aesthetics beyond an over-simplified list of tools, techniques, or technological operations used to produce audiovisual media.

This course explores critical social and cultural issues that have emerged parallel to the spread of digital technologies, from the 1960s to the present. We will analyze the impact of technologies ranging from the first computers to social media, surveillance and video games. We will ask critical questions about how our habits and ways of thinking change as we live our networked lives in a so-called information society.

This course provides an overview of media industry studies. While other courses in our program may help students develop the language to interpret moving images and media, this course invites students to look beyond the text. Though writers, directors, and producers are certainly key players in the development of content, this class focuses on the business of media in print, film, television, music, computer, video game, and mobile technology industries.

This course explores how identities are constructed within media and, through various modes of critical analysis, will complicate how we decipher the visible forms of identities in media we consume every day. The course unravels the complexities of identities in media by considering how identity can be read upon the surfaces of bodies, which will illuminate how and why categories like gender, race, class, and sexuality are visually and socially constructed rather than inherently “natural.” Our engagement with a range of texts will also problematize how we attribute meaning to identities based solely upon their visible properties, allowing us to question the circumstances causing our visual perception of identity to fail (and the consequences that follow).