Class Schedules

This course introduces students to the intellectual roots and contemporary applications of cultural studies, including critical media studies, focusing on the theoretical bases for analyses of power and meaning in production, texts, and reception. It includes primary readings in anti-racist, feminist, modern, postmodern, and queer cultural and social theory, and compares them to traditional approaches to the humanities. Designed as preparation for intermediate and advanced work grounded in cultural studies, the course is writing intensive, with special emphasis on developing skills in critical thinking and scholarly argumentation and documentation. Completion of or enrollment in MCST 110 is the prerequisite for majoring in media and cultural studies.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course students analyze the social, cultural, economic, political, and regulatory factors shaping the nature of US communications media, and then investigate how this affects local media organizations and their role in recognizing, serving and facilitating (or not) local populations, communities, interaction, identity, and civic engagement. Considering the history and practices of American journalism, and the current shifts in media technology and economics, the class examines the degree to which media function to provide effective access to news and information, foster diversity of content, encourage civic engagement, and serve the interest of citizens and diverse communities in a democratic society. Individual student projects for the course begin by identifying particular geographic, ethnic, or cultural neighborhoods and communities in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, and proceed to explore the degree to which these communities are recognized, defined, or served by various media institutions and journalism practice. Students explore various attempts to revitalize local communication, news delivery and civic discourse through experiments in community media, citizen journalism, community-based news aggregation, media arts, community service and other media innovations and reforms across neighborhood, ethnic, immigrant, gender, sexuality, and other public issues and community participation.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course introduces the aesthetics of film as well as selected issues in contemporary film studies. Its aesthetic approach isolates the features that constitute film as a distinct art form: narrative or non-narrative structure, staging, cinematography, editing, and sound. Topics in contemporary film studies that might be considered include one or more of the following: cultural studies and film, industrial organization and globalization, representations of gender and race, and theories of authorship, horror, and spectatorship. Several papers, a test covering basic film terms, and a short video project emphasizing abstract form are required. Suitable for first year students.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What is the camera’s relationship to truth? In an era of “fake news” and Photoshop, how can photography be used in a truthful way to communicate news stories? Through a blend of photo assignments and theoretical readings, this class examines contemporary photo-journalistic approaches in social media and other digital formats to help students read and create their own news stories in emerging contexts. Students will develop stories for web and social media platforms by creating compelling news images and transforming them into engaging stories. Contemporary outlets such as Magnum in Motion, Instagram Stories, and the New York Times Lens will be case studies for students to learn how to adapt their work to different venues. Students will also have the opportunity to work collaboratively with existing news and art outlets. Previous photography experience highly recommended.

General Education Requirements:

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Course Materials

With the rise of Donald Trump and right-wing movements elsewhere, it’s instructive to examine the appeal of populist movements. The Nazis were among the earliest populists to exploit the power of the media in shaping the political/cultural imagination. The course explores the role of film under National Socialism, including the organization of the film industry, the films’ Hollywood style and reliance on a star system, and the conundrum of separating propaganda from entertainment. Although we’ll study a few documentaries (Triumph of the Will, The Eternal Jew), the course will emphasize feature films, the movies people paid to see. We’ll also contrast Nazi propaganda with American propaganda from the same period.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In the last couple of decades we have seen the invention and popularization of a wide assortment of digital technologies and with them, a wide variety of new media forms. The internet (which includes a collection of media forms, from web pages and peer-to-peer software to social media and video sharing sites), massively multiplayer online video games, ubiquitous computing, software, mobile phones - together, many argue, these and other forms of new media are reshaping how we live, create, work and even, what it means to be human. In this class we'll examine a cross-section of contemporary humanistic research that has sought to understand the impact(s) of new media through a comparison to earlier, pre-digital media. In addition, we will engage in hands-on workshops, where we will use and learn some of the tools, software, and websites that our texts consider.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This discussion-based course is entirely focused on Bruce Lee, the actor and leading martial arts icon of the 20th century. Using American Studies and Critical Race Studies frames to examine the construction of racialized and gendered bodies, we will discuss Bruce Lee in terms of his biography, identities, politics, philosophy, and filmography. We will take time to appreciate the entertainment value and athleticism that Bruce Lee brought to his work, but we will also learn to distinguish the commercialized, commodified Bruce Lee (from t-shirts to posters to action figures) from the serious historical figure who symbolized the spirit of cultural independence and political sovereignty around the world. Among the required books and movies: The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, and "Way of the Dragon" (1972).

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course asks students to think about what constitutes an archive, and how artists, working across a range of mediums, spaces, and histories, have explored this question. We can think of the archive in its broadest sense as the collecting of materials in order to keep a record of an event, but we also need to consider it as a geographic problem, a space affected by its relationship to location, region, nation, community and race. An important part of understanding why archives exist is to ask how value is produced, what is worth preserving and what is ultimately disposable, what we want to hold on to, and what we want or need to let go of, what are we allowed to forget. In this class, students will look at how and why cultural producers like Fred Wilson and Marayam Jafri have defined and work with archives, then work on their own projects directly or indirectly to investigate the political and material space of archives. As a part of this course will be doing site visits to local archives including libraries, house museums, and looking at the quotidian archives we ourselves keep – be they material or dematerialized, i.e. social media, music playlists, etc. – or, more speculatively, the archives we could keep.

General Education Requirements:

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Course Materials

While the most visible signs of cultural globalization involve mainstream corporate products like Disney films, fast food chains, and blue jeans, underground and alternative cultural phenomena are also marked by their entanglement with a globalized economy, international communications technologies, diasporic communities, and other forms of transnationalism. By directly examining the products and practices of cultures labelled as dissident, subversive, or otherwise “alternative,” from the Pachuco subculture in the 1940s to punk music and identity in the 1980s and beyond, this course will ask critical questions about their transnational character. How do alternative identities express forms of both national and international belonging? What happens when alternative or oppositional identities are taken up outside of their “original” national contexts? Is this merely a miniature version of “cultural imperialism” or homogenization? How have international subcultures constructed unique networks of communication and exchange, both outside and within mainstream institutions or mediums? And, importantly, what are the political stakes of these transnational phenomena that are sometimes characterized as mere fashion trends or youth culture fads? To explore these questions, we will draw on key theoretical texts like Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Armand Mattelart’s Mapping World Communication, and Tziana Terranova’s Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. Our work will be grounded in distinctive products of transnational alternative culture like Victor Gaviria’s 1991 Columbian film Rodrigo D: No Futuro, which uses the film making practices of Italian Neorealism to depict the lives of a group of punks and metalheads living the Medellin slums.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is designed as a basic introduction to digital video production. The objective of the class is to familiarize students of film theory and history with the language of cinema from the standpoint of production in order to deepen your appreciation and knowledge of the technical aspects of film/video and to develop your capacity to use video as a tool for research and communication. In this way, the course will be a combination of technical instruction, critical engagement, and creative exploration. We will analyze and employ a variety of filmmaking techniques as well as constructing narrative and non-narrative strategies for doing so. The focus of the course will be to familiarize you with some basic conventions of experimental, documentary, and narrative cinema. In each assignment, you will be encouraged to think about how formal decisions enhance and further narrative or thematic elements. We will thus pay very close attention to formal aspects of cinematic production: mise-en-scene. cinematography, editing, and sound design. In addition to this attention to form, success in the class will be dependent on a commitment to working through the technical aspects of video production (camera operation, lighting, editing software) in order to create short, original video pieces. Prerequisite(s): MCST 128 or MCST 248 or MCST 249

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Journalism, as a concept, and as an institutionalized and normative set of practices, has evolved in conjunction with developments in Western systems of communication media—printing, the telegraph, newswire networks, film, radio, television, satellite systems and the Internet. Colonial and postcolonial extensions of communication infrastructure and networks has extended Western journalism practices across regions, nations and cultures, but norms and practices have also been opposed, resisted and adapted in diverse cultural and socio-political contexts. This course offers students the opportunity to explore the nature of journalism production in particular local contexts and across regional and global networks of news circulation. Of special interest will be cultures of news production and structures of news flow that characterize journalism activity and influence in differing circumstances under different political and economic systems in various parts of the world. Class members will pursue comparative case studies, in consultation with the instructor, that explore and illuminate intersections of local cultural production with national and transnational communication networks. Such studies of journalism activity may involve professional reporting, writing, editing, photography, video, and visual design across various media platforms as well as non-professional and citizen journalism production that challenges institutionalized professional models. Studies will also consider the influence of different systems of funding and production support and control: commercial, state-sponsored, or independent non-profit.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

> Human beings have defined themselves in relation to animals, plants, gods, and machines for a very long time. In addition, while many claim that they can explain “human nature,” there is a lot of disagreement in science, philosophy, religion, literature, art, and politics about what this “nature” is. At the same time, ecological and technological change continue to shape our understanding of the interdependence of human, animal, and plant life. Just as philosophers have argued for millennia about the most ethical and harmonious ways to structure human societies, twenty-first century theorists are asking about what it means to live in societies comprised of humans, animals, cyborgs, and possible hybrids of these. We shall join these thinkers in this project, examining relationships between humans and nonhuman entities from multiple perspectives. Our readings will range from the ancient to very contemporary. Along with historical and contemporary political philosophy and theory, our "texts" will include visual and performance art, dance, film, memoir, science and technology studies, and critical theories of disability, gender, affect, and the body. Among the questions we shall consider are the following: Who belongs to the political community? In what ways is the political community determined by relations of definition, exclusion, and representation? Why do non-human animals and other beings matter for politics? How do we understand the political subject or the idea of citizenship in an increasingly hybrid and technological world? How do human beings relate to other living and non-living entities? What is "posthumanism" and why might it matter politically? What forms of relationality are necessary to survive in the Anthropocene? And finally, how do the dynamics we identify and explore in class shape our ordinary lives, on and off campus?

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism OR U.S. Identities and Differences
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In this course we shall approach films as a medium that, through all of its means (from dialogue to more formal aspects, such as camera angle or editing), raises and attempts to negotiate philosophical, ideological, and political issues and conflicts. We shall be exposed to different methodologies of film analysis while examining: (a) a few representative films of three influential European film movements (German expressionism, Italian Neo-Realism, French nouvelle-vague), as a means of tracing the itinerary of European cinema from an action-oriented to a reflection-oriented practice; (b) the British and later American work of Alfred Hitchcock, as a mode of cinematography that employs the “gaze” as a principle of structural organization; and (c), American films of the 1970’s - 1990’s, as attempts to represent the world of late capitalism. In addition to several articles and book chapters that will be available on moodle, students need to purchase: Fredric Jameson: The Geopolitical Aesthetic; Slavoj Žižek: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lacan but Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. All readings and class taught in English.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this seminar, we will explore methods of visual storytelling and community engagement through documentary approaches to video and animation. First, we will explore how animation is becoming an integral part of documentary filmmaking, analyzing how visual modes of representation are increasingly used to convey complex social issues. Working collaboratively and with community organizations, we will create projects that employ animation and video as tools for social engagement, while learning the fundamentals of animation in After Effects. Students should come into the course with basic video production skills. Prerequisite: MCST 323, Fundamentals of Video Production.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials