MCST 110-01 30453 |
Texts and Power: Foundations of Media and Cultural Studies |
Days: M W F
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Time: 03:30 pm-04:30 pm
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Room: HUM 402
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Instructor: Michael Griffin
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Avail./Max.: 5 / 16
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*First day attendance required*
Details
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
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MCST 126-01 30454 |
Local News Media Institutions |
Days: M W F
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Time: 10:50 am-11:50 am
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Room: HUM 401
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Instructor: Michael Griffin
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Avail./Max.: 5 / 24
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*First day attendance required*
Details
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
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MCST 128-01 30455 |
Film Analysis/Visual Culture |
Days: M W F
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Time: 09:40 am-10:40 am
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Room: HUM 401
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Instructor: Bradley Stiffler
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Avail./Max.: 1 / 24
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*First day attendance required*
Details
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:
U.S. Identities and Differences
Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts
Course Materials
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MCST 192-01 30895 |
Arts in the City |
Days: M
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Time: 07:00 pm-08:30 pm
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Room: LIBR 250
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Instructor: Rohan Preston
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Avail./Max.: 4 / 16
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*2 credits; S/N grading only*
Details
Ask anyone a question that is not yes-or-no, and they’re liable to answer with a story. It could be an anecdote about their day, a reflection on a film or book, or a metaphor about the latest innovative idea jazzing them. Stories help us to know ourselves and inspire us towards our dreams. What is yours? In this discussion- and writing-based course, we look at stories through an immersion in arts and culture, taking advantage of the riches that surround us. Minneapolis and St Paul are a cultural mecca with a plethora of first-rate national and regional flagships. Students will take in shows, exhibits and concerts, including, in Spring 2023, the Broadway tour of “Hamilton” at the Orpheum, “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the Guthrie and “We Shall Someday” at Theater Latte Da. We will write critically about these cultural offerings, reflections that may be published on campus and elsewhere. We also will have guests in to talk about their craft and curating their own stories in a saturated, ever-changing social and traditional media landscape. Twentieth Century poet, critic and wit Dorothy Parker once advised: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style’ [Strunk and White’s definitive writing guide]. The first greatest [favor], of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” We do not promise to make students who take this course into professional writers. But we will have fun as we grow to recognize the narrative elements that animate, constrain, or expand the world around us while building foundational skills that are invaluable in any field. Instructor: A creative thought leader and arts ecology shaper, Rohan Preston has been theater critic at the Star Tribune since 1998. In that quarter century, he has interviewed some giants of storytelling, including playwrights August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner and Lynn Nottage. He also has interviewed and written about composer Stephen Sondheim and choreographers Twyla Tharp and Bill T. Jones. A pioneer as one of the first Black critics at major daily in the nation, Preston has twice served on the Pulitzer Prize jury for drama. His awards include an Emmy, for a team project he led about the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first Black president and a silver award in the Lowell Thomas travel writing competition for his piece about being the first member of his family to return to Africa. Mr. Preston also has written for the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and New York Times. Born in Jamaica, raised in New York and educated at Yale, he also is a poet, playwright and composer, authoring the poetry collection "Dreams in Soy Sauce" and co-editing the Viking/Penguin anthology "Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence."
General Education Requirements:
Distribution Requirements:
Course Materials
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MCST 232-01 30456 |
Fundamentals of Video Production |
Days: T R
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Time: 01:20 pm-02:50 pm
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Room: ART 301
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Instructor: Morgan Adamson
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Avail./Max.: -1 / 12
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*First day attendance required*
Details
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.
General Education Requirements:
Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts
Course Materials
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MCST 266-01 30949 |
Cinema Studies |
Days: T R
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Time: 01:20 pm-02:50 pm
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Room: HUM 215
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Instructor: Kiarina Kordela
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Avail./Max.: 19 / 25
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*Cross-listed with GERM 366-01*
Details
Taught in English; there is an optional German component for those who want to have the course count toward their German-taught courses. In this case, students must do the reading and writing assignments and some of their oral presentations in German.Cinema Studies is a film course with a special emphasis on some aspect of German culture relating to cinema, such as German film production, film adaptations of German literary texts, or the representation of German history in world cinema. While familiarizing students with the methodologies of film analysis, the course focus may vary from a historical or genre survey to a particular concept (such as representations of gender, race, nationality) to a cross-section between film and other texts. Students will gain insight into film as an aesthetic, ideological, and political medium, and into specifics of German history and culture. Students may register more than once in this course, provided a different topic is offered. Prerequisite(s): Requirement for those who would like to take the course as a taught-in-German course: GERM 308 or GERM 309
General Education Requirements:
Internationalism
Distribution Requirements:
Humanities
Course Materials
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MCST 268-01 30457 |
On Television |
Days: M W F
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Time: 02:20 pm-03:20 pm
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Room: ARTCOM 202
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Instructor: Bradley Stiffler
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Avail./Max.: 1 / 20
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*First day attendance required*
Details
This course is designed to be a critical look at an often-unexamined medium, television. We will approach TV as an industry, a medium or mode of culture, a sometimes-maligned object of discourse, and a site of textual, social, and political practices. Our guiding principle will be that TV matters. And we will ask not just what ideas and practices it produces, but, importantly, how it produces them and how they have changed over time. Starting in the postwar period, we will trace the emergence of television culture, mostly within the United States, and think about how this particular media institution shaped, and was shaped by, its social and historical context. Specifically, this portion will focus on how the television was constructed as a domestic appliance and was used as an instrument for producing and policing the ideal or normative family. Then, the course will examine the history and politics of racial representation on television, starting with the symbiotic relationship between the civil rights movement and television news institutions in the mid-20th century. We will follow this into the present, with particular emphasis on television's role in molding ideas about policing, protest, and racism. Throughout, we will consider the distinct textual, aesthetic, and stylistic aspects of individual television programs as well as the larger discursive environment in which they operate. Screening these episodes along with theoretical, historical, and analytical readings, this course will use class discussion, lecture, and written assignments to develop critical frameworks for understanding TV.
General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences
Distribution Requirements:
Humanities
Course Materials
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MCST 276-01 30708 |
Marx, the Imaginary, and Neoliberalism |
Days: T R
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Time: 03:00 pm-04:30 pm
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Room: HUM 401
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Instructor: Kiarina Kordela
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Avail./Max.: 2 / 37
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*Cross-listed with GERM 276-01, POLI 276-01, and RELI 276-01*
Details
Marx’s contribution to the theorization of the function of the imaginary in both the constitution of subjectivity and the mechanisms of politics and economy—usually referred to as ideology—cannot be overestimated. The first part of this course traces Marx’s gradual conceptualization of the imaginary throughout his work—as well as further Marxist theoreticians, such as Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Slavoj Žižek—while exploring how the imaginary enabled Marx’s discovery of three further crucial concepts: structure, the unconscious, and the symptom, all of which are central in the analysis of culture and ideology. In the second part of the course, we shall focus on the logic and mechanisms of power in contemporary neoliberalism, including the claim that today Marx’s theory is no longer relevant (readings will include Maurizio Lazzarato, Nancy Fraser, McKenzie Wark). All readings and class taught in English; no pre-knowledge required. Core course toward the Critical Theory concentration.
General Education Requirements:
Internationalism
Distribution Requirements:
Humanities
Course Materials
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MCST 281-01 30005 |
Bruce Lee, His Life and Legacy |
Days: M
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Time: 07:00 pm-10:00 pm
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Room: THEATR 205
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Instructor: Karin Aguilar-San Juan
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Avail./Max.: 2 / 25
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*Cross-listed with AMST 281-01 and ASIA 283-01*
Details
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
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MCST 294-01 30458 |
Spatial Humanities |
Days: T R
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Time: 03:00 pm-04:30 pm
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Room: HUM 402
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Instructor: Tia Simone Gardner
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Avail./Max.: 13 / 20
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*First day attendance required*
Details
Spatial Humanities is the interdisciplinary study of place, space and geography within the context of humanities. Because of its connection to the discipline of Geography, much of spatial humanities relies on the use of GIS (Geographic Information Science) as a means to understand and visualize the world, however in this class we will look at Spatial Humanities through the lense of cultural production. We will analyze how artists, architects, and activists have engaged ideas about landscape and they allow us to rethink the meaning of place. This class includes visiting lectures, visiting seminar leaders and site visits. Students are expected to work on real and imagined public-facing design problems.
General Education Requirements:
Distribution Requirements:
Course Materials
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MCST 294-02 30459 |
Media, War and Conflict |
Days: T R
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Time: 01:20 pm-02:50 pm
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Room: HUM 401
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Instructor: Michael Griffin
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Avail./Max.: 2 / 20
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*First day attendance required; cross-listed with INTL 294-04*
Details
Conflict is a familiar component of narrative structure and a regularly applied criterion of newsworthiness for journalism. Representations of extreme forms of conflict, including warfare, are frequently found in both fiction and non-fiction. And the ways in which violent conflict is represented in the media has significant implications for conceptualizing world affairs and politics, whether it involves warfare between nations, religious conflict, civil war among ethnic or kinship groups, political conflict or terrorist activities. This class focuses on the analysis of media representations of wars and conflicts in various cultures and regions of the world (including patterns of visual representation found in photography, film, television and online) and the ways in which these representations are shaped by the structures and practices of media industry production and transnational circulation across media systems and cultures. Students will study and analyze historical patterns of representation in war reporting and news broadcasts, literature, photojournalism, fiction film and non-fiction documentary, and relate those patterns of representation to contemporary descriptions and depictions of national and international war and conflict. In the second half of the term, each class member will choose a particular case study to research, resulting in a final course project that can take several possible forms: a term paper, multimedia presentation, video, etc. The goal of the course is to deepen awareness of culturally specific, and media specific, approaches to representation, and how the manner of representing conflicts reflects particular cultural perspectives, national or regional interests, specific media practices, the economic and political motivations of institutionalized media, and historical relationships of power across nations and social groups.
General Education Requirements:
Internationalism
Distribution Requirements:
Course Materials
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MCST 294-03 30828 |
Spying, Sensing, Sorting: Surveillance and Power |
Days: M W F
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Time: 01:10 pm-02:10 pm
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Room: CARN 404
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Instructor: Alix Johnson
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Avail./Max.: 2 / 20
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*Cross-listed with INTL 294-02*
Details
This course considers surveillance as a social formation, inseparable from the theory and exercise of power. On the one hand, it takes up the pressing questions surveillance raises, from the development of cutting-edge technologies to the complex work of international regulation. On the other hand, it situates surveillance historically as central to projects of imperial conquest, state formation, and colonial rule. Engaging with theoretical works, primary sources, empirical studies and artistic renderings, students will grapple with problems of surveillance and power across contexts while developing a multi-modal research project.
General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism
Distribution Requirements:
Course Materials
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MCST 394-01 30460 |
Documentary Cinema: Theory and Practice, Part 2 |
Days: T R
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Time: 09:40 am-11:10 am
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Room: HUM 412
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Instructor: Morgan Adamson
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Avail./Max.: 2 / 13
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*First day attendance required*
Details
This is the second semester of a two-semester course on the history, theory, and practice of documentary cinema. In the class, students will film and edit a short documentary film, learning the basics of cinematography, sound, and post-production for documentary cinema. We will survey contemporary trends in documentary filmmaking, including experimental, web-based, and virtual reality documentary films. In addition, will meet local and international filmmakers, and engage with Twin Cities film culture through organizations like Film North, the Walker Art Center, and the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival. Priority will be given to students who have taken the first semester of the course. If you have not taken the first semester of the course, please contact the instructor for before enrolling.
General Education Requirements:
Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts
Course Materials
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MCST 488-01 30461 |
Advanced Topics Seminar |
Days: W
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Time: 07:00 pm-10:00 pm
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Room: HUM 402
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Instructor: Tia Simone Gardner
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Avail./Max.: 5 / 12
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*First day attendance required*
Details
In the capstone seminar, students working on an independent project in line with the theme of the seminar share their scholarship, integrating what they have learned in the major, emphasizing knowledge gained in their focus area, as well as presenting their work at a concluding mini-conference. The capstone experience involves close analysis of cultural artifacts that examine at a higher level issues first raised in the introductory course. The department plans to offer two seminars every year, at least one in media studies, enabling students to select the seminar most relevant to their intellectual development. In exceptional cases, students with sufficient preparation may take the seminar prior to their senior year. Students may take more than one MCST senior seminar as long as content varies. Recent seminar topics have included: Image/Text: Metaphor, Myth and Power; Advanced Film Analysis; Advanced Studies in War and Media; Postmodernism, Identity and the Media; Whiteness and the Media; Advanced Queer Media. Prerequisite(s): MCST 110 - Texts and Power: Foundations of Media and Cultural Studies or permission of instructor. MCST 128 - Film Analysis/Visual Culture recommended for film studies seminars. Non-majors are welcome if they have taken MCST 110 or a comparable course.
General Education Requirements:
Distribution Requirements:
Course Materials
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