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

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

Geologists tell us that we have entered a new epoch called the Anthropocene, when humans have fundamentally reshaped the planet in ways that put the future of life at risk. This course will consider questions like: When did the Anthropocene begin? Who has the power to define an epoch? How have we represented environmental disasters in the past and present? What are the stories we tell ourselves about human’s relationship to the Earth? Where do we find hope for our futures? A timely look at the concept of “The Anthropocene” provides us with special opportunities for self-reflection, debate and expression. Our fiction and non-fiction readings, film screenings and experiential learning will help us answer if there could be such a thing as a “good” Anthropocene rather than simply an apocalyptic one. We will develop our writing and research skills working on collaborative projects with the Twin Cities as our backdrop. This interdisciplinary course is being co-taught by faculty from three different departments: Andrea Kaston Tange (English), John Kim (Media and Cultural Studies) and Roopali Phadke (Environmental Studies). Students can select which section to join, but all sections will cover the same material and meet at the same time. Students will spend time in their individual section, have opportunities to work with the other two professors, occasionally meet up in one large group that includes all three sections, and take local and regional field trips together.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

The theorization of difference is an important aspect of cultural theory. In this class we will look at the role of difference as it is understood through representation, cultural production and practices and the production of knowledge. We want to examine the turn to difference within cultural studies and how this move has shifted how we think about power relations and meaning making in society. We will at the foundational work of cultural theorists like Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall and bell hooks as well as more recent work by Jasbir Puar and Simone Browne whose work focuses on the administration of difference through the U.S. War on Terror, cultures of surveillance. We will also look at the work from cultural producers like filmmakers DJ Spooky aka The Subliminal Kid and Khalil Joseph. The class will expose students to a range of material including print, digital media, film, television, and internet and social media.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This class will explore how journalism — particularly interviews — can be a tool for social change by both examining historical works of advocacy journalism and by creating our own piece of collaborative journalism: an oral history of the George Floyd uprisings.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Varies by semester. Consult the department or class schedule for current listing.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course is an intermediate-advanced level exploration of documentary history, theory, and practice. Students will analyze seminal documentary styles and movements, read about and discuss documentary ethics and politics, and put this study into practice by experimenting with documentary production. We will explore aspects of pre-production, production, and post-production as we develop documentary projects through peer and instructor critique.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is an intermediate-advanced level exploration of documentary history, theory, and practice. Students will analyze seminal documentary styles and movements, read about and discuss documentary ethics and politics, and put this study into practice by experimenting with documentary production. We will explore aspects of pre-production, production, and post-production as we develop documentary projects through peer and instructor critique.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

A practice-based class exploring the rich history of artists' and experimental video. The class will introduce various key issues including portraiture and self-representation; assertions or representations of race, class, gender, and aspects of identity; found-footage, appropriation, and collage; and conceptual, formalist, feminist, and performative approaches. Video as exhibition in the gallery and cinema, streamed on the web and alternative broadcast television, and its use as tactical media intervention, political prank, act of witness, and legal/physical defense strategy will be considered. Coursework will include readings, screenings, writing, discussion, visual/textual analysis, and production practices of video-making, with the emphasis on developing each student's own aesthetic, critical and conceptual voice. This class will likely be hybrid, and may meet outdoors, with a parallel virtual component for those participating remotely. Those wishing to waitlist the class should contact the professor to be placed on a waitlist, and must attend the first class to be considered.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Global media collectively have tremendous influence in how many see and comprehend the world and therefore on the information and beliefs upon which they feel or act. While media are central to the continued production of a sense of "the world" at large or the "global" scale, media industries are situated geographically, culturally and institutionally. Even if they promise worldwide coverage or are multinational companies, there is much to be gained from studying how media are produced and distributed differently according to specific social, political, economic and historical conditions. This course considers media industries around the world with a focus on the relationships between the labor and infrastructures behind representations in a broad range of media (television, radio, cinema, news, telecommunications, internet).

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What is Black Art? In this class we will ask this question and look at the ways artists, curators, and activists have responded to it over time and place. This is a survey course, both chronological and cultural, that covers 19th and early 20th century Black artists, specifically those working as painters, sculptors, photographers, performers, and moving image artists. The course examines that ways that art chronicles major socio-political events. The artists in this course include 19th and 20th century artists like Henry Osawa Tanner and sculptor Edmonia Lewis as well as more contemporary artists like Ayana Evans who push against the boundaries of discipline. We will look how these artists and their work speak to the shifting role that race has played in the US from the period of Reconstruction to now. They also illustrate the ways that art and artists respond to urgent political crisis from the AIDS crisis to climate change. We will also examine the questions of economy and circulation of Black Art and its connection to the visual, social, and cultural history of the United States.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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 principles will be that TV matters and, crucially, how we talk about TV matters. We will ask not just what ideas and practices are produced by the programs and surrounding conversations, but, importantly, how they are produced 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. We will specifically focus on the role of television in the production and distribution of powerful ideas about gender, race, sexuality, and class. To ground our discussions, we will screen and dissect episodes of individual programs from throughout the last 80 years of television history. For instance, we will track changing discourses about gender, technology, work, and the family from I Love Lucy to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Nora From Queens. And we will look at discourses about race, class, and violence as they shift from news coverage of the civil rights movement through prime time engagements with the LA uprising in 1992 to discussions surrounding COPS and Live PD in the present moment.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course focuses on the dialogue and mutual influence between the German- and French-speaking traditions of political economy and philosophical and theoretical thought, as it becomes evident in the relations among German Idealism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Psychoanalysis, (post-)Structuralism, and their productive interconnections in the development of Critical Theory. While becoming familiar with the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacque Lacan, as well as the work of relevant thinkers who influenced their thought, we shall be examining the structural and conceptual homologies and differences among political economy, abstract thought, and human subjectivity. The last part of the course will focus on the relation between these interconnections (among economy, ideas, culture, and the constitution of identities) and the exercise of power in the era of global capitalism, as theorized by thinkers who draw on this German-French-speaking line of thought. No pre-knowledge required; all readings in English. Counts as core course for Critical Theory concentration.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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 are the truths and falsehoods that data and databases tell us about contemporary culture? How do we use data to tell stories? Increasingly, computational methods are being used to ask questions and look for patterns in cultural data (from museums, libraries, archives, and elsewhere). This class provides an introduction to some of the methods and tools used to investigate data and datasets, while encouraging critical engagement with a number of humanities-based research questions surrounding them. Students will consider ethical and design questions encompassing the collection, analysis, and presentation of data through class conversations and the process of creating their own digital projects.

General Education Requirements:
Quantitative Thinking Q2

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The theorization of difference is an important aspect of cultural theory. In this class we will look at the role of difference as it is understood through representation, cultural production and practices and the production of knowledge. We want to examine the turn to difference within cultural studies and how this move has shifted how we think about power relations and meaning making in society. We will at the foundational work of cultural theorists like Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall and bell hooks as well as more recent work by Jasbir Puar and Simone Browne whose work focuses on the administration of difference through the U.S. War on Terror, cultures of surveillance. We will also look at the work from cultural producers like filmmakers DJ Spooky aka The Subliminal Kid and Khalil Joseph. The class will expose students to a range of material including print, digital media, film, television, and internet and social media.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

One often hears horror movies referred to as trash. Does horror necessarily deserve this condemnation (or plug)? Why does an occasional horror film like Get Out or The Silence of the Lambs win respectability or even a best-picture Oscar nomination? What are the criteria by which we decide whether any film or work of art is good, bad, or perhaps not art at all? The course will examine horror films from various eras and places, some of which were repudiated at their release only to be recuperated later as art-house classics. But all challenge cultural assumptions about art and horror as mutually exclusive categories, and all employ shock, horror, or the uncanny as compelling means of representing social anxieties and historical traumas. Our objective will be to reflect on questions of aesthetic value, and to explore the themes, narrative strategies, and audience effects of horror. We will draw on a variety of theoretical approaches like Freud’s description of the uncanny or Todorov’s concept of the fantastic. In some sense horror cinema was “born” in Weimar Germany, so we will begin with silent German films, but explore Universal Studio’s depression-era horror (which owed a debt to German expressionist cinema) and to modern horror from Hitchcock to Stanley Kubrick, Dario Argento, or Jordan Peele. Student obligations: several brief presentations, midterm exam, research paper + presentation.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Global media collectively have tremendous influence in how many see and comprehend the world and therefore on the information and beliefs upon which they feel or act. While media are central to the continued production of a sense of "the world" at large or the "global" scale, media industries are situated geographically, culturally and institutionally. Even if they promise worldwide coverage or are multinational companies, there is much to be gained from studying how media are produced and distributed differently according to specific social, political, economic and historical conditions. This course considers media industries around the world with a focus on the relationships between the labor and infrastructures behind representations in a broad range of media (television, radio, cinema, news, telecommunications, internet).

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Taught in English, with an optional German component for those who want to have the course count toward their German-taught courses. In this case, students must do some reading and all writing assignments in German and participate in extra discussion sessions in German (format and frequency to be determined in collaboration between student and instructor).In this course we shall focus on the exchange and influences among French, German, and American cinematographers within the genre of road movies. We shall begin with a couple of 1940s-1950 American films that cut across the genres of road movie and film-noir and had an impact on the French nouvelle-vague director Jean-Luc Godard, whose films, in turn, inspired American road movies during their acme in the 1960s-1970s. We shall then turn to the German director Wim Wenders to focus on the relation of his 1970s-1980s road movies to both the German literary canon and their American filmic counterparts. The course will conclude with the German director of Turkish descent, Fatih Akin, who complicates the above exchanges by intertwining them with the significant German-Turkish cultural exchange. Students will gain insight into film as an aesthetic, ideological, and political medium, and into specifics of the history and culture of the countries involved.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This class gives an introduction to the many media platforms that are vital to contemporary journalism, and provides a strong foundation in news writing and reporting. It is taught by a veteran editor and writer, who is a Macalester graduate and currently a digital editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune ( startribune.com ). Campus and Twin Cities communities are used as students plan, develop, report and write stories individually and in groups. Cookies are usually served in class.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Although Donald Trump is, despite the many comparisons, a far cry from Hitler, examining how Nazism sold itself may help us understand the reasons for Trump’s political ascent, and for the far-right movements taking hold elsewhere. The Nazis were masters of propaganda, brilliant at mobilizing the modern media to disseminate their (ironically often anti-modern) worldview. Even before seizing power, they recognized the power of film in sustaining their imaginary, and created a film industry that rivaled (and resembled) Hollywood. What did Nazi movies look like? How did they balance film propaganda with film entertainment? Was resistance possible in this system? Instead of asking “What is a fascist film,” we’ll explore how film functions under fascism. Student obligations: several brief presentations, midterm exam, research paper + presentation.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

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

In this course we shall examine the relation of religion to both capital and the modern forms of political power (what Michel Foucault termed biopolitics or biopower), as well as the biopolitical formations of race and racism as means for sustaining power—while discovering the enduring pertinence of Marx’s work in theorizing the above issues. Biopower emerges gradually in secular capitalist modernity as a form of power that legitimizes itself not through its right to “take life” or punish or exclude (as in traditional forms of sovereignty) but through its obligation to protect and enhance life. Yet, albeit “secular,” biopower is a form of “pastoral power” (Foucault). We shall explore: the interconnectedness of modern biopower and religion; Marx’s critique of the dominant (Enlightenment) critique of religion and his thesis that the secular state presupposes religion; the colonial and racial constructions of religion; and the biopolitical constructions of race in its relation to social class and other forms of domination. All readings in English; no pre-knowledge required. Counts as a core course for the Critical Theory concentration.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How do pictures mean? This course explores the ways in which scholars and theorists have studied the unique nature of visual communication. How do visual images communicate differently from (and/or similarly to) lexical language? What sorts of assumptions have been made about visual communication and which of those assumptions have been debunked by research? To what extent is the interpretation of visual images a natural or universal process and to what extent must images be read by means of symbolic conventions that are culturally learned? The course will address issues ranging from the psychology of visual apprehension, addressing theories such as gestalt, to patterns of word-image relationship and the institutionalized use and circulation of visual images within multi-media systems. Class members will have opportunities to explore particular topics in depth as part of a final project.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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