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 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:
Writing WC

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

We live in a world populated by images. These images, still and moving, can tell us a good deal about who we are, what we desire, and what we value as a culture—they both reflect and transform the realities of everyday life. Learning to analyze the power of images requires understanding the ways that they are produced, disseminated, and consumed; it requires looking at the ways that images are constructed and reading the codes and conventions that give them meaning. Over the course of the semester, we will develop skills for examining the images that surround us, applying the tools and insights of visual analysis to television, advertising, art, and new media. However, the main focus of the course will be on the cinema. Exploring a wide range of styles, geographies, and theories of cinema, this course will give you the tools and vocabulary necessary to more systematically analyze films. We will look at the evolution of the moving image, studying the transformations the cinema has undergone over the past century, as well as the ways that we, as spectators, have been transformed along with it.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this course, we write about the way the media represents difference and dissent among Black athletes, culminating in recent coverage of “taking a knee” in solidarity with Black victims of police brutality. Our writing will follow the example of Dave Zirin, a Mac alum and the editor of www.edgeofsports.com. Student blogs will include entries about race and difference among amateur as well as well as professional athletes. In addition to the blog, every student will produced a 12 to 15 page term paper. We will also take at least two trips to local sporting events. Our readings, screenings and class discussions will cover representations of Jack Johnson (screening Ken Burns, Unforgivable Blackness); Muhammed Ali (The People’s Champ); Eduardo Galeano , Soccer in Sunlight and Shadows; Venus and Serena (screening, Venus and Serena).

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:

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 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 follow the development of both popular, corporate programming and alternatives practices, like cable access, guerrilla TV, and public television, to the present day. We will also examine the unspoken assumptions about class, gender, race, and sexuality that sit behind the way that both academics and mainstream commentators talk about TV as the quintessential medium of mass culture, or the “idiot box.” Engaging theoretical and analytical readings, this course will use class discussion, lecture, and written assignments to explore these critical frameworks. Additionally, we will screen and dissect episodes of individual programs

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

How are public perceptions concerning environmental concepts, conditions, policies, actors and interests shaped by embedded cultural and media representations of nature, environments and their use? Who sets the agenda for environmental issues and debates and how is that agenda presented for public consumption and discourse? What role does the history of environmental imagery in films, television, advertising and journalism play in establishing or maintaining particular perspectives and discourses regarding the environment? And what are the tendencies and limitations of science journalism regarding environmental issues such as pollution, safety regulations, conservation, environmental risk or climate change?

This course focuses attention on media representations related to human relationships with nature. Through weekly readings and analyses of media representations we will work to gain a better understanding of the particular influence of media images and discourse on our views of nature and environmental debate, including: images of wilderness, land use and control; representations of industrialization and its impacts; news reporting on environmental degradation and climate change; the visions and metaphors of environmental films and “green advertising,” media characterizations of environmental risk, portrayals of environmental activism, and the shifting parameters of environmental rhetoric in the U.S. and globally. Class members pursue individual term projects that explore and analyze chosen issues of environmental representation and their implications.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course provides an introduction to the history, politics, and aesthetics of Middle Eastern cinema. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the development of both local and regional cinematic traditions; the role of cinema in the production of collective memory of conflict and war; the international circulation of film as a form of soft power; and, not least, the profound discursive power of cinematic humor. Readings will offer an introduction to methods of film analysis as well as to the political and artistic history of the modern Middle East.

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:
Internationalism
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course provides an overview of the history of film up through the release of Citizen Kane , examining aesthetic, industrial, social, and theoretical topics in a variety of national and cultural contexts. Discussions, lectures, and screenings emphasize commercial and avant-garde styles and their determinants. What is the style now referred to as the ``classical Hollywood cinema?- Why did it materialize? What alternatives were there? The course explores issues of racism and gender as well as connections between the history of film and the modernization of European and U.S. culture. Several papers are required.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course takes the 50th anniversary as an occasion to reflect on the legacy of 1968, an iconic year for protest, revolution, and counterculture. The tumultuous year of urban revolt, anti-colonial struggle, oppositional movements, and political upheaval was marked by a concurrent explosion in the realm of visual culture, where formally innovative works distinctively mixed art and politics. With special attention to experimental cinema, political protest art, alternative journalism, and guerrilla urbanism, this course will examine the events of 1968 through the challenging, incandescent, and radical art and design of the era. Importantly, this course aims to address the “global sixties,” a term that situates events in the West, like the student revolts in Paris and the Days of Rage in Chicago, as part of an international wave of discontent and resistance. In examining these events, alongside others like the uprising in Mexico City, the Prague Spring, and the Rodney riots in Kingston, we will pay special attention to the way activism and art were conceived and practiced as part of a project of transnational insurrection and solidarity. In addition to analyzing works from the era, we will analyze retrospective representations of the era (from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point to Milan Kundera’s 1984 novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Phillipe Garrel’s 2005 Les Amants réguliers) to critically engage the legacy of this turbulent time period.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

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

An overview of contemporary approaches to media as culture, a determining as well as determined sphere in which people make sense of the world, particularly in terms of ethnicity, gender, identity, and social inequality. Students develop tools for analyzing media texts and accounts of audience responses derived from the international field of cultural studies and from the social theory on which it draws. Analysis emphasizes specificity of media texts, including advertisements, films, news reports, and television shows. Experience in cooperative discussion, research, and publication. Prerequisite(s): MCST 110 or permission of instructor

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Today we often hear people dismiss the Western (mostly European) philosophical tradition as a bunch of "dead white men." In other words, the argument goes, these thinkers harbored such passe notions as universal truths, a universal subject, and an individual in total control of itself and endowed with a pure reason unadulterated by rhetoric, imagination, fiction, and politics. Why should we bother with "dead white men" now that we understand that truth depends on historical context, that the self is decentered by the unconscious, that identity is constituted by gender, race, class, and other cultural factors, that truth is linked to power, and that ideology is omnipresent? Unfortunately, this all-too-familiar attitude overlooks its own faulty presupposition: it presumes a clear-cut break between philosophical tradition and contemporary thought, as if contemporary thought had no tradition out of which it emerged and could, therefore, merely discard what preceded it. Hence the popularity of phrases like "philosophy is dead." It is all the more ironic to see this attitude prevail in the West at the very moment that multiculturalism has become our cause celebre : all cultural traditions are supposed to be "respected," except the West's own tradition. (Perhaps as a new way for the West to reinstate surreptitiously its superiority as the sole culture with no tradition?) This course pursues a close reading of texts by various "dead white men" as the unconscious (i.e., repressed and, for that matter, all the more powerful) undercurrent of contemporary thought. Assigned texts will include: Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx, as well as texts by twentieth-century thinkers that stress the dependence of contemporary thought on philosophy. No pre-knowledge required; all readings in English. With different reading lists this course may be taken more than once for credit .

General Education Requirements:

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