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:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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 labor cultural producers. We will analyze how artists, architects, and activists have engaged ideas about geography and allow us to rethink the meaning of place. This class includesg visiting lectures and site visits. Students are expected to work on real and imagined public-facing design problems.

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

For thousands of years value has been scrutinized in philosophy, art history, and economic analysis, as it cuts across three constitutive aspects of social, cultural, and political life: economy, aesthetics, and ethics. Not only do we have and impose on the world our moral, aesthetic, and exchange values, but these three fields often become difficult to distinguish, as is evident in the slippery flexibility of words that allow us to say as much "this painting is bad or worthless" as "I think this person is bad or worthless," or "this is a bad, or worthless, remark" and "this is a bad or worthless check." This course will focus primarily on influential accounts of value in aesthetic theory, while also examining the ways in which aesthetic value demarcates itself from or implicates its moral and economic counterparts, and what the interplays among the three fields entail for aesthetic value. Our readings will focus on the impact of primarily German thought on the formation of modern aesthetic theory-from the early eighteenth century through the Enlightenment and Romanticism to high modernism and the Frankfurt School. Class and readings in English. Prerequisite(s): No pre-knowledge required. This course is appropriate for all level students.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is a survey of cultural production of and about Blackness. Looking at the work of artists, filmmakers, and theoreticians, we will analyze the relationship between race and image making from the late 19th century to today. We will read works by Tina Campt, Michael Gillespie, and Hito Steryl. Also included in this class are canonical films like Birth of a Nation, but will also look at contemporary critical responses to this film such as DJ Spooky's Rebirth of a Nation, and Garrett Bradley's America. While the course is focused primarily on the US, we will also talk about racial formations beyond the US and how cultural workers outside the US have engaged Blackness as a way of seeing, a way of listening, and a process of being.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:

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. 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. Prior experience with film studies such as MCST 128 is encouraged, but not required.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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. 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. Prior experience with film studies such as MCST 128 is encouraged, but not required.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Cultural heritage sites, including libraries, archives and museums, have existed in some shape or form for a very long time. Computers, on the other hand, have only been a part of these institutions for about sixty years. Although technologies offer more efficient and cost-effective ways to store and disseminate information and promise greater accessibility to materials, that doesn't necessarily mean that they successfully facilitate the missions of these cultural heritage sites or the needs of their visitors. Why is this the case? Do digital technologies truly have the potential to decentralize and democratize these spaces? What can they tell us about what we value, as a culture? In this interdisciplinary course, we will reflect on the impact of digital technologies on cultural heritage sites, and museums in particular, starting in the 1960s and continuing through the present, including discussion of how museums responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. Among other things, students will learn how to collect, curate, and digitize objects, write and design an object label, and contribute to an online exhibition.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

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 have 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, cultural 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:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

In this class, we will consider the ways that artists and social movements have used the moving image to challenge and transform dominant cultural norms. Engaging with international histories of experimental film, video, and new media, we will address the political and cultural contexts through which oppositional cinematic forms emerged—those contesting race, gender, resistance to capitalism and imperialism, sexual norms, and more. We will also examine cinematic practices that have sought to alter and disrupt the way we see the world and consume visual culture. In doing so, we will seek to understand the legacy of historical oppositional cinematic practices in our present moment, while addressing the profound impact that transformations in both the production and distribution of moving images have had in expanding and altering the meaning of oppositional cinema. Exploring a wide range of practices within the field of oppositional cinema--including digital video, installation art, and even virtual and augmented reality--this class will give you the opportunity to conduct practice-based research, creating your own oppositional cinematic pieces. We will also make use of the rich film culture in the Twin Cities, including the incredible collection of oppositional and experimental cinema held at the Walker Art Center.

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

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:
Writing WP
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

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

This course introduces a range of case studies in the history of film from the early 1940s to the present, examining aesthetic, industrial, social, and theoretical topics in a variety of national and cultural contexts. Discussions, readings, lectures, and screenings will explore topics like "Cold War Politics and International Film Festivals," "Latin American Counter-Cinema and the Politics of Realism," "New Wave Cinemas, Auteurism, and Gender," and "Streaming, Transnational Cinema, and the Queer Film Archive." Alongside these direct engagements with cinema and its social context, the course will also introduce a range of critical and theoretical approaches to research and writing for film history, drawing from feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial scholarship and using films themselves as theoretical sources. These ideas will help guide students in a semester-long research project in a film history topic of their choosing. Prerequisite(s): MCST 128 recommended.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

All readings and class taught in English; no pre-knowledge required. 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.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This is the first semester of a year-long course in the theory, history, and practice of documentary filmmaking. In this class, we will analyze seminal documentary styles and movements, read about and discuss documentary ethics and politics, and put this study into practice by developing concepts for documentary films. Focusing on elements of style and storytelling, in the first semester of the course you will develop a treatment for a documentary film and start the process of filmmaking using professional equipment and editing software. In the second semester of the course, we will realize our documentary treatments as short films with a focus on cinematography, editing, and sound, while reviewing contemporary trends in documentary filmmaking. We will also meet and collaborate with contemporary filmmakers working in the field of documentary cinema. Students are encouraged, but not required, to take both semesters of the class. Students who have taken Part 1 will be given priority enrollment in the second semester of the course.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

What might we learn about place, power, and change if we looked not at seemingly static space, but unapologetically mobile political spaces, like the river, the gulf, and the ocean. In this course, students will examine the relationship between water and nation building as it has been explored by cultural practitioners. The course draws heavily on Black studies and Black geographies, introducing students to the relationship between the Black Atlantic, the Mississippi River, the Gulf South and the literature, films, and sonic cultures of Black folks. A guiding question for course is, what do histories and cartographies that trace and locate Black mobility along a river that moves between the Gulf of Mexico and Minnesota reveal about the lives and struggles of Black populations contemporarily in and between these spaces? The Mississippi River, the gulf and the ocean give us a way to think about space, time, and mobility and also allows us to ask, how does proximity to the river, a source of power and destruction, intersect with economy and race to produce and reproduce anti-black landscapes? The class will be a combination of discussion based and hands on learning, offering students a chance to contribute to ongoing research and site-specific creative projects including map-making and 3-D imaging.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course teaches the art and technology of video projection and digital media in contemporary performance. Students will gain fluency designing and staging multimedia performances through a combination of classroom instruction and weekly Labs. Class sessions include lectures, discussions, tutorials, and hands-on performance with video cameras, projectors, and audio-video software. In Labs and term projects, students will create and perform original short pieces that stage their digital designs. Topics include: Experimental and Multimedia Performance Techniques; Cueing Video and Sound in the Performing Arts/Concerts/Dance/Theatre; Live Video Processing; Projection Mapping. Prerequisites: THDA 235 (Fundamentals of Scenography) or ART 233 (Photography 1). A previous course in Video Production may also count, with instructor permission. Please contact the instructor with any questions about course requirements or prerequisites.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Central to research is storytelling. This course provides the theoretical and methodological toolkits that students will use to conduct visual research in Geography and the Social Sciences. Drawing on Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies, the course surveys topics including research ethics, visual culture, discourse analysis, digital methods, participant observation and community-based research practices, and visual representation. Students will develop skills to observe, record, and analyze issues and processes in the local community in the Twin Cities through semester-long visual research projects by making still (photography) and moving (film) images. In addition, students will work on individual and group projects for hands-on experience on other digital methods. There are no prerequisites for this course and no prior background knowledge in visual methods or tools are required.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

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