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:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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:
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

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

An introduction to indigenous studies, this course explores the many roots and routes of Native cultural studies through film and media. Students will trace the history of documentary filmmaking and its relationship to the discipline of anthropology. We will also look at the radical visions, stories and aesthetics of contemporary indigenous filmmakers, performers and artists around the world. In this course, students will also experiment with and produce videographic essays and documentary trailers.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

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. 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:

Course Materials

This course examines mainstream and alternative systems of African American representation in the media from the 1820s to the 1960s, including race records, race movies, the Black press, Black video, and Black appeal radio. It also examines the way Blackness is constructed in the media today, including the role of new media (such as cable and the Internet); new corporate formations (such as FOX, UPN, and BET), and new forms of representation (such as representations that reject the Black-White binary). Prerequisite(s): AMST 110 or MCST 110 or permission of instructor.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Conflict is a familiar component of narrative structure and a regular criteria of newsworthiness for journalism. Extreme forms of conflict, including warfare, are a favorite subject 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, whether it involves warfare between nations, religious conflict, civil war among ethnic or kinship groups, political conflict or terrorist activities. This class will focus on the analysis of news reporting and other media representations of wars and conflicts in various parts 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, 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, multi-media 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, 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

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

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

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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:
Writing WP
Internationalism

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 .

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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.

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Course Materials