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:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

What do data look like in the humanities? How can data and databases inform our understanding of culture, or, alternately, be manipulated to distort the truth? 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 digital methods and tools used to investigate humanities data and databases, while encouraging critical engagement with the many ethical and design questions that arise in the collection, analysis, and presentation of data. In this course we will read articles from a range of disciplines, engage in activities reflecting on our own collecting practices and daily routines, and explore and articulate ways that digital technologies may be used more effectively and ethically.

General Education Requirements:
Quantitative Thinking Q1

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is an 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 making short documentary films. We will explore aspects of pre-production, production, and post-production as we develop documentary projects through peer and instructor critique. We will also explore new directions in non-fiction storytelling, including web-based documentary and virtual reality.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

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. Prerequisite(s): MCST 128 recommended, sophomore status or permission of instructor.

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 the 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:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

All readings and class taught in English; no pre-knowledge required. 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" (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; racial capitalism; the biopolitical constructions of race in its relation to social class and other forms of domination; and anti-racist criticisms of both Foucault and Marx.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Updated course description: Radical Reelism is an introduction to the field of Indigenous studies. In this course, we will trace the roots and routes of contemporary Indigenous filmmaking and new media in the U.S. and globally. What is the history of visual representation of Indigenous people? How do we reconcile the relationship between the reel and real? What are the specific legal and political dimensions of visual sovereignty? And what can Indigenous filmmakers and film theory teach us about power and social justice in the world we live in or the lands we currently occupy? We will seek answers to these questions through a centering of the radical visions, stories and aesthetics of contemporary Indigenous filmmakers and new media artists around the world.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, we will consider films that provoke horror, fear, disgust, shock, terror, panic, and revulsion and ask about their political, philosophical, and cultural effects and potentials. As a genre organized around visceral experiences, both on-screen (gore, violence, monstrosity, terror) and in the audience (jump scares, trembling, squirming, fright), horror reminds us of the embodied dimension of existence, our living, material, and creaturely side and its entanglement with other people and the non-human world. In this manner, horror films can be privileged sites for working out ideas about gender, race, and sexuality, in ways that often reproduce existing power dynamics, but can sometimes subvert them. We will also consider the horror film as a potential mode of theory itself, one attuned to the unthinkable dimensions of our existence. Based around detailed engagements with individual films, our work will be both historical and international, moving between canonical examples that may include F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Ishirō Honda’s Godzilla (1954), and Alfred Hitckock’s Psycho (1960) and more contemporary films that may include Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016), Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink (2022), and Remi Weekes’ His House (2020).

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 labeled as dissident, subversive, or otherwise “alternative,” from the Pachuco subculture in the 1940s to punk music and identity in the 1980s to hip hop culture in Japan 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? How might we rethink terms like “subculture,” “counterculture,” and “fringe”? To explore these questions, we will draw on key theoretical texts, music, film, and other media, and a series of historical and contemporary case studies.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

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:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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

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.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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

We are living through another wave of popular interest in “cults” and “cultists,” manifesting in true crime podcasts (Escaping NXIVM, Heaven’s Gate), television documentaries (Wild Wild Country, The Deep End), fictional horror or thriller stories (Midsommar, The Idol, Martha Marcy May Marlene), and historical dramatizations (Waco, The Master). These cultural works use the “cult” designation (with all its connotations and associated narratives) to label and make sense of a range of religious, political, economic, and social practices, ideas, and organizations, both contemporary and historical. This course aims to look critically at these media texts and the larger popular fascination with “cults.” In analyzing these narratives about religion, power, charisma, and commitment, we will not primarily focus on the so-called “cultists” being represented, but on the audiences that consume and interpret the stories and the cultural contexts that give rise to them. Looking closely at these images and narratives can reveal popular anxieties and ways of thinking about power and agency, identity and subjectivity, spirituality and secularism, and individuality and collectivity, for instance. Importantly, many of these historical and contemporary treatments also act as powerful sites for working out ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. Our approach will be theoretical and analytical as we examine key historical case studies from the second half of the 20th century (including media engagements with People’s Temple, the Black liberation group MOVE, and the Branch Davidians) and more contemporary examples (including MLM and crypto groups, NXIVM, and Teal Swan).

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

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. No prerequisites.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Why do we feel isolated and alone, when there’s more ways to connect than ever before? Zoom, Twitter, Tiktok are “social” technologies and belong to a growing storehouse of apps and devices with which to connect, but they can feel like tools of separation and isolation. A tradition of critical media theory has argued that a role of the media has been for the purposes of social separation and isolation in order to assure the docility and productivity of a population subjected to them. Prerequisite: MCST 110.

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

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