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
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:
Humanities

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 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:
Humanities

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:
Humanities

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

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

Ask anyone a question that is not yes-or-no, and they’re liable to answer with a story. It could be an anecdote about their day, a reflection on a film or book, or a metaphor about the latest innovative idea jazzing them. Stories help us to know ourselves and inspire us towards our dreams. What is yours? In this discussion- and writing-based course, we look at stories through an immersion in arts and culture, taking advantage of the riches that surround us. Minneapolis and St Paul are a cultural mecca with a plethora of first-rate national and regional flagships. Students will take in shows, exhibits and concerts, including, in Spring 2023, the Broadway tour of “Hamilton” at the Orpheum, “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the Guthrie and “We Shall Someday” at Theater Latte Da. We will write critically about these cultural offerings, reflections that may be published on campus and elsewhere. We also will have guests in to talk about their craft and curating their own stories in a saturated, ever-changing social and traditional media landscape. Twentieth Century poet, critic and wit Dorothy Parker once advised: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style’ [Strunk and White’s definitive writing guide]. The first greatest [favor], of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.” We do not promise to make students who take this course into professional writers. But we will have fun as we grow to recognize the narrative elements that animate, constrain, or expand the world around us while building foundational skills that are invaluable in any field. Instructor: A creative thought leader and arts ecology shaper, Rohan Preston has been theater critic at the Star Tribune since 1998. In that quarter century, he has interviewed some giants of storytelling, including playwrights August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner and Lynn Nottage. He also has interviewed and written about composer Stephen Sondheim and choreographers Twyla Tharp and Bill T. Jones. A pioneer as one of the first Black critics at major daily in the nation, Preston has twice served on the Pulitzer Prize jury for drama. His awards include an Emmy, for a team project he led about the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first Black president and a silver award in the Lowell Thomas travel writing competition for his piece about being the first member of his family to return to Africa. Mr. Preston also has written for the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and New York Times. Born in Jamaica, raised in New York and educated at Yale, he also is a poet, playwright and composer, authoring the poetry collection "Dreams in Soy Sauce" and co-editing the Viking/Penguin anthology "Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence."

General Education Requirements:

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. 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

Taught in English; there is an optional German component for those who want to have the course count toward their German-taught courses. In this case, students must do the reading and writing assignments and some of their oral presentations in German.Cinema Studies is a film course with a special emphasis on some aspect of German culture relating to cinema, such as German film production, film adaptations of German literary texts, or the representation of German history in world cinema. While familiarizing students with the methodologies of film analysis, the course focus may vary from a historical or genre survey to a particular concept (such as representations of gender, race, nationality) to a cross-section between film and other texts. Students will gain insight into film as an aesthetic, ideological, and political medium, and into specifics of German history and culture. Students may register more than once in this course, provided a different topic is offered.​ Prerequisite(s): Requirement for those who would like to take the course as a taught-in-German course: GERM 308 or GERM 309

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is designed to be a critical look at an often-unexamined medium, television. We will approach TV as an industry, a medium or mode of culture, a sometimes-maligned object of discourse, and a site of textual, social, and political practices. Our guiding 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 examine the history and politics of racial representation on television, starting with the symbiotic relationship between the civil rights movement and television news institutions in the mid-20th century. We will follow this into the present, with particular emphasis on television's role in molding ideas about policing, protest, and racism. Throughout, we will consider the distinct textual, aesthetic, and stylistic aspects of individual television programs as well as the larger discursive environment in which they operate. Screening these episodes along with theoretical, historical, and analytical readings, this course will use class discussion, lecture, and written assignments to develop critical frameworks for understanding TV.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Marx’s contribution to the theorization of the function of the imaginary in both the constitution of subjectivity and the mechanisms of politics and economy—usually referred to as ideology—cannot be overestimated. The first part of this course traces Marx’s gradual conceptualization of the imaginary throughout his work—as well as further Marxist theoreticians, such as Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Slavoj Žižek—while exploring how the imaginary enabled Marx’s discovery of three further crucial concepts: structure, the unconscious, and the symptom, all of which are central in the analysis of culture and ideology. In the second part of the course, we shall focus on the logic and mechanisms of power in contemporary neoliberalism, including the claim that today Marx’s theory is no longer relevant (readings will include Maurizio Lazzarato, Nancy Fraser, McKenzie Wark). All readings and class taught in English; no pre-knowledge required. Core course toward the Critical Theory concentration.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

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

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 lense of cultural production. We will analyze how artists, architects, and activists have engaged ideas about landscape and they allow us to rethink the meaning of place. This class includes visiting lectures, visiting seminar leaders and site visits. Students are expected to work on real and imagined public-facing design problems.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Conflict is a familiar component of narrative structure and a regularly applied criterion of newsworthiness for journalism. Representations of extreme forms of conflict, including warfare, are frequently found 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 and politics, whether it involves warfare between nations, religious conflict, civil war among ethnic or kinship groups, political conflict or terrorist activities. This class focuses on the analysis of media representations of wars and conflicts in various cultures and regions 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, literature, 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, multimedia 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, national or regional interests, 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

This course considers surveillance as a social formation, inseparable from the theory and exercise of power. On the one hand, it takes up the pressing questions surveillance raises, from the development of cutting-edge technologies to the complex work of international regulation. On the other hand, it situates surveillance historically as central to projects of imperial conquest, state formation, and colonial rule. Engaging with theoretical works, primary sources, empirical studies and artistic renderings, students will grapple with problems of surveillance and power across contexts while developing a multi-modal research project.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This is the second semester of a two-semester course on the history, theory, and practice of documentary cinema. In the class, students will film and edit a short documentary film, learning the basics of cinematography, sound, and post-production for documentary cinema. We will survey contemporary trends in documentary filmmaking, including experimental, web-based, and virtual reality documentary films. In addition, will meet local and international filmmakers, and engage with Twin Cities film culture through organizations like Film North, the Walker Art Center, and the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival. Priority will be given to students who have taken the first semester of the course. If you have not taken the first semester of the course, please contact the instructor for before enrolling.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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