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

The theorization of difference is an important aspect of cultural theory. In this class we will look at the role of difference as it is understood through representation, cultural production and practices and the production of knowledge. We want to examine the turn to difference within cultural studies and how this move has shifted how we think about power relations and meaning making in society. We will look at the foundational work of cultural theorists like Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall and bell hooks as well as more recent work by Jasbir Puar and Simone Browne whose work focuses on the administration of difference through the U.S. War on Terror and cultures of surveillance. We will also look at the work from cultural producers like filmmakers Trinh Minh ha and Khalil Joseph. The class will expose students to a range of material including print, digital media, film, television, and internet and social media.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The theorization of difference is an important aspect of cultural theory. In this class we will look at the role of difference as it is understood through representation, cultural production and practices and the production of knowledge. We want to examine the turn to difference within cultural studies and how this move has shifted how we think about power relations and meaning making in society. We will look at the foundational work of cultural theorists like Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall and bell hooks as well as more recent work by Jasbir Puar and Simone Browne whose work focuses on the administration of difference through the U.S. War on Terror and cultures of surveillance. We will also look at the work from cultural producers like filmmakers Trinh Minh ha and Khalil Joseph. The class will expose students to a range of material including print, digital media, film, television, and internet and social media.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

It is often assumed that visual images simply reflect reality, and faith in the veracity of pictures often carries over to a less than critical stance towards media representations of all kinds. This course introduces you to the field of media and cultural studies by focusing on a deeper understanding of the role played by visual images in creating mediated experiences and constructing the authority of media accounts. Drawing from the history of visual cultures and picture use and relating that history to contemporary media practices, including the shifting nature of visual images in digital environments, we will explore the particular roles and functions of visual images for journalism, documentary, publicity and political communication, and analyze the ways in which pictures and moving images engage our attention, potentially disarm our critical faculties, and contribute to the rhetorical and persuasive influence of media presentations. Writing assignments will focus on specific photographs, films, commercial or political advertisements and help you synthesize knowledge and methods of analysis from exercises, lectures, and readings. An independent project will help you hone your visual analysis skills, argumentative writing and ability to conduct college-level research.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:

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 Q2

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Under construction right now across Northern Minnesota, the Enbridge Line 3 oil pipeline is an issue of global environmental and racial concern. When completed, the pipeline will transport an estimated 800,000 barrels a day of fracked, tar sands oil (the equivalent of 50 coal-fired power plants or 38 million vehicles) from Alberta, Canada to Lake Superior, threatening local and global life. The pipeline crosses the Mississippi River and hundreds of other bodies of water and wetlands crucial to sustaining human and non-human life. It also extends the lifetime of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, contributing to potentially irreparable climate change and global mass species extinction. In addition to its environmental impacts, the pipeline has direct links to issues of racial justice that recall this past summer’s George Floyd uprising. Its construction has ignored Native sovereignty and treaty rights, reproducing systems of racial injustice and inequality that connect the Twin Cities to Northern Minnesota, Black Lives to Native Lives Matter. In conversation and/or collaboration with Indigenous and allied organizations working against the pipeline (including Honor the Earth, MN 350, Stop Line 3, the Giniw Collective, and others), this class will articulate the problem of the Line 3 pipeline through the lens of Media and Cultural Studies while drawing interdisciplinarily on other fields and other case studies for context and perspective. We will also engage in hands-on media making that will encourage you to stake out your own position regarding these issues

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course teaches the concepts and practical application of digital media in contemporary performance. Students will gain fluency performing with digital arts and creating multimedia designs through a combination of classroom instruction and weekly Performance Labs. Class sessions include lectures, discussions, tutorials, and hands-on performing with video cameras, projectors, and audio-video software. In Performance Labs and term projects students will create and perform original short pieces that stage their digital designs.Topics include: Intersection of Dramaturgy and Technology in Digital Design; Experimental and Multimedia Performance Techniques; Cueing Video and Sound for Contemporary Performance/Theatre/Dance; Projection Mapping; Live Video Feeds. Prerequisite(s): Two prior courses in design. Students who have completed production courses in art/technology/performance such as MSCT323, Fundamentals of Video Production or ART233, Photography 1 are welcome to contact the Professor directly for permission to enroll.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

From fashion shows, football, and film to baking powder, baseball, and butter, images of Native Americans are everywhere in pop culture. This course turns to the long history of the representation of Native Americans in popular culture, examining both how non-Natives have appropriated Indigenous imagery and how Native people have pushed back against this appropriation. Fulfills North America; Public History; and Race & Indigeneity requirements for History majors.

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

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Join us in Fall 2021 as we explore the roots and routes of Native Cultural Studies through photography, film, television, print and media. How have Indigenous people been represented in visual culture? And what can Indigenous visual artists or film theory teach us about the past, present and future in the United States? No previous coursework required.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

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

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Neoliberal theory posits the relative autonomy of the economic sphere from both culture and politics. Rejecting this assumption, the course will give students the ability to understand the interconnection of economic, political and cultural practices as well as the ways that economic theories are shaped by cultural assumptions about what constitutes a person, a life, a society, etc. We will read some of the foundational texts from the neoliberal school of economic thought (Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman) alongside more contemporary reflections on the culture and politics of neoliberalism from the fields of Anthropology, Geography, Philosophy, Cultural Studies, and Critical Race Studies. Additionally, we will look at both the global institutions that craft and enforce economic policies as well as their impacts in multiple international contexts. This course will emphasize interdisciplinarity and original research. Finally, in addition to key texts, we will examine recent documentaries that attempt to render economic structures visible.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Internationalism

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

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

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

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

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. The course will be a combination of technical instruction, critical engagement, and creative exploration. We will analyze and employ a variety of filmmaking techniques as well as constructing narrative and non-narrative strategies for doing so. The focus of the course will be to familiarize you with some basic conventions of experimental, documentary, and narrative cinema. In each assignment, you will be encouraged to think about how formal decisions enhance and further narrative or thematic elements. We will thus pay very close attention to formal aspects of cinematic production: mise-en-scene. cinematography, editing, and sound design. In addition to this attention to form, success in the class will be dependent on a commitment to working through the technical aspects of video production (camera operation, lighting, editing software) in order to create short, original video pieces. Prior experience with film studies such as MCST 128 is encouraged, but not required.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course is designed as a basic introduction to digital video production. The objective of the class is to familiarize students of film theory and history with the language of cinema from the standpoint of production in order to deepen your appreciation and knowledge of the technical aspects of film/video and to develop your capacity to use video as a tool for research and communication. The course will be a combination of technical instruction, critical engagement, and creative exploration. We will analyze and employ a variety of filmmaking techniques as well as constructing narrative and non-narrative strategies for doing so. The focus of the course will be to familiarize you with some basic conventions of experimental, documentary, and narrative cinema. In each assignment, you will be encouraged to think about how formal decisions enhance and further narrative or thematic elements. We will thus pay very close attention to formal aspects of cinematic production: mise-en-scene. cinematography, editing, and sound design. In addition to this attention to form, success in the class will be dependent on a commitment to working through the technical aspects of video production (camera operation, lighting, editing software) in order to create short, original video pieces. Prior experience with film studies such as MCST 128 is encouraged, but not required.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In the capstone seminar, students working on an independent project in line with the theme of the seminar share their scholarship, integrating what they have learned in the major, emphasizing knowledge gained in their focus area, as well as presenting their work at a concluding mini-conference. The capstone experience involves close analysis of cultural artifacts that examine at a higher level issues first raised in the introductory course. The department plans to offer two seminars every year, at least one in media studies, enabling students to select the seminar most relevant to their intellectual development. In exceptional cases, students with sufficient preparation may take the seminar prior to their senior year. Students may take more than one MCST senior seminar as long as content varies. Recent seminar topics have included: Image/Text: Metaphor, Myth and Power; Advanced Film Analysis; Advanced Studies in War and Media; Postmodernism, Identity and the Media; Whiteness and the Media; Advanced Queer Media. Prerequisite(s): MCST 110 - Texts and Power: Foundations of Media and Cultural Studies or permission of instructor. MCST 128 - Film Analysis/Visual Culture recommended for film studies seminars. Non-majors are welcome if they have taken MCST 110 or a comparable course.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials