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

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:
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

This course introduces students to the intellectual roots and contemporary applications of cultural studies, including critical media studies, focusing on the theoretical bases for analyses of power and meaning in production, texts, and reception. It includes primary readings in anti-racist, feminist, modern, postmodern, and queer cultural and social theory, and compares them to traditional approaches to the humanities. Designed as preparation for intermediate and advanced work grounded in cultural studies, the course is writing intensive, with special emphasis on developing skills in critical thinking and scholarly argumentation and documentation. Completion of or enrollment in MCST 110 is the prerequisite for majoring in media and cultural studies.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

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

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this class, students will engage with journalism’s most deceptively straightforward form: the interview. Interviews are more than questions and answers. Techniques, forms, tones, modes and media all factor in to the finished product. We will look at the differences in how one approach a wide variety of forms: Is it for a podcast or a breaking news story? Is it a celebrity profile or an investigation? In order to fully understand the roles of both the interviewer and the subject, this course will also review how interviews are employed in disciplines beyond journalism, including anthropology, psychology and legal procedures. A final project will give students a chance to employ any or all of these forms in developing their own interview style.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

What are the truths and falsehoods that data and databases tell us about contemporary culture? 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 methods and tools used to investigate data and datasets, while encouraging critical engagement with the humanities-based research questions that surround them. Students will consider ethical and design questions encompassing the collection, analysis, and presentation of data through class conversations and the process of creating their own digital projects.

General Education Requirements:
Quantitative Thinking Q2

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

Racial formation in U.S. culture and history was first offered a decade ago to overcome the narrow focus of our courses on race to the black-white binary. We wanted to offer at least some courses that operate outside the usual Black-White binary. Our first reading will be Omi and Winant’s Racial formation in U.S. Culture and History, which maps out their theory that race has a flexible meaning that changes through time and space. The course is interdisciplinary. For example, a foundation text is Cheryl Harris’s law review article “Whiteness as Property,” which looks at the legal foundations of racial classification. A key film will be Lone Star, John Sayles feature film about the interaction of Black, Native and Mexican people in Texas. The course required a major term paper.

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

This course is designed as a basic introduction to digital video production. The objective of the class is to familiarize students 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 approaches to experimental, non-fiction and art-based video-making, in the context of 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, as well as broad conceptual issues. In addition to this attention to form and content, 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

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

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