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 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

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 ideas of representational and aesthetic politics as well as through the practice and 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 critical race and ethnic studies in cultural theory as well more recent scholarly work that focuses on the administration of difference through surveillance technology and social media. 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:
Social science

Course Materials

What makes some jokes so funny? Why do we laugh? A well-timed joke can have the power to transform our reality—to disrupt through surprise, to change the rules of society through reversal and truth-telling, or, at the very least, to blow off steam and build communities through joyous laughter. But can comedy actually create lasting social changes? Or is laughter just catharsis—a therapeutic release of personal and social discontent? And what about mean-spirited or offensive jokes? What is the line between comedy and injury? And who gets to decide what is funny in the first place? Comedy is so much more than a light-hearted genre: it now invades every level of discourse in our society, from the fine arts to presidential politics. Comedy punctuates our attention, structures our everyday perceptions and habits, facilitates our communication and expression, and has a profound influence on all of our lives and experiences.In this course, we will approach the topic of comedy from every angle, while also keeping the funny alive. (As many have demonstrated, there is no surer way to ruin a joke than by explaining it.) We will read philosophies and theories of comedy, satirical newspapers, and social histories of stand-up. We will watch funny movies, TV shows, Internet memes, viral videos, and talk about them. And, of course, we will write and perform our own comedy in the classroom. By studying the history and formations of comedy—from the devices of comedic gags to the social politics of laughing bodies—we will think about how jokes can help us to reconcile with the past, survive the present, and reshape the future.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This introductory-level course approaches the youth-oriented Hunger Games series as a “map and mirror” for our times and a platform for launching adult, scholarly conversations about systems of extraction and exploitation, surveillance and the politics of Reality TV, environmental justice and public health, trauma due to war, and the possibilities for building a Culture of Peace. We will take an interdisciplinary American Cultural Studies approach as we read and watch everything in the Hunger Games series (the trilogy + two prequels) in the first half of the semester. In the second half of the semester, we will connect to various texts including: Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler), The Autobiography of Mother Jones, Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson), and The Future Earth: A Radical Vision for What’s Possible in the Age of Warming (Eric Holthaus). A major goal of the course is to open up our hearts and minds, and to discover more precisely what we hunger for—as scholars, citizens, and human residents of the planet Earth.

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:
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

Media have a tremendous influence on how we see and know the world. But while media is central to the production of a sense of "the global," media industries are materially, culturally, and geographically placed. Exploring some of these sites, and their complex interconnections, can help us to better understand our own media environments as well as some of the pressing issues that media systems worldwide face today: Who owns the media and who regulates it? How have its centers of power shifted over time? How do media systems located in different political, economic, and historical conditions result in different kinds of products? What is the impact of media industries on the earth? In this course we will follow a wide range of media forms (telegraph, radio, film, television, social) across time and space, focusing on questions of labor, infrastructure, and ownership. Course assignments will help you to make connections between past moments and contemporary questions, in relation to some of the media that matters most to you.

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

All readings and class taught in English; no pre-knowledge required. 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 Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Maurizio Lazzarato, McKenzie Wark).

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 or philosophy itself, one attuned to the unthinkable or occult dimensions of our existence. Organized around detailed engagements with individual films, we will pay careful attention to their formal and aesthetic properties. Additionally, our work will be both historical and intertextual, moving between canonical examples and more contemporary films. Finally, as our course is designed around a genre, we will pay special attention to the ways that genres work. This will mean thinking critically about intertextual connections and how considering films together changes their individual meanings. And we will practice using these intertextual links and categories as interpretative and analytical tools in our written assignments and class discussions. Some of the films we will address: Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), The Thing (John Carpenter, 1982), Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001), Raw (Julia Ducournau, 2016). Counts as an elective in the Critical Theory concentration.

General Education Requirements:

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. Interwoven throughout the course, we will discuss decolonization, digital repatriation, obsolescence, cultural heritage and AI, and collective remembering. You will come out of the class with a focused digital project.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course examines visual methods, particularly those employed by Black women artists and thinkers work in visual practices as forms of resistance, survival, and world-building. Through critical engagement with photography, film, installation art, and experimental media, we explore how Black feminist visual strategies challenge dominant regimes of representation while imagining otherwise possibilities. The course traces visual genealogies that refuse the violence of hypervisibility while simultaneously confronting erasure, navigating what Saidiya Hartman calls "the visual field of black captivity and its afterlife." Students will analyze works by artists who transform the very grammar of visuality, developing critical frameworks to understand how Black feminist aesthetics rework time, space, and embodiment. Through both analytical and creative projects, we will consider how these visual practices serve as methods of theorizing that expand beyond conventional academic boundaries, offering provocations for imagining and enacting more liberatory futures.

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

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:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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

The theorization of difference is an important aspect of creative inquiry. In this class we will look at the ways that artistic practice allows us to interrogate, understand, and represent difference. We want to examine how the turn to difference—racial difference, gendered difference, the politics of citizenship and belonging—has been approached through different forms like the essay, the book, investigations of place, and performance. We will think about the various ways that power is performed through cultural objects and then work through different forms of our own to critique these objects and move toward new social realities. We will look at the foundational work of artists and cultural producers in the early and late 20th century whose work focuses on critical race and ethnic studies, activism and exile, as well as more recent creative work that focuses on the administration of difference through surveillance technology and social media. The class is a studio-based course that exposes students to a range of materials including print, digital media, film, the internet, and social media.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This class is a hybrid discussion-studio course that surveys cultural production of and about Blackness. Looking at the work of artists, filmmakers, and theoreticians, we will analyze the ways that Blackness is performed as a visual language and genre, how it appears or disappears as a racialized, gendered, and (dis)abled set of embodied practices from the late 19th century to today. We learn from the ways that artists have taken social phenomena and reworked them into images, and we will work through ways that we can shape our own practices as creatives. While the course is focused primarily on the US, we will also talk about racial formations beyond the US, including the Caribbean, UK, West and Southern Africa. Class time will include technical demonstrations, artist presentations, working studio sessions, individual and group critiques, and field trips. Students will have the opportunity to work in their chosen media—photography, video, sound, installation, digital platforms, performance documentation, or hybrid forms—to produce a final portfolio. Through sustained inquiry, students will develop their own visual practice that thinks with and through Black life and aesthetic innovation.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course explores issues of Information and Media Literacy, AI, and Digital Competency, preparing students to navigate, evaluate, and create information responsibly in an ever-evolving digital landscape. As a class we will explore the range of factors driving information dissemination and media representation, including the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI), learn to discern credible sources in a sea of digital content, and understand the ethical implications of digital footprints. The course includes interactive, hands-on activities drawn from real world case studies, collaborative projects in digital media production, and engaging critical discussions of information dissemination and media practices. The course is designed as a gateway to building greater confidence as an informed, and responsible digital citizen, ready to face the academic, professional, political and civic challenges of the 21st century. Students will develop critical skills in AI literacy, information literacy, media literacy, and digital literacy, with a focus on building resilience against misinformation and disinformation in the digital age. No prerequisites.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The camera has a way of capturing truth in an unflinching way. The acting techniques needed to be able to communicate honestly and authentically are magnified when acting for the camera. This class will explore the expression of truth for both drama and comedy while building acting skills uniquely required for film and video. Students will develop critical response techniques that will enable constructive feedback. With the current industry trend towards video content, this class will give a strong foundation to succeed in any of the various film and video platforms.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

The camera has a way of capturing truth in an unflinching way. The acting techniques needed to be able to communicate honestly and authentically are magnified when acting for the camera. This class will explore the expression of truth for both drama and comedy while building acting skills uniquely required for film and video. Students will develop critical response techniques that will enable constructive feedback. With the current industry trend towards video content, this class will give a strong foundation to succeed in any of the various film and video platforms.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

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:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This discussion-based course is entirely focused on Bruce Lee, the movie actor and leading martial arts icon of the 20th century. Using American Studies and Critical Race Studies to frame and interpret the construction of racialized and gendered bodies, we will discuss Bruce Lee in terms of his biography, identities, politics, philosophy, and filmography (performative masculinity, anyone?). We will take time to appreciate the entertainment value and athleticism that Bruce Lee brought to his work, and we will 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. We will watch all four films in class starting with “Enter the Dragon,” and explore relevant scholarship in Bruce Lee Studies.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Join us 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 explores the complex interrelationship of sports and the media, using critical theory frameworks to consider the role mediated sports play within our lives. While there will be opportunities for creative work, this is not a sports journalism course and will not provide direct training for aspiring sports writers. Instead, we will mostly look at sports media from the perspective of the reader, viewer, and fan, examining how we engage with these cultural texts and use them to make sense of our world, construct our identities, and form political and social relationships with others. By surveying key historical case studies mostly drawn from the U.S. context, such as the career of Joe Louis in the 1930s, the iconic protests at the 1968 Olympics, the 1999 Women’s World Cup, and the Malice at the Palace in 2004, we will contend with how sports have served as unique and complex sites for working out ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and nationhood. This background will then frame our engagement with contemporary sports media. Students will be expected to keep a detailed journal of their sports media consumption and be prepared to turn a critical eye on their own practices of spectatorship, fandom, and social media participation.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In this course, students will gain hands-on podcasting experience, including brainstorming ideas, researching, interviewing, writing, editing, and producing their own podcast segment. They will also learn industry terminology, access music and archival databases, work with standard audio software, and learn to pitch their stories to media outlets. By the end of the semester, students will have created their own nonfiction audio story from start to finish.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

In this research-based creative writing course, students will interpret and contribute to the collective memory of the Twin Cities, using their imagination to fill gaps, silences, and erasures in the archive. We will spend the semester building a digital anthology of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and visual art that memorializes vanished and vanishing places in the metro area. To inform our work, we’ll read about critical archiving, material culture, and digital memorialization, and study models from the arts: short stories, films, odes, lyric essays, collages and museum exhibits. We’ll also learn about the city itself through field trips to the Minnesota Historical Society and selected neighborhoods, focusing on suppressed and marginalized histories like the disappearance of Spirit Island, urban renewal in Cedar Riverside, and ongoing efforts to remember George Floyd. Authors and filmmakers will range from danez smith, Mary-Kim Arnold, Macalester’s own Morgan Adamson, and Guy Maddin. Ultimately, students will learn to engage with and curate archival materials, and create a multimedia creative writing piece for the final site. The course will culminate in a public launch of our digital project. No prerequisite–just an interest in researching for creative writing, making multimedia work, or uncovering the past of the place where you live.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Advanced Research Methods prepares students to conduct independent research projects in Media and Cultural Studies. Beginning with the question, "What is research?" students will deepen their engagement with visual and textual analysis. Through an in-depth exploration of an advanced topic designated by the instructor, the course examines a range of approaches to the ways knowledge is produced and disseminated within the field. In Spring 2026 the advanced topic will be “Environmental Communication in Local Communities.” Students will explore issues in the dissemination of environmental information in local communities and neighborhoods, with a particular focus on local news and community organizations that contribute to coverage and discussions of environmental concerns. The course will include classroom discussions with a variety of local journalists and environmental activists involved in networks of environmental communication that facilitate and enhance citizen awareness and involvement. Through the development of individual research projects students will strengthen their critical reading, research and writing skills. Final projects will explore strategies for more effective environmental communication and include student-produced examples of media that might better address issues pertinent to local communities. Prerequisite(s): MCST 110 or permission of the instructor.

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