Explores the expanding nature of literacy in a digital world and changes in the meanings and practices of literacy over time. Prepares students to access, analyze, evaluate, create and engage with media in a variety of forms. Acquire competencies in evolving multimedia environments by critically evaluating media messages.
Examines the historical development of communication forms, tools, technologies and institutions (orality, writing, printing, photography, film, radio, television, computers, internet); their influence on culture (forms of expression and social relationships); and their impact on social and individual experience. Applies knowledge of communication history to contemporary social issues and problems in media and society, domestically and internationally.
Introduces theoretical approaches and practices used to analyze the content, structure, influence and contexts of media. Explores factors shaping media, including: politics, economics, technology, cultural traditions. Studies concepts, theoretical approaches and research methods of media criticism, and adopts and adapts these frameworks in analyses of mediated communication.
Examines issues at the intersection of digital media, culture and politics, such as regulation and network architecture, piracy and hacking, and grassroots activism. Engage with a range of theories about cultural politics, democracy, liberalism and neo-liberalism in relation to digital information and communication technologies.
Surveys the political and economic structures of media system in developed and developing countries and discusses the impact of privatization, ownership consolidation, and globalization on the flow of information across national borders. Also looks at how global media flows and counter-flows affect conceptions of nationhood and cultural identity. Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCI) or Program in Journalism & Mass Communication (JOUR) or International Affairs (IAFS) majors only.
Focuses on the institutions and practices of the media industries. Surveys the histories, structures, and activities of these organizations and the contemporary issues surrounding them. Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCIU) or Program in Journalism & Mass Communication (JOURU) majors only.
Examines culture in the form of discourse, symbols, and texts transmitted through the media. Explores the relationship between such mediated culture and social myth and ideology.
Provides an overview of how publishing in print and electronic forms has been tied closely to democratic ideals for centuries. Explores how the idea of the public is central to the theory and practice of media politics, and how the contested concepts of "the public sphere" and "public opinion" have long been linked to debates about the proper relationship between media and democratic citizenship. Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCIU) or Program in Journalism & Mass Communication (JOURU) majors only.
Addressed in the course are a range of issues from within a variety of literatures that consider the ways in which the media cover crime. Those literatures are particularly drawn from sociology and the emergent, and increasingly dominant, field of cultural criminology. The focus of the class is to get students to think of "crime" as a constructed and mediated concept and set of narratives that often create problematic public "understandings". Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Offers an understanding of the various people, cultures and nations of East Asia through their media systems. Provides a critical overview of the historical, cultural, social, political and economic dimensions of East Asian communication systems in today's digitally connected/disconnected world. Same as MDST 5211. Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) Media Studies (MDST) majors only.
Explores how media technologies affect social orders and shape cultural practices. Compares and critically evaluates different theories of technology, emphasizes the social construction of technology, asks how media technologies inform conceptions of social reality and individual identity and considers how media technologies can be understood across a range of academic disciplines. Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of MDST 2002 (minimum grade C-).
Emphasizes the sociological understandings of youth cultures, identities and practices in relation to media and politics. Topics include the influences of consumer branding, participatory culture, youth media production and representation, use of social media, mobile phones, gaming, and other digital media, and integrating them around themes of youth styles, gender, ethic, political identities, consumer culture, social behavior and other trends. Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of MDST 3711 (minimum grade C-). Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Introduces the critical perspectives most often employed in qualitative media analysis: semiology, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalytical criticism, sociological criticism. Texts from contemporary print and broadcast media. Same as MDST 5311.
Studies the construction, interconnections, and replications of gender, race, class, and sexuality in popular culture and how these constructs become cultural norms and mores. Uses critical methods with a focus on producing responsible viewers and readers. Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Examines strengths and limits on medias role in globalized crises (e.g. financial, climate change, health) in light of changing distribution of global power. Introduction to current crises; context-analytical approach to media technologies, financing and uses; application to national cases. Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) Media Studies (MDST) or International Affairs (IAFS) majors only.
Examines the history and character of two central institutions in American society--the family and television--to gain deeper understanding of their formative and enduring roles. Topics include: intersecting histories of the family and television; economic logic of the TV industry and programming; representations of the family in television programming; how families use and interact with television. Requisites: Restricted to Media Studies (MDST) students with a minimum of 73 hours taken.
Examines the way religion uses media as a social and political force. Introduces the major themes and trends in the mediation of religion and the religious inflection of the media in professional, popular, and emerging media contexts.
Explores the shifting boundaries of cultural and religious Muslim identities through media representation and production in Muslim-majority countries and in the West. Using popular culture as a complex site of struggle, this course examines how Muslims address questions of gender, ethnicity, class, democracy, sexuality, religion, and modernity in a variety of media forms and practices.
Provides a crucial frame through which students understand the evolution of film, television and gaming in the digital era. Explores an impending revolution in how screen media are created, circulated and consumed. Relates to a larger trend across the media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked communication with traditional screen media practices. Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Explores politics of media activism.. Relies on survey of existing theory and scholarship on media activism and close analyses of activist practices within both old and new media and on local, national and global scale. Special attention paid to questions of relativity and efficacy and value of media activism as both aesthetic and political activity. Requisites: Requires a prerequisite course of MDST 5001 (minimum grade D-). Restricted to graduate students only.
Offers an understanding of the various people, cultures and nations of East Asia through their media systems. Provides a critical overview of the historical, cultural, social, political and economic dimensions of East Asian communication systems in today's digitally connected/disconnected world. Same as MDST 4211. Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Introduces the critical perspectives most often employed in qualitative media analysis: semiology, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalytical criticism, sociological criticism. Texts from contemporary print and broadcast media. Same as MDST 4311.
