Current Course Details

Jump to: Summer 2012 | Winter 2012 | Spring 2012

Students from other NYU departments who would like to register for graduate courses in Media, Culture, and Communication, please direct questions to mcc.graduate@nyu.edu. 

Check Albert or the Registrar's Office site for locations and call numbers.

Summer 2012

MCC-GE 2147 Reality and Documentary TV
Susan Murray
May 21 - June 8, 2012
Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu 10.00 AM - 12.45 PM 
Class#: 4395 (4 credits)

This course will survey the historical development and shifting definitions of documentary and reality television. We will explore the ways in which television has understood and utilized non-fiction formats at particular historical moments; trace the formations and deployment of realist aesthetics; explore the ethical obligations/problematics of these forms and their practitioners; examine the implications and meanings of documentary/reality hybrids; and consider the reception of and cultural meanings derived from particular documentary and reality texts and subgenres.

MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies
  

MCC-GE 2137 Visual Culture and the Politics of Memory: Global Perspective
Marita Sturken
Buenos Aires, Argentina
June 4 - June 22, 2012
Class#: 2148 (4 credits)
*Requires Department Consent & Application 

This course examines the intersections of visual culture, commemorative politics, social movements, and nationalism in an analysis of the politics of memory in the global context.  We will examine the debates and contestations over memorialization and artistic engagements with the memory of traumatic events in several key sites around the world, including Argentina, the United States, Chile, Germany, and South Africa.  The course will have a particular focus on the politics of memory at work in Argentina over the memory of its “dirty war” from 1976-1983, with visits to particular sites and projects in Buenos Aires in which artists, architects, and activists are engaging with questions of memory and the aftermath of trauma.  It will put these local sites into comparative dialogue with examples of artistic and architectural memorialization in other contexts such as the memorialization of 9/11 in the United States, of the Holocaust in Germany, of Apartheid in South Africa, and of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.  

We will examine the key role of visual culture in the politics of remembrance and the relationship of commemorative politics to social movements.  The realization of memory through architecture, design, art, photography, digital media, and museums has been central to the politics of the memory of violence and trauma over the last few decades.  Through explorations of how art, photography, and design have played a key role in shaping cultural memory in these contexts, we will investigate the aesthetics of memory, the role of pedagogy in remembrance, the spatialization of memory, and the deployment of memory through these forms into political action.  The course will draw on the scholarship in visual culture and memory studies to examine the politics of memory from a global perspective. 

The course will take place over a three week period in Buenos Aires, meeting regularly at the NYU-Buenos Aires site and with field trips to relevant sites in the city, including the Parque de la Memoria, ESMA (a former military school and site of torture that is now a museum and cultural center), the Plaza de Mayo, and Memoria Abierta, a nonprofit organization that has produced a Topografia de la Memoria through the work of designers and architects. We will take one trip to Rosario, 180 miles away, where the country’s first national Museum of Memory was recently opened and where grassroots memory art is visible in streets throughout the city. 

Guest speakers in Buenos Aires will include architects, designers, and activists involved in memorial projects in the city.  

The course will be conducted in English, with additional recommended readings in Spanish for bilingual speakers. 

Winter 2012

Note: Taken in January, these graduate-level courses count toward Spring 2012 course load and tuition, and any financial aid you receive in Spring 2012 will apply to these courses. 

MCC-GE 2145 Methods in Interpreting Popular Culture
Liel Leibovitz
January 3 – 21, 2012
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday
6:00 – 8:45 PM
Class#: 16637 (4 credits)

This course provides an introduction to the fundamental methods for understanding the construction of meaning in film, television, popular music, and advertising, tracing the study of popular culture through film theory and mass media analysis to cultural studies. Recent theoretical analysis of popular culture has examined such notions as popularity, spectatorship, methods of reading audiences, global culture, and the concept of cultural practices. This course will survey methods of analysis such as structuralism, semiotics, genre analysis, psychoanalysis, socio-historical analysis, ideological analysis, discourse analysis, political economy, reception theory, feminist analysis, and ethnography as tools with which to mine the depths of popular culture. It will include screenings of film and television excerpts, as well as readings by Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Georges Perec, Ellen Seiter, Clifford Geertz and others.

[MA Area of Study: Visual Culture, and Cultural Studies + MA Research Course]

MCC-GE 2165 Transnational Communities and Media Cultures
Radha Hegde
January 2 – 14, 2012 
London, England
4 credits 

This course examines the emergence of transnational communities, recent patterns of migration, and the role of media forms and practices in redefining culture and national belonging. We will explore how media practices define culture and identity for diasporic groups within the landscape of global cities. What role do media play in the (re)imagining of cultural politics, nationalism, and everyday life in the context of global relocations? How do technology and media enable new configurations of cultural resistance and identification within ( and between) different immigrant groups? What does this mean in terms of negotiating the global and local in various aspects of immigrant lives? Through field trips, field work, discussion, and lectures, students will be exposed to contemporary issues and research. Click here for more information. 

[MA Area of Study: Global and Transcultural Communication]

MCC-GE 2351 Global Food Cultures: Hong Kong
January 2 – 15, 2012
Hong Kong
4 credits 

An interdisciplinary and intercultural examination of human communication through food. The course explores the social, economic, political, and cultural ramifications of the technology, production, acquisition, preservation, packaging, distribution, promotion, representation, selling, presentation, and consumption of food, as well as the disposal of food-related wastes. Students will have a unique opportunity to explore various local, regional and transnational, and food rituals in Hong Kong as the manifestation of changing social norms, economic realities, and cultural beliefs in an increasingly global and multi-cultural city. Click here for more information. 

[MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies & Global and Transcultural Communication]

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Spring 2012

MCC-GE 2005 Psychic Life of Media: History and Theory
Ben Kafka
Wednesday 11:00 AM – 1:10 PM
Class#: 13618 (4 credits)

 From Socrates to Freud, Benjamin to Turkle, theorists have recognized that technologies of media and communication work on the unconscious as well as the conscious level. How can we study this phenomenon? How can we write its history? Possible topics include: information overload and fatigue, addiction and withdrawal, pornography and autoeroticism, friendship and charisma.  Some familiarity with psychoanalytic theory strongly recommended.

[MA Area of Study: Technology and Society & Visual Culture and Cultural Studies]

MCC-GE 2010 Censorship in American Culture
Svetlana Mintcheva
Wednesday 4:55 – 7:05 PM
Class #: 13615 (4 credits)

This course examines censorship in contemporary American culture, with an emphasis on current debates in which the boundaries of the permitted are urgently contested, from discussions about hate speech, to controversies over representations of violence and sexuality. The course will analyze cases related to visual art, performance, literature, film, and historical representation in venues ranging from museums and art galleries to public spaces and the Internet. Students will explore the historical context that has generated today’s cultural and legal struggles over censorship and how this context affects contemporary debates about the arts, sexuality, national security, technology, privacy, and government involvement in the marketplace of ideas and images.  

[MA Area of Study: Persuasion and Politics & Visual Culture and Cultural Studies]
 
MCC-GE 2025 Race and Media
Charlton McIlwain
Tuesday 4:55 – 7:05 PM
Class #: 3051 (4 credits)

The racial and ethnic diversity of the United States from Europeans' first encounter with Native Americans, through colonialism and American slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights era and beyond has made the issue of race one of the United States' principal sites of conflict and conversation. For many years, scholarship on race and media has focused on a myriad of theories and issues surrounding representation, concerned with the presence or lack of people of color in media of all kinds, and the stereotypical ways they are portrayed when they are present. But this is only one part of the story. While this course highlights many of these issues, it focuses on the ways that media can and have shaped public discourse about race and racism both within and beyond the confines of the United States. The course considers a variety of media television sitcoms and drama, television and print news, film, popular music, the internet and others for the purpose of investigating how media have and continue to variably influence the publics racial agenda, and the general content, tone and tenor of racial conversation in the public sphere.

[MA Area of Study: Interaction and Social Processes & Visual Culture and Cultural Studies & Persuasion and Politics + MA Research Course]

MCC-GE 2138 Politics of Digital Media
Liel Leibovitz
Thursday 11:00 AM – 1:10 PM
Class#: 13616 (4 credits)

This seminar will examine the myriad ways in which digital media shape our political and cultural institutions, processes, and perceptions. From the silver-haired architect of Wikileaks to the networked activists who helped bring down a slew of Arab regimes, digital media are facilitating previously unimaginable contests for visibility and power, ushering in a shift from spectatorship to participation. But they are neither uncomplicated nor monolithic: A host of forces, from government legislation to market considerations, are vying to fashion the emerging technologies into weapons used to oppress opponents and stifle dissent. To paint this rapidly evolving landscape, we will look at broad political theories as well as particular policies, will hear from leading theorists and activists in the field, and will strive to emerge with both a philosophical and practical understanding of the movements currently at work and the technological platform on which they rely and against which they sometimes feud. 

[MA Area of Study: Technology and Society & Visual Culture and Cultural Studies]

MCC-GE 2140 Studies in Organizational Communication
Deborah Borisoff
Wednesday 4:55 – 7:05 PM
Class#: 3055 (4 credits)

This course examines organizational communication and the influences that create and define organizational climate. Topics include: diagnosing organizational cultures; the effects of gender, culture and race on organizational communication; communication and leadership; and organizational conflict.

[MA Area of Study: Interaction & Social Processes]

MCC-GE 2153 Media Activism
Stephen Duncombe
Monday 7:15 – 9:25 PM
Class#: 3057 (4 credits)

This participatory and discussion-oriented course explores the politics of media activism: its tactics, its strategies and its goals. The course will rely on both a survey of the existing theory and scholarship on media activism, as well as close analyses of actual activist practices within both old and new media and on a local, national and global scale. Special attention will be paid to questions of creativity and efficacy, addressing questions concerning the value of media activism as both an aesthetic and political activity.

[MA Area of Study: Persuasion and Politics]

MCC-GE 2165 Transnational Communities and Media Cultures
Radha Hegde
Mon 4:55 – 7:05 PM
Class#: 3058 (4 credits)

This course examines the emergence of transnational communities, recent patterns of migration, and the role of media forms and practices in redefining culture and national belonging. We will explore how media practices define culture and identity for diasporic groups within the landscape of global cities. What role do media play in the (re)imagining of cultural politics, nationalism, and everyday life in the context of global relocations? How do technology and media enable new configurations of cultural resistance and identification within ( and between) different immigrant groups? What does this mean in terms of negotiating the global and local in various aspects of immigrant lives? Through field trips, field work, discussion, and lectures, students will be exposed to contemporary issues and research.

[MA Area of Study: Global and Transcultural Communication]

MCC-GE 2167 Transnational Media Flows
Juan Piñon
Thursday 2:00 – 4:10 PM
Class#: 13619 (4 credits)

Analyzes the global flow of media products, in particular the circulation of television & film in transnational contexts, at the intersection of political economy (economic, business, & institutional frameworks) with cultural economy (the cultural meanings of these television & film products). Focuses on case studies of the supranational regional players in some of the most important geo-linguistic world markets, where the tensions between global/transnational media flows & local interests are most evident, engaging with theoretical positions ranging from critiques of the homogenizing effects of globalization to those that affirm the changing power relations of counter-flows based on audience preferences.

[MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies & Global and Transcultural Communication]

MCC-GE 2184 Comparative Media Systems
Rodney Benson
Tuesday 7:15 – 9:25 PM 
Class#: 3060 (4 credits)

How does journalism differ around the world? And to the extent that it does, why? Beyond the personal idiosyncrasies of individual journalists and media owners, which factors play the greatest role in shaping 'national news cultures': professional values and traditions, level and type of commercialism, government regulations, bureaucratic pressures or organizational dynamics, and/ or audiences? Too much of our media criticism proceeds from hunches and assumptions, rather than real evidence, for the simple reason that it limits itself to a single national context ( and often a single time period). Adequately sorting out the factors that shape our media environment can best be accomplished via comparative research. This course offers a conceptual roadmap to such a project as well as a close empirical look at the news media in a variety of national contexts. After a general consideration of the factors that structure news media systems and the roles that media play in democratic societies, the course incorporates (1) a survey of comparative methodologies: surveys, ethnographies, news content analyses, etc., and (2) national and comparative case studies, representing the major types of Western European journalistic 'models' as well as some important non-European variants.

[MA Area of Study: Global and Transcultural Communication & Persuasion and Politics + MA Research Course]

MCC-GE 2200 Media Events and Spectacle
Salvatore Fallica
Wednesday 7:15 – 9:25 PM
Class#: 3061 (4 credits)

This course examines the role played by media events & spectacle in the shaping of belief, attitudes, & actions, with particular attention paid to the concept of the masses & its changed meaning over time. The course examines concepts of mass culture, the decentralization of cultural forms, & the rise of convergence culture. It explores the history of the media event & the theories that have shaped it, & the role of spectacle in society from the Renaissance to modern society to the age of digital media.

[MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies]

MCC-GE 2275 Middle East Media and Cultural Politics
Helga Tawil-Souri
Wednesday 2:00 – 4:10 PM
Class#: 13620 (4 credits)

Examines developments of culture, politics, and media in Israel/Palestine through an historical and cultural lens. Course is organized by theoretical themes and draws on different media and cultural expressions. Topics will include land, identity, nationalism, memory, mobility, citizenship, exile, among others.  

[MA Area of Study: Global and Transcultural Communication]

MCC-GE 2284 Religion and Media
Arvind Rajagopal
Tuesday 2:00 – 4:10 PM
Class#: 13735 (4 credits)

In this course, we will begin with an overview of some of the problems in thinking about religion in the context of what Derrida has identified as ‘globalatinization.’ We will consider the extent to which many of our ideas about religion are shaped not only by historical legacies, but as well by material cultural practices and conditions, and techiques of mediation that are irreducible accompaniments and constituents of the beliefs in question. We will consider how the narrative arc of the Enlightenment sought to place religion, in ways that shifted over time. An influential self-conception about the European Enlightenment was that it expressed the triumph of secular reason over the ancien regime, and the defeat of inherited privilege of all kinds. the relegation of religion to the private sphere was in effect to declare religion to be free from politics; such a gesture could only be a prelude to a new form of politicization. We will observe the playing out of an interesting set of contradictions: religion is widely present, but understood in terms that fail to grapple with what is properly religious, due variously to Enlightenment conceits, imperial reasoning, nationalist self-fashioning, and the deification of technology. No definitive statement or argument can be attempted on religion as a result, although we will read authors who essay authoritative definitions.

We will consider early modern mobilizations of religious identity, and oppositions between Jewish and Christian, Christian and Islamic, and religious and secular identities, and assess how religious beliefs and practices can be rendered into a historical telos, racialized and/or nationalized. We will also examine how religious identities can be mapped onto language, and onto technology. Last but not least, we will conside how what was recently hailed as the End of History soon led to a theological display of power with Operation Shock and Awe, and a global war against Evil, a.k.a. “Islamic fascism.” We will conclude by examining the sacralization of democracy, and the profane quality of the terror it opposes itself to, and what appears in their wake as a serious challenge to Enlightenment conceits about the separation of church and state, and about the ability of reason to defend itself by purely reasonable means.

[MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies & Global and Transcultural Communication]

MCC-GE 2286 Young People & Media Cultures
JoEllen Fisherkeller
Tuesday 4:55 – 7:05 PM
Class#: 3066 (4 credits)

In this course students explore the debates and issues raised by various media environments as these relate to young people's growth and experiences. Students investigate how young people actually use, value, and find meaning in multiple media in different social contexts, and discuss the social, cultural, and political implications of these situations. Finally, students propose how to deal with the issues raised by the readings and discussions.

[MA Area of Study: Interaction and Social Processes & Visual Culture and Cultural Studies]

MCC-GE Values Embodied in Information and Communication Technologies
Helen Nissenbaum
Tuesday 2:00 – 4:10 PM
Class#: 3067 (4 credits)

Studies social, political & ethical values embodied in computer & information systems, & new media. Students examine work in the philosophy & social study of technology to understand the rich & sometimes troubling relationship between values & technical design. Course will ask: Is technology neutral? Who should make key decisions? What is the role of scientists & engineers? The course examines specific cases, such as, the Internet, search engines, web- cookies, & data mining from philosophical, empirical, & technical perspectives.

[MA Area of Study: Technology and Society]

MCC-GE 2310 Sound Studies
Martin Scherzinger
Tuesday 7:15 – 9:25 PM
Class#: 3089 (4 credits)

This course examines central themes in the emerging field of 'Sound Studies'. We explore a range of histories, archeologies and ethnographies of sound and listening, as it intersects with topics in media studies, science and technology studies, political economy and musicology. How has our experience of sound changed as we move from the piano to the personal computer, from the phonoautograph to the mp3? How have political, commercial, and cultural forces shaped what we are able to listen to, and how we listen to it? Finally, how have performers, physiologists, acousticians, engineers and philosophers worked to understand this radical transformation of the senses? 

Students should be able to describe and analyze technologies of sound production and reproduction over the last two centuries. They should also be able to describe, contrast and analyze (1) disciplinary, (2) metaphysical, (3) ideological, and (4) musical approaches to sound and listening over the last two centuries. Finally, students should be able to critically assess the way various communicative media have shaped how sound is made, used and heard in our times.

[MA Area of Study: Interaction and Social Processes & Visual Culture and Cultural Studies & Technology and Society]

MCC-GE 2344 The Social Life of Paper
Lisa Gitelman
Monday 4:55 – 7:05 PM
Class#: 13617 (4 credits)

 What is the cultural work performed by or with the technology of paper? How can a history of paper supplement and enrich recent histories of printing technology and printed artifacts like "the book"? What would it mean to imagine a paperless future? Organized around discussions of readings in common, this course considers the history, production, circulation and use of paper in the social production of knowledge, the shared imagination of value, and the mutual relations of consumers and commodities.

[MA Area of Study: Technology and Society & Visual Culture and Cultural Studies]

MCC-GE 2400 Topics in Visual Culture:  Politics of Visual Display
Olga Kopenkina
Wednesday 2:00 – 4:10 PM
Class#: 13622 (4 credits)

Taking the exhibition and museum site as an object of study, this course examines the modern history of visual display. The artistic avant-garde radically altered the way we look at visual display by eliminating the separation between image and audience. Nevertheless, this visual “rupture” has been echoed in the contemporary discussion about public art and the role of cultural institutions. Since the 1920s, political regimes in Russia and Europe intervened in exhibition techniques connecting avant-garde with totalitarian art – a fact that reinforced the ideological function of the museum. How do museums and contemporary art institutions use the ideological function of the museum display now? How do they create the ideology, which as Guy Debord, theorist of the spectacle noted, conceals the truth of the society that produces it? Does the notion “public art” adequately express the avant-garde desire for the full integration of viewers in the process of exhibiting the artwork? Is there a space for resistance to the ideology of “spectacle,” and corporate economy around art inside the modern museum?

[MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies]

MCC-GE 2420 Visual Culture Methods
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Thursday 2:00 – 4:10 PM
Class#: 13621 (4 credits)

In the wake of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements worldwide, especially Occupy Wall St here in New York, how can we study the interface of visualized media and politics? This course provides a participatory introduction to the methods of critical visuality studies from a wide range of perspectives. The class will develop and explore horizontal means of occupying visual culture.

[MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies + MA Research Course]

MCC-GE 3200 Doctoral Core Seminar II (DOCTORAL STUDENTS ONLY)
Erica Robles-Anderson
Monday 2:00 - 4:10 pm
Class#: 3049 (4 credits)

The second of two advanced theory seminars taken sequentially during the first year of study. Over the course of the year, all the departmental research areas are surveyed: Cultural Theory & Criticism; Media, Institutions & Technologies; and Rhetoric, Politics, & Public Advocacy.

MCC-GE 3100 Special Topics in Visual Culture and Cultural Studies: Fundamentals of Moving Images (DOCTORAL STUDENTS ONLY)
Susan Murray
Wednesday 2:00 - 4:10 PM
Class#: 13736 (4 credits)

This course will examine the history of moving images, focusing primarily on the ways that institutional, technological, and social/cultural factors contributed to the aesthetics and form of film and television during the 20th century in the U.S.. Moving from early silent cinema to the early days of digital cinema, students will read key texts in film/media theory and history, view a selection of films and programs in out-of-class screenings, and consider both in relation to specific historical movements and developments. Reading will likely include works by: Tom Gunning, Jonathan Crary, Phillip Rosen, Mary Ann Doane, Raymond Williams, Samuel Weber, John T. Caldwell, Lisa Parks, Anna McCarthy, D.N Rodowick, Brian Winston, Vivian Sobchack, Lev Manovich and more.

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