Current Course Details

Jump to: Fall 2013 | Spring 2013 | Summer 2013

Students from other NYU departments who want to take graduate courses in Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) in Fall 2013 can register beginning August 1. The courses will be open in Albert; there is no need to contact the department directly. Albert wait lists will be available for all courses. Please direct questions to mcc.graduate@nyu.edu. 

Please check Albert or the Registrar's Office site for the most up-to-date class meeting patterns, locations and call numbers. 

Fall 2013

Download a pdf version of the Fall 2013 schedule here. 

MCC-GE 2001 Media, Culture, and Communication MA Core Seminar
4 credits

Section 001
Rodney Benson
Tuesday 7:15 - 9:25 PM

Section 002
Martin Scherzinger
Wednesday 2:00 - 4:10 PM

Section 003
Martin Scherzinger
Wednesday 4:55 - 7:05 PM

Examines theoretical approaches that are central to the study of media, culture, & communication. provides students with a historical & critical framework for understanding the literature & research traditions within the field of media studies with an emphasis on media & communication as institutional actors, technological artifacts, systems of representation & meaningful cultural objects.

MCC-GE 2027 Media and the Environment
Nicole Starosielski
Wednesday 11:00 AM - 1:10 PM
4 credits

This course will introduce you to the varied ways in which human and natural environments have been shaped by media representations and technologies, extending from newspapers, photography, and popular literature, to film, television, and video games. The course integrates the study of environmental media from diverse disciplinary perspectives, including eco-cinema, eco-criticism, environmental communication, and environmental studies. It surveys research from media studies that explores how environments are represented in visual media; from eco-critical texts that detail the specificities of poetic, literary, and artistic approaches to the environment; and work in environmental communication that documents the role of the mass media, including the Internet, broadcast television, and news programs, in the dissemination of environmental messages. The course will also interrogate the diverging functions of environmental media in different historical periods and social contexts, beginning with the rise of landscape photography, scientific representations of nature, and “fictional” wildlife films; extending through the development of canonical environmental media works in the 1960s; and ending with the role of contemporary interactive and “recycling” based aesthetics.

MA Areas of Study: Technology and Society, Visual Culture and Cultural Studies


MCC-GE 2112-001 Politics of the Gaze: Sensory Formations of Modernity
Allen Feldman
Monday 4:55 - 7:05 PM
4 credits

The mediation and technological development of vision and its dominance over the human sensorium is integral to the emergence of the modern, including experiences of urbanism, consumer desire, gender/sexual identities, race and ethnicity, trans-cultural image systems, aesthetic production, and the making of power and political truth claims. This seminar will focus on introducing participants to the core theories and analytic methods of visual culture, and the socio-political history of the human sensorium in a variety of disciplines, including ethnography, social history, urban studies, cinema studies, social geography, material culture studies, and media studies. Politics of the Gaze Course Reader at New University Copiers 11 Waverly Place between Mercer & Greene. Tel: 212-473-7369.

MA Area of study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies

MCC-GE 2148-001 The Television Business in Transition
David Poltrack
Thursday 6:00 - 9:15 PM
4 credits

Exploration of the technical, legal, and economic structures including broadcast television, cable television, the internet and mobile.  Examination of the consequences of these structures on the content and social effects of mass media.  The focus will be on the programming and advertising structure of this evolving television business and how that structure is evolving with the 3-screen convergence of television, the internet, and mobile.

Note: this course meets these dates only: 9/5, 9/12, 9/19, 9/26, 10/10, 10/17, 10/24, 10/31, 11/7.

David F. Poltrack is Chief Research Officer, CBS Corporation and President of CBS VISION. CBS VISION is a research unit exploring and offering insight on emerging technologies, media consumption patterns, and advertising value in the media marketplace.He oversees all research operations at CBS encompassing audience measurement, market research, program testing, advertising research, and monitoring of the national and international video marketplace. David designed and oversees TELEVISION CITY at the MGM GRAND, Las Vegas, CBS’ state of the art Research Center.

David is past chairman of the Media Rating Council; trustee of the executive committee, Marketing Science Institute; past president, Market Research Council and in 2009 was inducted into their Hall of Fame; past chairman and current board member, Advertising Research Foundation. As Adjunct Professor, he teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business; NYU Stern School of Business, and is a visiting professor at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, Beijing, China. He is author of Television Marketing: Network, Local, and Cable (McGraw-Hill) and has many articles published in professional journals.

David is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame (B.A., magna cum laude, History), and NYU (M.B.A., Marketing).

Spring 2013

MCC-GE 2025-001 Race and Media
Charlton McIlwain
Tues 2:00 – 4:10 PM 
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: Persuasion and Politics; Visual Culture and Cultural Studies;  Interaction and Social Processes; & MA Research course

MCC-GE 2133-001 Topics in Digital Media: Digital Media and Materiality
Nicole Starosielski
Wed 11:00 AM – 1:10 PM 
4 credits

Part reaction to the hyped “immateriality” of the internet and part reaction to the textual approaches of cultural media studies, there has been a recent emergence of research on the materiality of media and communication. This work, at times grouped under the “new materialisms,” has extended from research in material culture to media archaeologies inspired by German media theory, and from studies of media infrastructure to cultural geographies of ubiquitous computing. This seminar will introduce students with the range of recent materialist research, while at the same time maintaining a skepticism about claims of the “newness” of this approach and the coherence or unity of the “material turn” in social theory. While including materialist media theory, the course will also focus on the elemental aspects of digital media – from codes and circuits to power generation and storage – in order to assess the usefulness of materialist and infrastructural analytics for understanding contemporary media systems. 

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

MCC-GE 2138-001 Politics of Digital Media
Liel Leibovitz
Tues 4:55 – 7:05 PM 
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 & Persuasion and Politcs & Visual Cultural and Cultural Studies

MCC GE 2140-001 Studies in Organizational Communication: Studies & Application
Deborah Borisoff
Wed 4:55 – 7:05 PM
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 and Social Processes

MCC-GE 2147-001 / CINE-GT 1603.001 Reality and Documentary TV
Susan Murray
Thurs 2:00 – 4:10 PM 
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 2155-001 Activist Media and Creative Activism
Stephen Duncombe
Wed 4:55 – 7:05 PM
4 credits

Throughout history, the most effective political actors have married the arts with campaigns for social change.  In fact, the practice of artistic activism has only accelerated in recent times, as savvy organizers learn to use the increasingly mediated political terrain of signs and symbols, stories and spectacles to their advantage. This participatory and discussion-oriented course explores the activist use of an artistic aesthetic tactically, strategically, and organizationally. The course will rely on both a survey of the existing theory and scholarship on “artistic activism,” as well as close analyses of contemporary practices on a local, national and global scale. Special attention will be paid to issues of creativity and efficacy, addressing questions concerning the value of this hybrid practice as both an aesthetic and political activity.

MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies & Persuasion and Politics

MCC-GE 2165-001 Transnational Communities and Media Cultures
Radha Hegde
Mon 2:00 – 4:10 PM
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: Interaction and Social Processes & Persuasion and Politics & Global and Transcultural Communication

MCC-GE 2184-001/SOC-GA 2072 Comparative Media Systems: Production of Culture
Rodney Benson
Mon 7:15 – 9:25 PM
4 credits

NEW DESCRIPTION

How does the production of culture differ around the world? And to the extent that it does, why? Beyond the personal idiosyncrasies of individual media owners and creative workers, which factors play the greatest role in shaping 'national media cultures': professional values and traditions, forms of ownership and funding, government regulations, organizational dynamics, and/ or the social properties of media owners, workers, and 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 drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. This course offers a conceptual roadmap to such a project as well as a close empirical look at media systems (fields, networks, ecosystems) in a variety of sub-national, national and transnational contexts. We will read important new and classic theoretical works (e.g., Fligstein and McAdam's A Theory of Fields, Bourdieu, DiMaggio and Powell and other new institutionalists) and case studies of a variety of fields of cultural production, such as Becker's Art Worlds, Fourcade's Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, Medvetz's Think Tanks in America, Ryfe's Can Journalism Survive? An Inside Look at American Newsrooms, Hesmondhalgh and Baker's Creative Labor: Media Work in Three Cultural Industries, and Hallin and Mancini's Comparing Media Systems: Beyond the Western World.

MA Area of Study:  Persuasion and Politics;  Global and Transcultural Communication; & MA Research course

MCC-GE 2200-001 Media Events and Spectacle
Sal Fallica
Wed 7:15 – 9:25 PM
4 credits

This course examines the role played by media events and spectacle in the shaping of belief, attitudes, and actions, with particular attention paid to the concept of the masses and its changed meaning over time. The course examines concepts of mass culture, the decentralization of cultural forms, and the rise of convergence culture. It explores the history of the media event and the theories that have shaped it, and 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 2201-001 Mediating The Bio-Political Body
Allen Feldman
Mon 4:55 – 7:05 PM
4 credits

This seminar seeks to build media theory within the material histories, philosophy and political culture of embodiment/disembodiment. The body is situated as the interface of our era's most contentious political terrains including human rights violations, epidermal stigma, gendered gazes, targeting gazes, and confinement in refugee, detention, torture and concentration camps. For Foucault the formation of the political subject is isomorphic to the formation of the body as a communicative, mediating and mediated site. The body has become the screen, the archive and the stylus for political inscription and encryption. For Foucault, Agamben and Esposito the political is concerned with producing forms of life as biopower-- the governing of life and death through subject forming and deforming body-media from surveillance to violence. Previously Hegel, Kojeve, Lacan and Fanon theorized political domination as the spectral occupation and remediation of one body by another. Derrida described the current war on terror as the shift from communitas to immunitas, to auto-co-immunity in which the body-politic sacrifices its actuality to protect itself as virtuality. In the above theories the body unfolds as the place where our current historical actuality originates and culminates in a politics of somatic virtuality. We will examine the body as a political semiotechnique, as material support for political ideology and spectacle and as enabled/disabled by techno-political prosthetics and as the means of political virtualization. We will track several orienting genealogies of the body that roughly run from Hegel and Kojeve to Lacan and Fanon; from Spinoza, Nietzsche and Heidegger, to Deleuze, Foucault, Agamben, Esposito and Derrida; from Merleau-Ponty to Lefort and Ranciere. Among the themes to be explored are: exposability and disposability of the body; torture, embodied witnessing and truth; postcolonial typographies of the body; second bodies, subversive mimesis and political virtuality; political animality and monstrosity; communicable and excommunicated bodies; political violence as auto-immunization.

 MA Area of Study: Persuasion and Politics & Visual Culture and Cultural Studies

MCC-GE 2211-001 Decolonization and Aftermath: Postcolonial Visual Culture
Arvind Rajagopal
Tues 2:00 – 4:10 PM
4 credits

The advent of 20^th C. decolonization challenged the way in which world history had been conceived for four centuries, as centered upon the tiny landmass of Western Europe, rather than say, as plural and polycentric. This course is interested in exploring the place of visual media in propagating colonial and postcolonial agenda. Hence it seeks to identify and understand some of the pictorial practices, image-making technologies, and visual subjectivities that modern empires have used among “colonizers” and the “colonized.” We will examine the significance of the visual as a factor in practices and concepts of decolonization, inquiring into the ways the visual gets separated or remains within an embodied sensorium, as anticolonial politics grows and mass media expand alongside. South Asia, as the most populous concentration of electoral democracies, will offer a series of historical reference points for the comparative theoretical aims of this class. 

MA Area of Study:  Global and Transcultural Communication & Persuasion and Politics

MCC-GE 2225-001 World Communication: Principles, Politics and Law
Stefaan Verhulst
Thurs 4:55 – 7:05 PM
4 credits

The course considers the emergence of, and global responses to, the cross-border flow of information and cultural products. It considers where and how globalization, mediation and global governance intersect. The course begins with a close examination of the rationales for ( and against) some form of control or influence of world communication. It then considers in detail the various existing legal and institutional mechanisms designed to influence the way information crosses borders (within or across nation-states). The course focuses, in particular, on the international, regional or bilateral regimes that govern the content and flow of world communication.

MA Area of Study: Persuasion and Politics & Global and Transcultural Communication

MCC-GE 2286-001 Young People and Media Cultures
JoEllen Fisherkeller
Tues 4:55 – 7:05 PM
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: Persuasion and Politics & Interaction and Social Processes

MCC-GE 2290-001 Interpersonal Communication
Susan Fox
Mon 4:55 – 7:05 PM
4 credits

The application of various systems of communication analysis to specific behavioral situations. Through case-study method, students apply communication theories & models to practical, everyday situations.

MA Area of Study: Interaction and Social Processes

MCC-GE 2171-002 Screening History:  The Construction of American History in Hollywood Films
Brett Gary
Wed 2:00 – 4:10 PM
4 credits

This course will explore the ways in which popular Hollywood films construct versions of the historical past, and the ways that such films can be utilized as historical documents themselves.  Hollywood films are fascinating documents because they make powerful arguments about how audiences should understand complex historical and contemporary and historical matters, in the guise of entertainment.  The films reach mass audiences, they entertain, they mythologize, they produce compelling narratives about the past, they simplify complex problems, and have been influential in creating audiences’ historical understanding.  They are significant and complex cultural texts, and this course will study them as artifacts of a powerful communications entertainment industry whose visions of the past, and its narratives and arguments about what constituted the legitimate (and illegitimate) social, political, economic order throughout the 20^th century and into the 21^st  centuries warrants our close examination.

MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies & Persuasion and Politics

MCC-GE 2402.001 Topics in Visual Culture: Politics of Visual Display
Olga Kopenkina
Thurs 2:00 – 4:10 PM
4 credits

Departing from 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 art exhibition? 

MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies; Global and Transcultural Communication & Persuasion and Politics

MCC-GE 2451 Biz Lab: Business & Economics of the Video Game Industry
Joost Van Dreunen
Thurs 6:20 – 9:00 PM 
4 credits
Cross-listed with NYU Game Center - GAMES-GT 301

*If interested in enrolling in the course, please contact Mary Taylor at mary.taylor@nyu.edu.  

This course provides students with a broad sense of video games as a major entertainment industry.  Students will develop a business vocabulary integral to professional game development and publishing and will come to understand the historical drivers of change, the dominant economic forces, and market trends.  The course will include analysis of current case studies in the business landscape and students will be asked to formulate their own credible business models.  

MA Area of Study: Technology & Society

MCC-GE 3132.001 Special Topics in Globalization: Mapping the Transnational
Radha Hegde
Tues 2:00 – 4:50 PM
4 credits
DOCTORAL Students Only

This course examines theoretical and methodological challenges in producing cartographies of the global that pay attention to transnational flows, assemblages, circuits and disjunctures. Paying special attention to ethnographic method and conceptualizations of the transnational, the course will focus on close readings of select theoretical framings and ethnographies of media and communication. Discussions will be organized around issues of modernity, mobility and locality in order to engage with the politics of transnational linkages and the production of a critical discourse on media and globalization.

MCC-GE 3200.001 Doctoral Core Seminar II
Arvind Rajagopal
Wed 2:00 – 4:50 PM
4 credits
DOCTORAL Students Only

Periodic meeting of doctoral students & faculty to discuss current research& professional development.


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Summer 2013

MCC-GE 2024-001 Amateur Media - CANCELLED
Susan Murray
Mon – Thurs 10:00 AM - 12:45 PM
4 credits
SAMPLE SYLLABUS

This course will track the various manifestations of media amateurism over time and medium, while also exploring the theoretical concerns and cultural discourses that surround their work and social construction, especially in relation to notions of professionalism, community, networks, artistic practice, collectivism, and marginalization. We will cover the histories of and issues within: amateur photography (victorian pictorialism, snapshot photography, leisure photography, digital photo-sharing, etc.); amateur film and video (art film at the margins, home movies, camcorders, video vigilantes, viral videos, youtube, etc.) as well as early radio amateurs, ham radio, 'zines, blogging, and hacking. 

MA Area of Study:  Visual Culture and Cultural Studies

MCC-GE 2166-001 The Global City and Media Ethnography
Allen Feldman
Mon – Thurs 4:55 – 7:40 PM 
4 credits

The course focuses on the theories and methods of media/sensory ethnography, visual culture, media archeology, through the linked topics of transcultural and trans-local processes, diaspora identities, the post colonial and human rights. The curriculum is aimed at graduate students from diverse disciplines who want to explore creative media practice as a research methodology. This course provides students with theoretical and practical grounding in multi-sited action research in trans-cultural and transnational settings. Through social historical and trans-cultural ethnographic perspectives practice-led pedagogy promotes a self- reflexive contextual and critical understanding of the use of media for the conduct and dissemination of research and the creation of social knowledge through participatory cultural production. Practice-Led Media Research is the theory, social history pedagogy and circulation of social science and humanities research through the production of film, video, internet, visual arts and other screen/audio based media. Practice-led research overcomes divisions between social theory and action-research, and between creative practice and evidence-based research. An important focus is the use of visual media to convey ideas and distinctive understandings about the world. There is a strong emphasis on comprehending visual phenomena in cross-cultural perspective and on the multifarious roles played by media in processes of identity and cultural formation in the world today.

MA Area of Study: Global and Transcultural Communication & Visual Cultural and Cultural Studies + MA Research Course

MCC-GE 2169-001 Globalization, Memory and Visual Culture
Marita Stuken and Charles Talcott (American University of Paris)
Paris, France
June 3 - 21: Mon/Wed/Fr 2:30 - 4:30 PM and Tues/Fri 12:30 - 3:30 PM
4 credits

This course examines the intersections of global visual culture and cultural memory, with a particular focus on the tensions that arise between the largely national tendencies of cultural memory and the global circulation of cultural meaning. We will focus on the ways that the nation, colonialism, and globalization have been enacted through visual culture and cultural memory with a particular focus on France, in comparison to other national contexts.

The course provides an overview of contemporary theoretical engagements with cultural memory, visual culture, and consumerism, looking at the role played by discourses of memory in changing concepts of nation, colonialism-postcolonialism, and globalization. The course will begin by examining how cultural memory and memorialization have been deployed in the context of the nation, looking in particular at how national memory has been constructed in France. We will look at how the concept of national memory becomes contested, and the institutions through which the memory of France and the French Empire have been constructed. We will thus consider the tensions between the emerging identities of transnationalism and globalization and the traditional frameworks of national memory. How cultural memory is enacted through visual culture will be a key theme of the course, looking at memorials, museums, artistic projects, design, and architecture as central to how cultural memory is shaped. We will situate these projects in relation to the memory industry and global consumer economy, through which cultural memory is packaged, branded, and consumed. These intersections—memory, visual culture, consumerism, nationalism, colonialism, and globalization—will frame our inquiries.

This course will be an intensive three-week course in Paris, organized in collaboration with the American University of Paris. We will have a number of field trips and site visits, including the Musee Carnavalet, the Quai Branley museum of French colonialism, the Cite de l’Immigration, and a day trip to Normandy and the World War II museum in Caen.

Click here for more information. 

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

MCC-GE 2384-001 Topics in Globalization: Media and Cultural Globalization in France
Rodney Benson and John Downing (American University of Paris)
Paris, France
June 26 - July 16: Mon/Wed/Thurs 9:00 - 11:00 AM and Tues/Fri 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM
4 credits

This course will provide students with a critical understanding of how international flows of information and entertainment products – from news and information to movies, television and lifestyle brands -- play a role in shaping and reshaping global economic, political, military, and cultural realities. We will examine a range of forms of mediated production and consumption understood broadly in relation to political, economic, and cultural power, and situate these forms in relation to contemporary theorizing about global cultural convergence, divergence, and hybridity.

In this intensive three-work course organized in collaboration with the American University of Paris, the city of light and its environs will be our laboratory. France is often at the center of debates about the reach and character of cultural globalization: its government has often taken the lead in opposing American efforts to define cultural exchange in purely market terms, even as French publics have often welcomed American popular culture and political ideas. To better understand globalization “on the ground” in France, we will range across Paris to meet with activists, journalists, and other media creators. In so doing, we will deepen our understanding of the global, national, and local economic and political processes shaping how culture is being created, consumed, remixed, diffused, and transformed.

Click here for more information.