Graduate Courses
| E58.2001 | Media, Culture, and Communication Core Seminar (for MA students only) sample syllabus Examines theoretical approaches that are central to the study of media, culture and communication. Provides students with a historical and critical framework for understanding the literature and research traditions within the field of media studies with an emphasis on media and communication as institutional actors, technological artifacts, systems of representation and meaningful cultural objects. | |
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| E58.2100/2101 | Seminar in Media Criticism I and II sample syllabus Analysis of the media environment from a variety of critical perspectives. Emphasis on writing as well as reading media criticism. | |
| E58.2112 | Politics of the Gaze sample syllabus 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. | |
| E58.2115 | Intercultural Communication sample syllabus This course examines the production and reproduction of culture, nation, race and ethnicity through communicative practices. Globalization, transnational and translocal influences have profoundly complicated the idea of cultural difference in contemporary life. We will critically explore how (particularly mediatised) communication advance understandings of stereotypes, prejudice, borders, citizenship, identities, and difference. We will explore these issues through analysis of mediatised representations of minorities and majorities. The course offers an overview of discourses and policies used to manage cultural difference. We will examine firstly multiculturalism and cultural diversity and secondly recent developments that address certain minorities with uncompromising discourse of "zero cultural tolerance". Students will get tools to critically analyse identity, difference and representation in various contexts. | |
| E58.2120 | Media Policy and Regulation | |
| E58.2130 | Topics in Digital Media sample syllabus This course is devoted to the research of new communication channels that evolved with the rise of information technology and digital connectivity. These new tools develop new practices, ethics and power relations and require us to approach them from a different angle. Since the pace of these new media adoption is constantly increasing we will try to develop a more experimental research practice, in which we will act as participating agents within the explored new media environments. In that sense students should expect to be ‘embedded' and ‘report from' deep within social networking sites, multi-player online immersive environments, the blogosphere, the open source movement, radical online activist groups, internet based art, cellphone networks, and more. The practice would resemble field journalism and will encounter the similar anthropological conflicts of the researcher's role in its subject of research. Projects will be executed both in groups and individually and will be using an assortment of collaborative web tools to conduct and document the research online. In addition to the individual researches each week will feature a theme and will be discussed through assigned reading, listening and viewing materials. | |
| E58.2131 | Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace sample syllabus Today, for the first time in history, computer-mediated culture has become mainstream for a majority of individuals in technologically developed societies. From email to texting, from online gaming to online banking, from YouTube to Hulu, from DoS attacks to Second Life sit-ins, nearly every traditional aspect of our lives has found a new expression in its digital proxy.
In order to understand the cultural, social, political and economic consequences of this development, we must look to the origins of today's cyberculture, in the futuristic visions (both dystopian and utopian) that shaped the development of today's networked technologies. We will trace the genealogy of these visions, as they developed in tandem with the growing digital communications infrastructure over the past three quarters of a century, and evolved into new forms that even the most forward-thinking of visionaries could not have predicted. Ultimately, one can argue that the Internet has both exceeded and fallen short of the hype that surrounded its birth and development, and, by comparing the myth to the reality, we may better understand what aspects of the human condition are likely to persist regardless of technological development. Class will be conducted as a seminar. Students will be responsible for leading discussions on the readings, and are encouraged to critically engage the readings and class conversations. | |
| E58.2134 | Media Archaeology | |
| E58.2135 | Media, Memory, and History sample syllabus This seminar will focus on introducing participants to the basic theory and core methods of visual culture studies in a variety of disciplines, including ethnography, social history, urban studies, cinema studies, social geography, art history and media studies. | |
| E58.2136 | War and Media Theory sample syllabus Communication studies traditionally focus on how war is propagandized by mass media. In contrast, this seminar proposes that war is an encompassing mode of political communication in which media is militarized and violence is mediatized. We will examine how modern warfare has generated new visual cultures and new media networks. This seminar proposes that the visual technology of war and the technologies of event dissemination are linked problems in the political history of representation. The triangulation of person, place and time as the basis of perceiving history can only be accounted for by a history of mediated perception-a history increasingly characterized by military technologies and military visual culture, and their fashioning of the modern sensorium. The seminar will examine the thesis that the "informationatization" of contemporary consciousness can only be understood through a media theory of war. | |
| E58.2138 | Politics of Digital Media sample syllabus This seminar examines various political features and scales concerning networked technologies-from the informal to the formal-in relationship to three different though overlapping categories: the politics of regulation and architecture (domain name registration, filtering, protocols, censorship, ICANN), the politics of hacking (transgression, intellectual property law and free software, etc.), and finally explicit grassroots and media activism that makes heavy use of digital media and networked technologies (Indymedia, Tactical media, Burma protests etc.). Students will be introduced to and interrogate a number of political theories about democracy, liberalism, social movements, and neoliberalism as they assess the politics of technology. By the end of the course students should be familiar with an array of political questions and tactics that emerge out of the use, invention, circulation, dissemination and production of networked technologies. We will pay close attention to the ways in which technology is at once imagined as an agent of political change and contrasts this with how these technologies work to enable and curtail various political possibilities. | |
| E58.2145 | Methods in Interpreting Popular Culture sample syllabus 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 the notion of the popular, spectatorship, methods of reading audiences, global popular culture, and the concept of cultural practices. This course surveys methods of analysis such as structuralism, semiotics, genre analysis, psychoanalysis, socio-historical analysis, ideological analysis, discourse analysis, political economy, reception theory, feminist method, and ethnography as tools through which to understanding popular culture in depth. It will include screenings of excerpts of film and television in class. Readings will include works by Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, Umberto Eco, Dick Hebdige, George Lipsitz, Toby Miller, Tania Modleski, David Morley, Janice Radway, Ellen Seiter, Lynn Spigel, and Raymond Williams, among others. | |
| E58.2146 | The Sitcom sample syllabus This course examines the history and politics of television’s most enduring genre, the situation comedy. The sitcom occupies a particularly important place in U.S. cultural hierarchies. Both lauded as an innovative, quintessentially televisual form and denigrated as the epitome of mass media’s formulaic cultural dross, the genre is a discursive locus in which U.S. preoccupations with class, race, gender, and other forms of difference are negotiated. | |
| E58.2149 | A Cultural History of Television | |
| E58.2150 | The Origins of Modern Media: 1880 – 1950 sample syllabus Examination of the sociopolitical, technological, aesthetic, & institutional development of media from 1880-1950. Emphasis is placed on telegraphy, telephony, sound-recording, & amplification devices, radio (both point-to-point & broadcast) & film. Students are introduced to a variety of historiographical techniques & are encouraged to reflect upon the relationship between origins of the mass media & current technological institutional, sociopolitical & aesthetic dynamics of media. | |
| E58.2157 | The Communications Revolution and Culture in America sample syllabus An examination of the nature of the communications revolution in the 20th century & its impact on American cultural life & institutions. First semester focuses on the political economy of media from a critical perspective; second semester focuses on current developments in the communications industry & their impact on the U.S. & global culture, from an industry perspective. Either half may be taken independently. | |
| E58.2165 | Transnational Communities and Media Cultures sample syllabus 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. | |
| E58.2166 | The Global City and Media Ethnography: Practice-led Transcultural Media Research sample syllabus 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. | |
| E58.2170 | Communication and Persuasion: Film Classics of Propaganda sample syllabus Viewing and analysis of the cinematic and persuasive techniques used in classic propaganda films (features and documentaries) to shape their viewers' constructions of reality. | |
| E58.2173 | Research for Communication Professionals sample syllabus This course is intended to familiarize you with the types and methods of research conducted, assessed, and applied by professionals in the communication industries and to foster critical thinking about contemporary issues in public opinion and consumer research. Students will conduct a research project. | |
| E58.2175 | Political Communication sample syllabus Communication aspects of international politics, including changing media roles, powers, and constraints in international politics, relations media-government/media-opposition in international conflicts, crises and peace processes; war journalism and peace journalism; traditional and public diplomacy. Case studies include The Middle East (Iraq, Israel-Palestine, etc.), Africa, former Yougoslavia, and others suggested by students. | |
| E58.2182 | Communication Processes: Gender, Race and Cultural Identity sample syllabus Course examines past & current studies on language, communication theories, speech perception, & other aspects of verbal & nonverbal behavior. Students relate these studies to how gender, race, culture & sexual orientation are developed & reflected in society in both personal & professional relationships. | |
| E58.2184 | Comparative Media Systems sample syllabus 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. | |
| E58.2185 | Critical Issues in Conflict Resolution sample syllabus Students examine transformations in the communication processes that influence conflict management as manifested in diverse contexts. Issues will be explored from the perspectives of gender, culture, & ethnicity. | |
| E58.2190 | The Languages of Communication: From Cave Painting to Print sample syllabus The historical development of various non electronic media--language, painting, writing & print & their consequences for consciousness, information processing, & sociopolitical structures. | |
| E58.2191 | Print, Media and Modernity sample syllabus This seminar will explore the evolution of print technology and culture since Gutenberg's first experiments with movable type. Our objective will be to arrive at an understanding of how print media have formed and transformed essential features of the culture of capitalism. Themes will include the rise of the bourgeois individual, public/private spheres, production of difference, erotics of reading, urban space and spectacle, high/low culture, bureaucracy. Although the emphasis will be on the history of the book, the course will also examine newspapers, paper money, identity documents, and other printed matter. | |
| E58.2195 | Electronic Media: Television sample syllabus This course will survey the cultural and industrial history of American television. Students will come to understand how technological innovation, regulatory bodies, advertisers, network heads, creative producers, audiences have interacted with economic, social, and political forces to shape television over time. In addition to their reading and participation in class discussion, students will be expected to screen television programs both in and out of class, write one 15 page historical research paper, and to complete one exam. | |
| E58.2200 | The Mass Mind sample syllabus An inquiry into those forces in our technological society, especially those of the mass media that significantly influence our beliefs, attitudes & actions. | |
| E58.2201 | Mediating the Bio-political Body 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. | |
| E58.2206 | Dis/ability Studies: Art, Media, Philosophy sample syllabus Introduction to the concepts used in the new interdisciplinary field of disability studies. This seminar will be a joint exploration of the necessarily connected experience and representation of dis/ability, embodiment and the 'normal' in modern Western culture. It centers on questions of dis/ability in the three fields at three critical interfaces, namely the formation of Western rationality in the seventeenth century; the generalization and medicalization of the concept of the "normal" in the nineteenth century; and the emergence of dis/ability as a new form of identity in the past forty years. | |
| E58.2210 | Globalization and Gender sample syllabus This course will examine how definitions of gender and sexuality are reproduced, negotiated and deployed in the context of globalization and transnational flows. We will examine key texts drawn from feminist/global cultural studies on the topics of citizenship, global labor flows, migration, militarization, neoliberalism and the construction of the gendered global subject. Through a reading of theoretical texts, ethnographic case studies and analysis of media representation, we will engage with questions of feminist epistemology and method research. | |
| E58.2211 | Decolonization and its Aftermath sample syllabus The advent of 20th century 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. The former view made it difficult to understand how the majority of the world's population mattered to history at all. With the onset of decolonization after the end of World War I, the world began to be seen, first through the lens of the nation, and secondly, as an extensive set of interconnections, where seemingly remote events could have major effects across countries. This course will combine a survey of select decolonization movements with analyses of the transformations from anticolonial nationalism through postcolonial developmentalism to the contemporary new world order. The course will consider decolonization in two senses: as the historical achievement of independence in former colonies, and, as a communicational concept illuminating socio-political change. | |
| E58.2215 | Social Experiences in Consumer Culture sample syllabus Consumer culture by its nature is intensely local and inevitably global. Its locality is tied up with the intimacy of food, clothing, and shelter, and the elasticity of the relationship between bodies and things. At the same time, consumption is a flash point for basic social and political debates about the relationship between needs and desires. This course seeks to develop critical approaches towards dealing with both these dimensions of consumer culture by exploring the ways in which bodies and things shape each other through long histories of production, distribution, and fashion. Though consumption is conventionally regarded as the terminus of the social life of things, this course will seek to study the social world of consumers as an analytic entry point into complex networks of cultural practice which mediate the perennial tension between habituation and novelty in the shaping of consumer experience. | |
| E58.2220 | Communication and the Culture Industries sample syllabus An examination of the ways the entertainment industries exercise their communicative power. Provides a wide-ranging overview of theoretical & empirical research on the industrial manufacture of popular culture, focusing on sociologies of production & on the ongoing processes of digitization & globalization. | |
| E58.2225 | World Communication: Principles, Politics and Law sample syllabus 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. | |
| E58.2251 | Communication Environments: Macroanalysis sample syllabus Inquiries into “the business behind the box”: the economic & decision-making structure of broadcast television. | |
| E58.2260 | Rhetorical Criticism sample syllabus Studies of major contributions to rhetorical knowledge; analysis & influence of basic concepts & issues; principles of rhetoric applied to criticism of speeches from the classical to the modern period. | |
| E58.2265 | Communication and Persuasion: Sociological Propaganda sample syllabus A series of analyses of the history, theories, techniques, & results of propaganda in society with special focus on the relationship between interaction (sociological) propaganda & communication in our increasingly technological society; case studies drawn from public relations, commercial advertising, social movements, & the mass media. | |
| E58.2270 | Communication and Political Propaganda sample syllabus In this course, students examine some of the major historical moments in political propaganda as well as current propaganda campaigns. We start with a brief analysis of the Nazi Party propaganda system and then examine the political propaganda tools and techniques that contemporary political parties, government officials and candidates use in their quest to manufacture political consent. Students should leave this class with an intellectual overview of the field of political propaganda as well as the various analytical methods that will help them recognize, describe and explain the propaganda techniques of contemporary political actors. | |
| E58.2275 | Middle East Media and Cultural Politics sample syllabus Examines developments of culture, politics, & media in contemporary Middle East through an historical & cultural lens. Course is organized by theoretical theme & geographic location & addresses culture as a site of struggle; the impact of globalization on Arab mass media; the connections between civil society, democracy & Islam; & gender, national & diasporic identities. | |
| E58.2282 | Information Law and Policy sample syllabus Examines the emergence of a specific body of laws & public policies that influence the production, distribution & use of information technologies, with a focus on issues of privacy, online speech, intellectual property, the creative commons, computer crime, & governance in general. | |
| E58.2284 | Religion and/as Media sample syllabus Bertrand Russell long ago declared that religion belonged to the infancy of human history, in a statement that expressed the secular self-understanding of an enlightened European of his time. By comparison, at least from the time of Alexis de Tocqueville, it has been clear that in a country like the United States, religious affiliation has not diminished with the advance of historical time. If anything the movement has been in a contrary direction, with religion having increased in social and political influence, with effects that reverberate across the globe today. The disparity between Continental and American perceptions reflects a failure to understand the place of religion in modern society, and to relate changes in religious practice to historical change. It is not simply in traditional, backward or disadvantaged societies that religion thrives, but in the very heart of modern society, so to speak. The legislative approach to sequester religion and keep it in its place, widely practiced, rarely has the desired results. Religion turns out to be mediated in new ways, to sacralize new forms of connection, to mark out new relations between the sacred and the profane. | |
| E58.2285 | Integrating Media Education in School and Community Work sample syllabus Hands-on video production, media literacy program design, readings, & reflection on approaches & strategies educators can use to incorporate media education into their schools & community-based organizations. | |
| E58.2286 | Young People & Media Cultures sample syllabus 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. | |
| E58.2290 | Interpersonal Communication sample syllabus 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. | |
| E58.2295 | Values Embodied in Information and Communication Technologies sample syllabus 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. | |
| E58.2351 | Global Food Cultures | |
| E58.2900 | Thesis in Media, Culture, and Communication sample syllabus This course is designed to foster and support your thesis-writing process. Ours is a thesis-based seminar that serves as a writing workshop: we will write in class together, you will draft portions of your thesis, you will give and receive feedback on your writing. This class will also offer professional development for students interested in academic careers. Students apply research methodologies, engage in peer-reviewing and oral presentations, and develop their writing for academic journals. | |