Undergraduate Courses

• MCC-UE 1002 - Space and Place in Human Communication

  This course will build on a core concept of Lewis Mumford who understood media ecology as a component of spatial and urban ecology. Emphasis will be given on how space socially organizes human meaning and on the inscription of space. How do people, through their practices and their being in the world, form relationships with the locales they occupy (both the natural world and the build environment)? How do they attach meaning to spaces to create places? And how do the experiences of inhabiting, viewing, and hearing those places shape their meanings, communicative practices, cultural performances, memories, and habits? Course themes include: mapping and the imagination; vision and space, soundscape, architecture and landscape, new media and space/time compression; space and identity; spatial violence; spatialization of memory.
  
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• MCC-UE 1003 - Introduction to Digital Media
  This course is an introduction to digital media, focusing on networks, computers, the Web, and video games. Theoretical topics include the formal qualities of new media, their political dimensions, as well as questions of genre, narrative, and history.
  
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• MCC-UE 1006 - Television: History and Form

  Analysis of television as a medium of information, conveyor and creator of mass culture, and a form of aesthetic expression. Course examines the historical development of television as both a cultural product and an industry.
  
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• MCC-UE 1007 - Film: History and Form
  Analysis of film as a medium of information, conveyor and creator of mass culture, and a form of aesthetic expression. Course examines the historical development of film as both a cultural product and an industry.
  
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• MCC-UE 1008 - Video Games: Culture and Industry
  The course examines the emergence of video games as site of contemporary cultural production and practice. It pays special attention the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of video games, including their various narratives forms and sub-genres, and concentrates on their interactive dimensions. The course provides insight into the emerging trends in the interface between humans and media technologies. The course also situates video games within the business practices of the entertainment industries.
  
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• MCC-UE 1009 - Psychoanalysis: Desire and Culture

  Explores the subject of desire in modern media and culture. Freud's ideas have had a profound influence on everything from the earliest manuals on public relations to the struggles of modern feminism. We will read a range of psychoanalytic theorists while studying how their insights have been put to work by both the culture industry and its critics.
  
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• MCC-UE 1012 - Crime, Violence and Media
  This course considers the culture of crime in relation to conventions of news and entertainment in the mass media. Topics include competing theories of criminogenic behavior, news conventions and crime reporting, the aesthetics and representation of crime in the media, the role of place in crime stories, moral panics and fears, crime and consumer culture, and the social construction of different kinds of crimes and criminals.
  
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• MCC-UE 1015 - Advertising and Society

  This course will examine the emergence of advertising as a form of communication, its influence upon other forms of mediated communication and its impact upon culture and society.

  Note: This course counts under two Fields of Study: Images and Screen Studies as well as Technology and Society. It may be offered at NYU Prague. Consult with your academic advisor for course availability and description abroad.
  
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• MCC-UE 1021 - Dead Media Research Studio
  This course is devoted to media archaeology, that is, historical research on forgotten, obsolete, or otherwise 'dead' media technologies. The goal of the course is to introduce students to the skills and resources necessary for producing rigorous scholarship on obsolete and obscure media. It will include an exposure to scholarship in media archaeology including writings from Friedrich Kittler and Jonathan Sterne; an intensive introduction to research methods; instruction on the localization and utilization of word, image, and sound archives; and a continuing emphasis on the need to restore media artifacts to their proper social and cultural context. The course follows a research studio model commonly used in disciplines such as architecture.
  
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• MCC-UE 1022 - Latino Media
  Examines the production, consumption and cultural meaning of Latino media produced in and around the United States (as opposed to that produced in Latin American countries). Focuses on a wide range of mediated cultural production: television, radio, film, advertising, magazines, etc. This course will be a critical investigation into the theories, production and consumption of Latino media and popular culture. Examines the influence popular culture has on politics, identity formation, shaping culture and as a mode of revealing, producing and reproducing ideology and political struggle.
  
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• MCC-UE 1024 - Amateur Media
  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 the work of amateurs and their social construction, especially in relation to notions of professionalism, community, networks, artistic practice, collectivism, and marginalization.
• MCC-UE 1029 - New Media Research Studio
  New Media Research Studio is a lab dedicated to examining and deconstructing new information technology tools and environments. Students will be exposed to the contemporary discourse around new media through reading, listening and watching. We will embark on virtual journeys into media and will update the class collaborative blog with travelogues from social networking sites, massive-multi-player online environments, the blogosphere, the open source movement, radical online activist groups, internet art collectives and more.
  
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• MCC-UE 1030 - Architecture as Media: Communication Through the Built Environment

  This class reads architecture and the built environment through the lenses of media, communication, and culture. The course takes seriously the proposition that spaces communicate meaningfully and that learning to read spatial productions leads to better understanding how material and technological designs are in sustained conversation with the social, over time. Through analyses of a range of spaces from Gothic Cathedrals to suburban shopping malls to homes, factories, skyscrapers and digital cities students will acquire a vocabulary for relating representations and practices, symbols and structures, and for identifying the ideological and aesthetic positions that produce settings for everyday life.
  
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• MCC-UE 1031 - Digital Literacy

  This course offers students a foundational understanding of the technological building blocks that make up digital media and culture, and of the ways they come together to shape myriad facets of life. Students will acquire a working knowledge of the key concepts behind coding, and survey the contours of digital media architecture, familiarizing themselves with algorithms, databases, hardware, and similar key components. These technological frameworks will be examined as the basic grammar of digital media and related to theories of identity, privacy, policy, and other pertinent themes. 

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• MCC-UE 1065 - Media Events and Spectacle

  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.
  
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• MCC-UE 1140 - Screening History: The Construction of American History in Hollywood Films

  This course explores the ways in which popular Hollywood films construct the historical past, the ensuing battles among historians and the public over Hollywood's version of American history, and the ways that such films can be utilized as historical documents themselves. We will consider films as products of the culture industry; as visions of popularly understood history and national mythology; as evidence for how social conflicts have been depicted; and as evidence of how popular understanding and interpretations of the past have been revised from earlier eras to the present.

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• MCC-UE 1151 - Media History of New York
  New York has played a crucial role in the history of media, and media have played a crucial role in the history of New York. New York has been represented by media since Henry Hudson wrote his reports to the Dutch. Media institutions have contributed centrally to its economy and social fabric, while media geographies have shaped the experiences of city living. This course explores media representations, institutions, and geographies across time and is organized around the collaborative production of an online guidebook to the media history of New York.
  
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• MCC-UE 1210 - Senior Honors in Media, Culture, and Communication
  Prerequisite: senior standing and department approval to pursue honors in the major. Open only to MCC majors with senior standing. Extended primary research in media, culture, and communication focusing on the development and sharing of individual research projects. Students enroll the following semester in 2 points of Independent Study under the direction of a faculty honors sponsor, as outlined in department guidelines.
• MCC-UE 1302 - Consumption, Culture, and Identity

  This course offers students the opportunity to engage with theories of communication and culture through the context of consumption and contemporary consumer society. Our focus will be on the role of commodities and consumer practices in everyday life and in culture at large. We will give particular attention to consumption's role in the construction of social and cultural identities. Students will consider critical responses to consumer culture, including the resistance and refusal of consumption as well as the attempted mobilization of consumption toward social change.

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• MCC-UE 1302 - Global Television

  This course introduces students to theories of global television studies, the reception of American media abroad, and several case studies of television from around the world.  Students will learn about the challenges and rewards of studying global television, both of which revolve around how to study television programming and the television industry across cultures and across languages. 

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• MCC-UE 1345 - Fashion and Power

  This course examines fashion as a form of communication and culture. Through cultural and media studies theory, we will examine how fashion makes meaning, and how it has been valued through history, popular culture and media institutions, focusing on the relationship between fashion, visual self-presentation, and power. The course will situate fashion both in terms of its production and consumption, addressing its role in relation to identity and body politics (gender, race, sexuality, class), art and status, nationhood and the global economy, celebrity and Hollywood culture, youth cultures and subversive practices.
  
  Note: This course counts under two Fields of Study: Images and Screen Studies as well as Interaction and Social Processes. The course may be offered at NYU Paris. Consult with your academic advisor for course availability and description abroad.
  
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• MCC-UE 1347 - Culture of the Screen: From the Cinematic to the Handheld
  Whether large, small, wide, high-definition, public, personal, shared, or handheld, screens are one of the most pervasive technologies in everyday life. From spaces of work to spaces of leisure, screens are sites for collaboration, performance, surveillance, and resistance. This course traces the cultural history of screens through a range of forms -- from the panorama to the cinema, from the radar system to the television, and from the terminal to the mobile device -- to provide a way of thinking about the development of the screen as simultaneously architectural, material, representational and computational.
  
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• MCC-UE 1351 - War As Media
  This course examines the proposition that contemporary war should be understood as media. War has become mediatized and media has been militarized. This course treats war and poltical violence as communicative acts and technologies and focuses on how they shape our understanding and experience of landscape, vision, body, time and memory.
• MCC-UE 1352 - Empire, Revolution and Media
  This course examines the role of media in the history and emergence of empires and revolutions and the history of media empires. It focuses on the investment in media forces by both empires and revolutions, and the tendency of media to form empires that are subject to periodic revolution? in the marketplace within the contexts of colonization, decolonization and globalization. Media discussed include prints, paintings, photography, journalism, fiction, cinema, the Internet and digital media.
  
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• MCC-UE 1403 - Postcolonial Visual Culture
  This courses addresses how colonialism and postcolonialism are shaped and mediated through images and the gaze. The dynamics of colonial history motivate and shape colonial and postcolonial perceptions and influence their patterns of global circulation when the boundary between the world out there and the nation at home is increasingly blurred. We will survey a range of image texts through various media (photography, television, cinema) and sites (war, the harem, refugee camps, prisons, disasters): nationalist mobilization, counter-insurgency, urban conflict, disaster management, the prison system, and the war on terror.
  
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• MCC-UE 1410 - Global Visual Culture
  This course examines the role of visual culture in the emergence of, concepts of, and processes of globalization and the global cultural flows. In introducing students to the concept of the visual construction of the social field, the course compares the means by which cultures visualize themselves in forms ranging from the imagination to the encounter between people and visualized media. The course takes as its fundamental premise that visual culture circulates and creates meaning in increasing global flows and that the very foundations of global capital, global culture, and global media are based on the dynamics of visuality and the power systems it both affirms and challenges.
  
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• MCC-UE 1411 - Visual Culture of Science and Technology
  This course examines the imagery of science and technology, the role of visuality in the construction of scientific knowledge, artistic renditions of science, and the emergence of visual technologies in modern society. It looks at how visuality has been key to the exercise of power through such practices as cataloguing and identification; the designation of abnormality, disease, and pathologies; medical diagnosis; scientific experimentation; and the marketing of science and medicine. We will examine the development of the visual technologies in the emerging scientific practices of psychiatry and criminology; explore the sciences of eugenics, genetics, pharmacology, brain and body scans, and digital medical images of many kinds; the marketing of pharmaceuticals, and the emerging politics of scientific activism.
  
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• MCC-UE 1508 - Print, Typography and Form

   This course surveys a number of important themes in Western history and thought by way of our most omnipresent medium: typography. Organized around three major technological innovations—the printing press in the mid-15th century, multi-cylinder and sheet-fed rotary presses in the second half of the 19th century, and the desktop computer in the late 20th century—this course will look at the sociopolitically transformative power of print. Topics of study may include print’s relation to: religion and science, censorship and ownership of the press, money, advertising in the public sphere, gender politics, Nationalism, Socialism, late-20th century countercultures, as well as more contemporary concerns that arise from the transition of print to digital and online platforms. In this course we will discover that whether dealing with marketing, journalism, political activism, design, or new media, typography is a fundamental concern.

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• MCC-UE 1517 - Photography and the Visual Archive
  This course examines the role and history of photography within the historical landscape of media and communication. Special emphasis is placed on the accumulative meaning of visual archives, tracing how images relation and establish cultural territories across a variety of texts and media. The course investigates and contrasts the mimetic visual strategies within western and non-western traditions, looking at historical and contemporary images in a variety of forms.
  
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• MCC-UE 9015 / MCC-UE 1015 - Advertising and Society (Prague)

  The course examines the role of advertising not only as an economic force but also as a form of cultural representation with a focus on the social implications of the role of consumerism in contemporary society by following its various forms around the world. Students will read, watch, analyze and discuss a variety of text specific commercials. Attention will be devoted also to the impact of advertising on the post-communist world and to the ways by which cultural issues are framed and kept in mind in the media discourse. The main objective is to provide an introductory course that is meaningful and of practical importance to students. The course examines Advertising not only as an academic discipline, but also a way of perceiving and understanding our society. 

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• MCC-UE 9103 - Intro to Digital Media (Paris)

  This course is an introduction to digital media, focusing on networks, computers, the Web, and video games. Theoretical topics include the formal qualities of new media, their political dimensions, as well as questions of genre, narrative, and history. Conducted in French.

• MCC-UE 9345 / E59.1345099 - Fashion and Power (Paris)

  This course examines fashion as a form of communication and culture.  Through cultural and media studies theory, we will examine how fashion makes meaning, and how it has been valued through history, popular culture and media institutions, focusing on the relationship between fashion, visual self-presentation, and power.  The course will situate fashion both in terms of its production and consumption, addressing its role in relation to identity and body politics (gender, race, sexuality, class), art and status, nationhood and the global economy, celebrity and Hollywood culture, youth cultures and subversive practices. 

• MCC-UE 9993 - Introduction to Digital Media: Chinese Cyberculture (Shanghai)

  This course introduces the philosophy of cybernetic machines with reference to the technological trends affecting contemporary China. Topics will include: Chinese cyberspace and the Great Fire Wall; the revolutionary potential of microblogs; hacking; gaming; the ICT economy, maker innovations and machine intelligence.

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