Graduate Courses

Master's thesis preparation and presentation class. The class will cover academic writing, research methods, testing with human subjects, data analysis, oral presentation techniques, and feature class discussions about published papers and theses. It will conclude with an oral thesis defense required of all graduating master's students.

This course serves as the first-semester master’s thesis research and writing class. It covers research methods, testing with human subjects, data analysis, and academic writing. Students are expected to complete the major pre-writing work on their projects by the end of the semester.

This course serves as the master’s thesis writing and presentation class. It covers academic writing and oral presentation techniques, and features class discussions about published papers and theses. It concludes with an oral thesis defense required of all graduating master’s students

This course focuses on further developing a body of work for exhibition & a correlating written thesis. Students work closely with a leading artist, writer, or critic to develop a narrative context for their thesis & final exhibition.

Students develop detailed proposals for their thesis research, obtain IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval (when applicable) and commence thesis work.

This seminar supports students in developing, researching and writing their
Master’s thesis. The purpose of the Master’s thesis is to facilitate the integration of theory and practice in drama therapy and to provide a foundation from which students are able to articulate their interests in the field. This seminar was designed to clarify the scope, options, and timeline associated with the thesis project and to facilitate successful completion.

This course examines Tonmeister theories & techniques related to recording acoustic music in concert hall settings. Students will sharpen their recording skills with class lectures & live recording sessions. Producing classical music is the primary focus, however other acoustic music genres including jazz, world, & folk will be examined. Topics include spot and stereo microphone technique, concert hall acoustics, & record production.

Course examines advanced Tonmeister music production theories & techniques related to recording acoustic music for playback on immersive sound systems. Students will sharpen their recording skills through class lectures & live recording sessions. Topics include surround sound (Dolby 5.1), surround with height channels (Auro-3D), wave field synthesis (WFS), immersive audio, & object based systems (Dolby ATMOS).

Designed for current theoretical research in digital media. It is expected that course themes will vary to reflect debates in the field. Topics may include the following: computers and pedagogy: on-line communities; on-line publishing; the cultural history of software; video games studies.

This seminar will introduce students to 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.

As our society becomes increasingly "datified", algorithms are capable of penetrating and reconfiguring our daily experience to an unprecedented extent. This course takes a critical approach to data analytics and practices to better understand the connections between emerging socio-technical systems and cultural transformations. It provides the knowledge foundation and conceptual sensitivity for comprehending the ongoing "algorithmic turn" of our culture.

Artificial intelligence research has always been accompanied by optimistic claims about what computers can do and critiques exposing what they can't. This course tracks the historical and philosophical frameworks of such controversies. Through case studies, the seminar examines the development of AI programs and critical reflections on them. It focuses on the intersection among theories of subjectivity and the project of building intelligent artifacts. The course ends by investigating recent theoretical discussions of algorithmic processes and instrumental reason.

A critical, humanities-based exploration of games, focusing largely on digital gaming. First half of semester explores foundational texts and topics within game studies (narratology vs. ludology, play culture, gender and gaming), while second half covers recently published scholarship in the field.

This class will study hacking by looking at technology (what hackers do), politics and law (how hackers changed both), and society (how hackers are understood). We will study cryptography and privacy, digital infrastructure, the Internet of (hackable) Things, monetization and industry, whistleblowing, reverse engineering and hardware analysis, hacker ethics, free and open source information, the rise of state-sponsored hacking, and social media manipulation. The class will cover technical topics but assumes no prior technical knowledge by the students.

Platforms are instrumental in mediating a wide range of phenomena, including social interaction, economic transactions, resource access, information circulation, cultural experiences, and more. Their ubiquity in everyday life is documented in concepts of platformization and platform capitalism and an emerging discipline of platform studies. This course explores the metaphors, histories, logics, and materialities of platforms. Through lenses of media studies, political economy, and anthropology, students investigate the implications of platforms in contemporary life.

This course examines three aspects of the surveillance system: the history and future of the technologies, the institutions that deploy them (e.g., private companies, military organizations, civil states), and moral and ethical questions around public, private, and surveilled media. Students learn about surveillance and privacy tools; analyze the challenges they pose to social structures like national jurisdictions, sovereign borders, and the model of private life and introspection; explain the consequences of their use; and design and argue for alternative systems.

Systems thinking is an episteme. Characteristic of the natural sciences, systems thinking has heavily, if unevenly, influenced human sciences. It has informed the management of bureaucracy, corporations, populations, and national economy. Systemic governing has further collapsed into commerce with the consolidation of platform monopoly. In all these instances, legibility structures are designed, constructed, and employed to make a world readable (seeing it as a system) and manipulable (turning it into a project). This course examines these various institutional efforts and their consequences on the world they target.

This umbrella course is designed to examine specific topics within the field of globalization, one of the core areas of focus in the MCC MA program. It incorporates historical theoretical frameworks and situates contemporary readings in relation to genealogies of the field. Specific themes may include global consumer culture; international development; gender and globalization; visuality and globalization; and global cultures of finance.

The best way to understand the role of media in today's environment is to
understand the broader dynamics of cultural globalization since the 1970's. We will therefore focus on a series of topics, beginning with commodity chains and flows, and continuing to discussions of religion, migration and financialization in the last half century. In the last phase of the seminar, we will look at advertising, branding and corporate promotion in the era of big data and social media.
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Our daily movements and communicative acts are caught in nets of visual and digital inspection called surveillance "watching from above" the power of compulsory visibility. Not only the present, but the past can be surveilled and controlled through the manipulation of historical memory and fake news. This course asks: can sousveillance, "watching from below," promote social change and cultural counter-memory? We will navigate Madrid as a historical laboratory of conflicting visual histories, memories and spatial experience.