Graduate Courses

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.

This course will cover the origins of social justice theory and its current-day relevance for higher education educators and practitioners. Students will explore models of oppression and empowerment and learn to infuse social justice frameworks into curricular and extracurricular programming.

This course will provide students with analyses, perspectives and contrasting views of the philosophy, history, mission, purpose and role of higher education institutions in America's diverse, contemporary society. It will go beyond the immediate issues facing higher education and focus on primary causes, examining three forces with the potential to transform higher education- demographics, the economy and the workforce, and technology. It will examine the nature and potential impact of each as well as the combined impact of all three, and seek to answer the question of how higher education can be expected to change in the years ahead.

Topics vary from year to year. See course descriptions in the course notes.

Topics vary from year to year. See course descriptions in the course notes.

Special Topics in Visual Culture and Cultural Studies: Visuality and Globalization

This course examines photographers who engage in sustained studies of interior
worlds as practices, meditations, and journeys of the artists and the people they document. The course focuses on themes and topics of intimate relationships, self-study, psychic and spiritual life, mental health, daily rituals, and the body. Engaging visual theory, narrative writing, and artists’ portfolios, we study the techniques, processes, and aesthetics that image-makers employ to express interior life.

This course focuses on the analysis of theoretically supported methodologies in applied psychology, art therapy, communicative science and disorders, drama therapy, music therapy, nutrition, occupational therapy, and physical therapy within the context of patient based management. This course engages students in clinical cases to apply interdisciplinary theories for evaluation and intervention. Theories and methods will be addressed related to models within a biopsychosocial perspective with emphasis on co-morbidity complications.

The best leaders inspire others through the power of their example. This course engages students in a practical research-based approach to transformational leadership practice. Students will: develop their own personal platforms as transformational leaders; deepen their sense of life purpose and professional commitments; increase their competencies for understanding and influencing others; learn how to cope with complexity in the workplace, and practice strategies for self-renewal and self-care as transformational leaders.

Examines the challenges of transforming high schools to increase educational opportunity & outcomes of urban youth. We will investigate past efforts to transform urban high schools as well as more current school reform efforts such as small schools, charter schools & middle colleges. Using relevant theories on educational change & an in-depth study of school reform, we will examine the roles that principals, teachers, & external providers play in sustaining the change process & analyze the challenges of leading , teaching & learning in today’s changing urban high schools.