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 & 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 & circuits to power generation & storage - in order to assess the usefulness of materialist & infrastructural analytics for understanding contemporary media systems.
