Courses

The internship program promotes the integration of academic theory with practical experience. Internships expand student understandings of the dynamics of the ever-changing field of communication.

This course explores interpersonal communication choices and outcomes in our ever-changing digital landscape. The class focuses on interpersonal relationships such as family, friends, and romantic relationships and will tackle topics such as online identity, listening, starting and ending relationships, social saturation, parasocial relationships, conflict, and deception. The class will critically discuss how today’s technology (e.g., social media, email) impacts the quality of our interactions so that we have the tools needed to create successful relationships.

This course provides an overview of the most relevant qualitative methods used to research media audiences, platforms, technologies, industry, history, policies and texts.

Readings and research on the ways in which language is implicated in different cultures and constructions of time, space, c=consciousness, self, truth, knowledge, and gender.

To what extent is "the media" governed by law, and to what extent is it a law unto itself? Does "the media" enable or unsettle the regnant forms of international order? This course will discuss shifts in the post WWII world order, as perceived through the category of media, and via issues of international law and justice. This course will seek to understand some key dynamics of changing world order, shifting between history and courtroom, to try to understand the new contours of the international world order over the course of the 20th C and to the present time.

: In this course, students develop a creative media project as their culminating MA
experience. Students are expected to have a project in mind, as well as the technical skills to produce their desired project. The course is organized as a workshop in which students present ideas, share drafts and prototypes, and provide and receive feedback. Students integrate skills and knowledge acquired during
the program to complete their new media project by the end of the semester.

No description available.

This course investigates the ways human & natural environments have been shaped by media representations & technologies, extending from newspapers, photography, & popular literature, to film, television, & video games. Integrating eco-cinema, eco-criticism, environmental communication, & environmental studies, the course explores how environments are represented in visual media through different historical & social contexts, beginning with the rise of landscape photography, scientific representations of nature, & “fictional” wildlife films, to environmental media works in the 1960s to the role of contemporary interactive & “recycling” based aesthetics.

Explores theoretical, methodological, and archival strategies for research on early or obsolete media artifacts. This seminar functions as an ongoing research studio while discussing central texts in the field of media archaeology.

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.

This class is designed to equip MCC students with the ability to translate their academic background in media and cultural analysis into a career working within a facet of the media industry and to expose them to the latest industry practices from a master media practitioner. Students are guided by an alumni instructor to make
connections between their academic coursework and current industry practice with the goal to help them understand the media industry application of their intellectual studies. Industry focus is dependent on alumni instructor’s expertise.

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.

This course examines the relationship of visual media to historical narratives and cultural memory. It looks at photography, film, television, and forms of new media in relation to theories of historiography and cultural memory.

This seminar treats the body as a bio-political medium and media as mimetic, cyborgian and visualized forms of flexible embodiment. We will explore the political encoding of bodies as a crucial, yet under-analyzed, mode of modern political communication encompassing the racialized, colonized, gendered, medicalized, technologicalized, disabled and terrorized body.

This course explores how forms of media and popular culture have historically constructed a sense of realism, authenticity, or access to direct experience through various technologies, production, marketing, programming, performance techniques and promotion practices. It will survey the history of hoaxes, spectacles, photography, documentary, news, robotics, video games, virtual reality, reality television, and social media in order to trace the history and analyze the repercussions of the ethics, aesthetics and business of "the real".

Examines developments of culture, politics, and media in contemporary Middle East through an historical and cultural lens. Course is organized by theoretical theme and geographic location and addresses culture as a site of struggle; the impact of globatlization on Arab mass media; the connections between civil society, demoracy and Islam; and gender, national and diasporic identities.

This course examines migration, mobility and the role of media and technology in redefining cultural borders and citizenship. We will discuss how the presence and representation of migrants and immigration reconfigure visions of national belonging. How are migrants imagined and surveilled in global urban contexts? How do media and technology enable the (re)imagining of transnational communities and cultural politics? Through discussions and lectures, students will engage with changing urban landscapes and emerging networks of migration.

In recent years, content moderation received attention as screening of user-generated content on social media platforms. Content moderators filter explicit materials, hate speech, and misinformation and thus play an important role in the curation of online experiences. Content moderation pertains to questions on the digital political economy, online culture, as well as democracy and social justice. This course examines the implications of content moderation for how we understand media technologies, online platforms, labor relations, and politics in the digital age.

A project-based, research-intensive course that explores emerging practices & trends in new media with particular emphasis on interactive & immersive environments, such as social networking sites, multi-player online environments, the blogosphere, the open-source movement, social activist groups, & internet-based art. Students engage in a semester-long participatory research project using collaborative web tools.

This course aims to train students to think philosophically about our rapidly
changing—and ever more intimate—relationship with machines. We focus in particular on the following subjects: artificial intelligence, robots, cyborgs, automation and science fiction speculation.