Courses

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.

Focus on particular topics available allows students to broaden skills and expression. Past topics have included the figure, the landscape, pastels, and charcoal. Topics are chosen as a result of both faculty and student interest.

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.

This course seeks to investigate what history, & particularly recent history, tells us about the role of art in contemporary culture. We will look at the concept of the avant-garde & the notion of “criticality” that dominates the current art system & how that shapes art making, education, patronage, dissemination, & canonization. Mostly, we will ask ourselves questions like, what, if any, is the artist’s (& writer’s) responsibility as a producer of culture? What role does art play in global culture? How do politics affect aesthetics?

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.

Not Available.

Course topics will vary from semester to semester.

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.