Courses

Introduction to Methods in Media Studies

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

Languages and Culture

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.

Law- Media- and World Order

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.

MA Media Projects

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.

Media Activism

This interactive and discussion-oriented course provides an introduction to the politics and tactics underlying five broad categories of media activism: media interventions at the levels of representation- labor relations- policy- strategic communication- and "alternative" media making. The course will rely on both a survey of the existing scholarship on media activism- as well as close analyses of actual activist practices within both old and new media. As a class- we will examine a wide-range of digital media as well as local- national- and global media activist institutions.

Media and the Environment

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

Media Archaeology

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.

Media Events and Spectacle

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.

Media- Culture- & Communication Core Seminar

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.

Media- Memory- and History

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.

Mediating the Bio-Political Body

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.

Mediating the Real

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".

Middle East Media and Cultural Politics

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.

Migration- Media- and The Global City

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.

Moderating the Internet

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.

Philosophy of Technology

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.

Political Communication

Communicative aspects of American government, including the preparation of candidates, the electoral process, political advertising and public relations. The use of strategic communication to influence political agendas, the formation of public policy, and the process of political debate.

Production of Culture in the Digital Age

This is an exciting and potentially transformative moment for cultural production across the globe. This class will go behind the scenes to explore how culture (music, cinema, art, journalism, television dramas, social media, etc.) actually gets made. We will adopt a critical approach, reflecting on what's at stake, and investigate the social-structural, organizational, and technological forces that partially determine the aesthetic and political qualities of a range of cultural products.

Professional Writing and Research Applications

This course is meant to integrate skills and knowledge acquired during the master’s program to achieve a professional level of competency in several areas: writing for professional journals or websites; developing survey or other instruments for data production; surveying the scholarly literature; writing scholarly abstracts; understanding the processes of self-editing and peer reviewing; and giving polished oral presentations of final writing and/or web-based projects.

Race Media

This course focuses on the ways that media have shaped public discourse about race and racism both within and beyond the confines of the United States. The course considers a variety of media - television sitcoms and drama, television and print news, film, popular music, the internet and others - for the purpose of investigating how media have and continue to variably influence the public's 'racial agenda,' and the general content, tone and tenor of racial conversation in the public sphere.