Courses

Religion and Media

This course will examine some key writings on the topic of religion. The changing modes of religion's mediation will be addressed by examining key historical controversies over the place of religion, including the growth of practices of religious and political action that are apparently fueled and partly enacted via technological media.

Researching Social Media

This course introduces students to recent scholarly research on all aspects of social media and the research methodologies used to conduct that research. This course will focus on research that attempts to disrupt common place assumptions about the origins and development of social media, and consider the rise of the attention economy, the influencer industry, and algorithm culture, all with an emphasis on people in relation to technology.

Screening History: American History in Hollywood

This course explores how popular Hollywood films construct versions of the historical past, and can be utilized as historical documents themselves. The films reach mass audiences, they entertain, they mythologize, they produce compelling narratives about the past, they simplify complex problems, and they have been influential in creating audiences’ historical understanding. Hollywood films are significant and complex cultural texts, and this course will study them as artifacts of a powerful communications entertainment industry whose visions of the past and arguments regarding social, political, economic order throughout the 20th century and into the 21st centuries warrants our close examination.

Seminar in Media Criticism I

Analysis of the media environment from a variety of critical perspectives. Emphasis on writing as well as reading media criticism.

Social Life of Paper

What is the cultural work performed by or with the technology of paper? How can history of paper supplement and enrich recent histories of printing technology and printed artifacts like 'the book'? What would it mean to imagine a paperless future? Organized around discussions of readings in common, this course considers the history, production, circulation and use of paper in the social production of knowledge, the shared imagination of value, and the mutual relations of consumers and commodities.

Sound Studies

This course examines central themes in the emerging field of “Sound Studies”. We explore a range of histories, archeologies and ethnographies of sound and listening, as it intersects with topics in media studies, science and technology studies, political economy and musicology. How has our experience of sound changed as we move from the piano to the personal computer, from the phonoautograph to the mp3? How have political, commercial, and cultural forces shaped what we are able to listen to, and how we listen to it? Finally, how have performers, physiologists, acousticians, engineers and philosophers worked to understand this radical transformation of the senses?

Special Topics in Visual Culture & Cultural Studies: The Political History of Visual Display & Representation

Special Topics in Visual Culture and Cultural Studies

This umbrella course is designed to examine specific topics within the field of visual culture, one of the core areas of focus in the MCC MA program. Incorporates historical, theoretical frameworks and situates contemporary readings in relation to genealogies of the field. Specific themes may include globalization and memory; visual culture and eco-criticism; the visual culture of science and technology; visual culture, diaspora, and post colonialism; the politics of visual display; the history of screen; global flows and visual culture; and visuality and modernity.

Special Tpcs in Visual Culture/CulturalStudies: Semiotics of Media, Arts/Performance

This course will explore semiotics and performance theory by comparing the modes of performance used in media (including television, film, radio, advertising, theater, music and visual art) with social performance in general. Readings will draw from classic and contemporary work in semiotics, performance theory and linguistic anthropology, analyzing media and art forms from around the world. Students will engage with the theoretical concepts and analytical models encountered in class by applying them to a media form, performance or piece of art of their own choosing.

Studies in Organizational Communication

This course examines organization communication and the influences that create and define organizational climate. Topics include: diagnosing organizational cultures; the effects of gender, culture and race on organizational communication; communication and leadership; and organizational conflict.

Surveillance/Sousveillance

Optical and auditory powers of inspection, traversing, facial recognition algorithms, drone overflights and surveillance capitalism have historically and politically rendered residual concepts of movement, communication and privacy anachronistic. History can be surveilled and reedited through counterfactuality. The technocratic, political and corporate centralization of exposure precipitates counter-surveillance activism or sousveillance such as Black Lives Matter, new aesthetic strategies of evasion and new cognitive mappings of public/private space.

The Politics of the Gaze: Sensory Formations of Modernity

The meditation and technological development of vision and its dominance over the human sensorium is integral to the emergence of the modern, including experiences of urbanism, consumer desire, gender/sexual identities, race and ethnicity, trans-cultural image systems, aesthetic production, and the making of power and political truth claims. This seminar will focus on introducing participants to the core theories and analytic methods of visual culture, and the socio-political history of the human sensorium in a variety of disciplines, including ethnography, social history, urban studies, cinema studies, social geography, material culture studies, and media studies.

The Psychic Life of Media: History and Theory

The Racial Web

Students will examine the sources, content, and flow of racial and radicalized discourse on the web, as well as a broader variety of issues related to race and digital media. Central themes of racial formation and critical race theory, coupled with foundational concepts from graph theory and social network analysis will guide explorations into the multifaceted ways in which racial disadvantage , exclusion, segregation and disparate treatment get produced and reproduced in cyberspace.

Theoretical Synthesis for Research- Writing- and Teaching

This course will develop students’ ability to synthesize key theories and concepts in the study of media, culture, and communication, through the mapping of conceptual fields and development of syllabi aimed at core theories and individual research areas, drawing out relationships—logical, epistemological, historical, and methodological between relevant concepts, theories, schools of thought, and subdisciplines.

Thesis in Media- Culture- and Communication

The thesis project synthesized general knowledge in the field of media, culture and communication as well as demonstrates a high level of competency in the candidate's chosen area of study in accordance with institutional and state regulations.

Topics in Digital Media

Designed for current theoretical research in digital media. It is expected that course themes will vary to reflect debates in the field. Topics may include the following: computers and pedagogy: on-line communities; on-line publishing; the cultural history of software; video games studies.

Topics in Digital Media: Digital Media and Materiality

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.

Topics in Digital Media: Algorithmic Cultures

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.

Topics in Digital Media: Computation and Critique

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.