Courses

Topics in Digital Media: Games Studies

A critical, humanities-based exploration of games, focusing largely on digital gaming. First half of semester explores foundational texts and topics within game studies (narratology vs. ludology, play culture, gender and gaming), while second half covers recently published scholarship in the field.

Topics in Digital Media: Hacking in Technology, Politics and Society

This class will study hacking by looking at technology (what hackers do), politics and law (how hackers changed both), and society (how hackers are understood). We will study cryptography and privacy, digital infrastructure, the Internet of (hackable) Things, monetization and industry, whistleblowing, reverse engineering and hardware analysis, hacker ethics, free and open source information, the rise of state-sponsored hacking, and social media manipulation. The class will cover technical topics but assumes no prior technical knowledge by the students.

Topics in Digital Media: Platforms and Society

Platforms are instrumental in mediating a wide range of phenomena, including social interaction, economic transactions, resource access, information circulation, cultural experiences, and more. Their ubiquity in everyday life is documented in concepts of platformization and platform capitalism and an emerging discipline of platform studies. This course explores the metaphors, histories, logics, and materialities of platforms. Through lenses of media studies, political economy, and anthropology, students investigate the implications of platforms in contemporary life.

Topics in Digital Media: Privacy/Surveillance

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.

Topics in Digital Media: Queer and Trans Game Studies

This course examines the political movement of queer and transgender artists and programmers who are creating games and computational media. Throughout the semester, we will read work by queer, trans, and feminist scholars and game designers and play the games they designed in order to situate today’s queer and trans games movement within the histories, contributions, and politics of queer and trans people and people of color. How might we re-imagine the radical potentiality of video games by centering game studies on queer and trans life, history and experience?

Topics in Digital Media: Systems Thinking

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.

Topics in Globalization

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.

Topics in Globalization: Cultural Dimensions

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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Topics in Globalization: Surveillance/Sousveillance

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.

Topics in Visual Culture & Cultural Studies: Visuality & Globalization

Special Topics in Visual Culture and Cultural Studies: Visuality and Globalization

Transnational Media Flows

Analyzes the global flow of media products, in particular the circulation of television and film in transnational contexts, at the intersection of political economy (economic, business, and institutional frameworks) with cultural economy (the cultural meanings of these television and film products). Focuses on case studies of the supranational regional players in some of the most important geo-linguistic world markets, where the tensions between global/transnational media flows and local interests are most evident, engaging with theoretical positions ranging from critiques of the homogenizing effects of globalization to those that affirm the changing power relations of counter-flows based on audience preferences.

Visual Culture Methods

This course is an introduction to the history and theory of vision and visuality, with a particular focus on research methods in the study of visual culture. The course focuses on the research methods and approaches specific to the field of visual culture and related fields of study, its scholarly literature, its theoretical genealogy, and the stakes in interdisciplinary research.

Visual Cultures of the Modern and Global City Class

This course examines visual culture through a focus on the city, from the dynamics of visuality in the nineteenth-century modern cityscape to the mega cities of globalization. We will look at the visual dynamics of urbanscapes, architecture, cinema, memory, and consumerism in the visual culture of the city.

War and Media Theory

This seminar explores the practices of war as modes of material political communication in which media is militarized and violence is mediatized. This seminar will examine how modern warfare has generated new visual cultures, new media networks and the sensorium of modernity.