Welcome to the blog.

This is a space for students to blog about the assigned material for the day they chose to lead discussion.

This course is an introduction to media studies theoretical concepts and
frames. We ask what are the important interventions in media studies and how has
media studies addressed new developments in technology, genre, and form? The
class also considers the relationship between media (TV, internet, video, film,
radio, music, etc) and issues of power and difference. Throughout the course we
interrogate how racial, gender, or sexual identities get treated within media and
cultural production. What other categories of difference figure within (or are
omitted from) the literature? At the heart of the course are questions concerning the
politics of representation.

By the end of the course students should:
• Be well versed in a variety of conceptual themes and theoretical approaches
to the study of media
• Have basic skills in analysis of media production and consumption habits
and practices
• Be confident evaluating a variety of media texts using critical analytic
approaches
• Understand the workings of power and resistance in media texts.

 

Class Leaders:

Leaders are asked to assign the class one outside media text (TV episode, video, film, podcast, song, etc.) from popular culture that relates to that week’s readings. Leaders should use this text along with the assigned readings to create a blog post in advance of their presentation that summarizes the readings and poses questions to activate class discussion. The questions should be grounded in the material and lead us to make connections between the texts. For the outside material, the ideal media text will address the themes of the class period for which you are presenting and will further prompt class discussion.