Media, Culture & Communication (MCC-GE)

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.

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.

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

This class reads architecture and the built environment through the lenses of media, communication, and culture. Through analyses of a range of spaces - from Gothic cathedrals to suburban shopping malls to homes, factories, skyscrapers and digital cities - students will acquire a vocabulary for relating representations and practices, symbols and structures, and for identifying the ideological and aesthetic positions that produce settings for everyday life.

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

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.

Fame—celebrity, notoriety, renown—confers recognition and immortality. It is an enduring and desirable form of power; a uniquely human ambition and a central force in sociallife. Culture, commerce, politics, and religion all proffer promises of fame, whether for 15 minutes or 15 centuries. Drawing on texts from history, anthropology, sociology, this course reflects on the ethics, erotics, pragmatics and pathologies of fame. We compare fame to other forms of recognition and look at how it transforms across space-time, social boundaries, and technological conditions.

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.

Traces the development of technology from historical, current, and future-oriented perspectives. Attention given to intended and unintended consequences of technological events.

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.

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.

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.

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 & 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 & circuits to power generation & storage – in order to assess the usefulness of materialist & infrastructural analytics for understanding contemporary media systems.

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.

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.

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.

There has been much public outcry over the data-tracking practices of governments and corporations and how these threaten civil liberties. Meanwhile, people have increasingly embraced wearable technologies and smartphone apps to monitor and analyze their own bodies and lives. How do individuals "datafy" themselves and how, in turn, does data intimately shape their experience, identity, and life chances? What does contemporary self-tracking (and its pre-digital antecedents) reveal about changing cultural values, political contexts, and understandings of the self?

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.

This course will introduce students to critical video—the use of documentary, ethnographic, and research-based video to investigate and critique contemporary culture. The class offers students a theoretical overview of documentary video, a set of conceptual tools to analyze video, and an introduction to the practice of video production for small and mobile screens. Students will apply texts on video’s history, culture and distribution, as well as on the ethical challenges of video production, to their own research-based video project. No prior experience in video production is required.

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

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.

The course will focus on the tactical, strategic, & organizational uses of artistic aesthetic taken up by the activist for the purpose of social change. The course will rely on both a survey of the existing theory & scholarship on “artistic activism,” as well as close analyses of contemporary practices on a local, national & global scale. Special attention will be paid to issues of creativity & efficacy, addressing questions concerning the value of this hybrid practice as both an aesthetic & political activity.

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.

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.

This course explores how popular Hollywood films construct versions of the historical past, & 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, & they have been influential in creating audiences’ historical understanding. Hollywood films are significant & complex cultural texts, & this course will study them as artifacts of a powerful communications entertainment industry whose visions of the past & arguments regarding social, political, economic order throughout the 20th century & into the 21st centuries warrants our close examination.

This course is meant to integrate skills & 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; & giving polished oral presentations of final writing &/or web-based projects.

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.

Course examines past and current studies on language, communication theories, speech perception, and other aspects of verbal and nonverbal behavior. Students relate these studies to how gender, race, culture and sexual orientation are developed and reflected in society in both personal and professional relationships.

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.

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.

Production-based course designed as a structured classroom environment for hands-on, critical inquiry. Students receive research guidance, feedback & support for individually-designed & executed digital media/computational projects. May be taken in conjunction with another MCC course or as a stand-alone course in which students develop an independent project that may be an outgrowth of a previous MCC course.

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.

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.

This course examines theories of consumption, consumer culture, commodification, branding, and the changing patterns of media consumption. We will investigate the history of consumer society from the nineteenth century through contemporary consumer practices shaped by digital media, changing spaces of consumerism, taste and lifestyle, the consumption of entertainment media, and critiques and resistances to consumerism.

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.

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.

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.

The internship program promotes the integration of academic theory with practical experience. Internships expand student understandings of the dynamics of the ever-changing field of communication.

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?

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.

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.

A series of analyses of the history, theories, techniques, and results of propaganda in society with special focus on the relationship between interaction (sociological) propaganda and communication in our increasingly technological society; case studies drawn from public relations, commercial advertising, social movements, and the mass media.

A series of analyses of the history, theories, techniques, and results of propaganda in society with special focus on the relationship between agitation (political) propaganda and communication in our increasingly technological society; case studies drawn from national and international sources.

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.

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.

This course explores interpersonal communication choices and outcomes in our ever-changing digital landscape. The class focuses on interpersonal relationships such as family, friends, and romantic relationships and will tackle topics such as online identity, listening, starting and ending relationships, social saturation, parasocial relationships, conflict, and deception. The class will critically discuss how today’s technology (e.g., social media, email) impacts the quality of our interactions so that we have the tools needed to create successful relationships.

It should be noted that independent study requires a minimum of 45 hours of work per point. Independent study cannot be applied to the established professional education sequence in teaching curricula. Each departmental program has established its own maximum credit allowance for independent study. This information may be obtained from a student?s department. Prior to registering for independent study, each student should obtain an Independent Study Approval Form from the adviser.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

In Shanghai, food stalls, restaurants and marketplaces have migrated online. The Coronavirus pandemic intensified this virtualization. This course treats mobile food delivery as a media infrastructure and examines how new delivery systems form part of a distributed urban ecosystem. Students use critical cartography and digital storytelling to explore cultural, economic and political issues raised by the growth of food delivery apps, such as food production reorganization, socio-economic conditions of delivery workers, and shifts in the city’s built environment.

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. :

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 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 Topics in Visual Culture and Cultural Studies: Visuality and Globalization

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

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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

This umbrella course examines select topics in critical, cultural, social, and political theory, with special attention to problems of interpretation in the humanities and related social sciences in both historical and theoretical contexts.

In this doctoral seminar we examine the digital and the analog, not merely by reference to actually existing media technologies, but also, and perhaps more importantly, through encounters with theory and philosophy. Themes in the course include analogicity, digitality, the logical, the illogical, interfaces, cybernetics, psychoanalysis, geometry, and arithmetic. Readings are drawn from the work of Friedrich Kittler, Sarah Kofman, Catherine Malabou, Brian Massumi, Katherine McKittrick, Hito Steyerl, McKenzie Wark, and others.

This advanced graduate seminar offers a survey of important academic monographs documenting the history of computing, introducing students to critical objects, interventions, and authors in and around the field. Readings will be drawn from the history of technology, history of science, media studies, STS, and game studies.

Advanced reading and discussion of the foundational literature, principles, and paradigms associated with the study of media, culture, and communication.

This course provides an overview of qualitative and quantitative research methods in the interdisciplinary fields of media, cultural, communication, and technology studies. It examines the philosophical and theoretical assumptions behind various methodologies, the research questions served by different methods, the usefulness and limits of methods, and strategies to design a research project. It serves as an introduction to the research of MCC faculty.

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

This course examines specific topics within the fields of cultural studies and visual culture, with the aim of delving into particular theoretical concerns within these overlapping and interrelated fields of study. It is the aim of Special Topics courses to incorporate historical theoretical frameworks and to examine important recent scholarship on these issues.

This course examines theoretical & methodological challenges in producing cartographies of the global that pay attention to transnational flows, assemblages, circuits & disjunctures across multiple political & social processes. Paying special attention to ethnographic challenges, we will conduct close readings of select global ethnographies of media & communication in order to discuss & decenter the politics of transnational linkages organized around issues of modernity, mobility & locality.

The aim of this advanced graduate seminar is to bring together two fields which are rarely discussed together: postcolonial theory and global media studies. Although postcolonial theory is primarily concerned with issues of race, class, gender and decolonization, it has a deep underlying interest in the role of novels, narrative and visual modes in the process of decolonization. Global media studies, which focuses largely on the recent flow of money, images, peoples and commodities, needs to be critically aware of the ways in which minds, bodies and states throughout the world are still entangled in colonial modes of thought and practice. Bringing these frameworks together can cast new light on power, mediation and coloniality.

In this course students will read a set of exemplary ethnographies in the area of technology and media as a way to explore different strategies and techniques for ethnographic research, writing, and analysis. In addition to close reading and discussion, participants will plan, undertake, and report on mini-ethnographic projects. The course will be of special interest to students who intend to conduct ethnographic research for their dissertation projects (or are considering doing so).

This umbrella course is designed for doctoral students on themes related to the social, cultural, historical, and political economic meanings and effects of communication technologies. Specific themes may include: digital media, social networking, intellectual property and issues of privacy, robotics and artificial intelligence, computer hacking, genetics and biocomputing, the business of new technology.

This course provides a graduate-level introduction to the field of Science & Technology Studies (STS). We will survey the ways scholars in STS—whose research methods range from historical epistemology to medical anthropology to the sociology of science—have understood the natural world, technical systems, human perception, & the social order to be co-produced. Following Bruno Latour, throughout the course we will investigate “matters of fact” as always “matters of concern.”

Advanced reading and discussion of the foundational literature, principles, and paradigms associated with the study of media, culture, and communication.

The formulation of doctoral research problems in culture and communication. Planning of relevant methodology; criticism of work in progress.

Year long set (10-15) of professionalization classes and writing workshops on topics such as teaching, publishing, fellowships/grants, conferences, and going on the job market.