Media, Culture and Communication (MCC-UH)

Abu Dhabi contains many worlds, from five-star hotel restaurants to South Asian migrant workers eating on the job. This course uses food to explore the daily life of a global city in the Middle East. The course combines intensive reading and writing assignments with reporting and field trips. With Abu Dhabi as their beat, students explore the role of markets; traditional Bedouin cuisine and the rituals of eating it; the hidden lives of food producers and growers; the cuisine of exile; the business of food; edible geography; and other topics drawing on anthropology, economics, culture, politics, and urban studies. Students participate in hands-on experiences like visits to local markets and restaurants. Each student is expected to find, report, and write a feature article about a food-related location in Abu Dhabi. Readings range from medieval Arabic culinary manuals and classics of cultural anthropology to contemporary food reporting and literature, with an emphasis on the Middle East.

This course will investigate the landscapes brought into view by a specific media artifact, in this case the critically acclaimed HBO show, The Wire. This is a TV series about a "black site" ostensibly in Baltimore but in fact stretched across the American heartland, namely the African American urban underclass. The series could be called a case study in making the urban underclass simultaneously spectacular and theoretically invisible. It has been seen as an example of the critical and creative turn taken by a segment of the cultural industry, as a maturation of the audience and a demassification of viewer tastes in the era of addressable mass culture. The show's creator David Simon has also described it as a move away from postmodern irony and narrative fragmentation and as based on the mythic traditions of ancient Greece.

Media are everywhere -- from optic fibers underground, and devices like smartphones and touchpads, to apps such as Snapchat and Yik-Yak. As technologies keep changing, so too do media theories, although much of the old media doesn't go away. We have newspapers, radio, and television, but have we theorized them adequately in their new incarnations? This course links the global history of media technology with the history of ideas, and in doing so to relate theory to media objects in ways that will empower students and clarify how we understand our media environment. Drawing on materials from film and television to political history, the course examines the emergence and spread both of media and of "media theory," in close connection with and occasional divergence from each other. Surveying select case studies from across the globe, students will seek to establish historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding media's global impact.

Students will look at the media in Morocco today and understand the current situation by studying the developments that took place over the last decade. What are the ethics of reporting on a revolution and its aftermath? What critical frameworks shape our understanding of the roles played by media and social media in the unfolding of such events? This course in foreign reporting takes as a central case study the state of the media in Morocco and the broader region following the Arab Spring. During the two first weeks of the course, the students will learn techniques of feature writing and journalism ethics. During the third week, they will remotely research and write about a topic of their choosing on Morocco. The content of the readings is heavily based on human rights and politics in Morocco. Students will read and discuss long-form readings on the Middle East and more specifically on Morocco as well as daily news reading on Morocco. A longtime foreign correspondent with the National Public Radio will skype with the class to talk about their experience internationally and in Morocco.

How does a writer from abroad, a stranger in a strange land, get to know an unfamiliar city or country? Is it possible to write fairly about an unfamiliar culture? Is it possible to avoid the pitfalls of "parachute" journalism and take the time to know a culture from within? What does it mean to be an outsider? A tourist? A journalist? What are the special challenges of reporting in an unfamiliar context? What are the special rewards? And how does travel in a new world change the traveler? In this course you will engage with these, and related, questions through a variety of lenses, reading some of the best travel writing of the past and present and writing several pieces of your own. This is a course in reading and writing nonfiction - and a course in thinking about culture, in all its many meanings. Our culture, the culture we live in - and perhaps our particular subculture - informs our experience of other cultures and the world. You will experiment with various forms of journalistic and essay writing, engaging with Sydney and yourselves.

The last several decades have witnessed a "memory boom" throughout much of the world, most visibly through the building of numerous memorials and memory museums, as well as high-profile debates about memory. This course examines the intersections of visual culture, commemoration, nationalism, and social movements with the politics of memory in the global context. We will study the contestations over memorialization and artistic engagements with the memory of traumatic events, with a particular focus on the politics of memory in Argentina regarding state terrorism from 1976-1983. The course will put memory projects in Argentina into comparative dialogue with examples of memorialization in other contexts such as 9/11 in the United States, the Holocaust in Germany, and state terrorism in Chile, Peru, and throughout Latin America. Through explorations of how art, photography, digital media, and design have shaped cultural memory in these contexts, we will investigate the aesthetics of memory, the role of pedagogy in memorial museums, the spatialization of memory, the digitalization of memory, the role of human rights, and the deployment of memory into political action.

Accurate accounts of the past are made possible in large part due to the existence of primary documents deposited in public and private archives. In this class we will explore the vast array of materials housed in a range of public repositories and how they help illuminate the history of the UAE. Students will review primary material to consider how archives are used by documentary filmmakers, historians and other scholars and their role in shaping history and the identity of the UAE. We will visit a variety of sites, including the UAE National Archives and Qasr Al Hosn in Abu Dhabi, and the Peace Memorial Museum, National Film Library and Archive and the National Archive in Zanzibar. Students will also be introduced to the growing number of online databases and consider the future of history given the challenge of preserving information in the Digital Age. Each student will embark on a preliminary archival research project that delves into an under-explored aspect of UAE history. The class will culminate in a class presentation on a research project on a UAE figure.

'You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.' - James Baldwin. Comprehensive news coverage of Africa is scant. The sparse coverage is often a variation of an incomplete portrait that has dominated the Western media for the last 50 years: tales of starvation, political instability and disease are mainstays. There is often little historical or political context this coverage. Even with the Internet and global access to African journalism, the stereotypical portraits of a 'dark continent' persists. But in recent years, a cadre of African writers have begun to change that narrative. These writers, worldly and comfortable on global streets, have churned out works that center a nuanced portrait of contemporary life in African cities today. They have been able to have some success in their literature in ways that contemporary journalism from this region has never been able to. This course will provide students with an understanding of contemporary issues in African cities, as well as how literature is tackling these issues.

This course is designed to provide students with an understanding of the distinctive historical and political developments of media from an Emirati context, and engage in focused dialogue to develop critical assessment of the relation between media, culture, gender, and politics in the Emirates. This course is also designed to expose students to a range of cultural, theoretical, and comparative research undertaken in the field of media practices in the Arab Gulf States and the Middle East to acquire the theoretical tools necessary to understand the cultural context and political role of media in the Emirates. As this course advances, students will be prompted to problematize the role the state plays in media and in the representation of Emirati women in this field, and think through the role traditional and new media have played in shaping the journalistic experiences inside the newsroom, and in shaping public opinion in the Emirates.

The UAE and Italy offer fascinating case studies in the production of culture. While both countries are deeply integrated in global markets, their governments, businesses, and civil society sectors construct unique hubs of cultural creativity as part of their "nation-branding." Six cities and their surroundings - Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Rome, Bologna, and Milan - will be our laboratories. We will meet with creators and support personnel working in a variety of cultural fields: music, art galleries and museums, film, digital news, television, photography, food cultures, and more. Students will critically reflect on cross-national and regional differences, write a daily journal on readings and site visits, and develop skills in conducting and communicating primary research. They will deepen their understanding of the social, organizational, and political processes that shape the making of contemporary cultures, and in dialogue with public and nonprofit officials, draw lessons for cultural practice and policy. NOTE: Pending feasible international travel conditions, this course will include a seminar in Italy.