Introduction to Media and Cultural Studi

This course serves as an introduction to key texts, concepts, and thinkers in Media and Cultural Studies. Rather than presenting a reductionist, linear narrative that uncritically traces the triumphs of Western technological innovations and genius individuals, this course instead explores media as organizational and management devices that produce particular kinds of knowledge and power, including by influencing our understanding of social issues and social justice.

We will explore how media, as vehicles of knowledge production, are intimately connected to meaning-making, policing, and exclusion practices. At the same time, media can be repurposed as instruments for liberation struggles and emancipatory imaginaries of all kinds. Throughout the course, we will learn about these themes both through the lens of a critical history of the present, emphasizing the long-standing value struggles that underpin media environments and inform practices of re-mediation and cultural production, and also through being in conversation with recent trends in media studies and contemporary social issues.