51-2226 Media, Politics and Intervention

The media, traditional and new, has been a central aspect of US and global culture, politics, and life over the last several decades. To understand and interrogate the multiple roles, functions, and contexts of media, this course will draw on the critical theoretical legacies and conceptual tools of media studies and cultural studies. This will help students locate media forms, texts, practices, institutions, and industries in their larger social, political, economic, and ideological contexts and to begin to comprehend their histories, present(s), and also imagine their future(s). Combining both critical theoretical work and applied studies of the media, the course takes an interdisciplinary approach and draws freely on the social sciences and the humanities traditions. More specifically, in an attempt to comprehend the whole circuit of media/circuit of culture² (production-text-consumption), the course will engage social and political theory, cultural studies, textual analysis, ethnography, critical political economy, and cultural policy studies, among others. The course will also be addressing key questions including, but NOT limited to, the role of the state; media effects; the politics of the media; the politics of representation, subjectivity and agency; media and ideology; and political activism.

3 Credits
GA HU