left-arrowleft-arrowright-arrowleft-arrowAsset 9
Logo
'

Media Theory

ARHI 186W PO-01: Interog Whiteness: Race, Sex, Rep

  • Instructor: Jackson, Phyllis
    • Thursday, 1:15-4:00 PM
    • LE Room 110 (LeBus Court)
    • Media Theory

Interdisciplinary course studying select African disaporan visual arts interrogating linguistic, conceptual, and visual solipsisms contributing to the construction and reproduction of whiteness in aesthetics, studio art, film, video, and social media. Course assignments and activities develop critical visual literacy employing a constructionist approach to the production of knowledge and cultural criticism. Students encouraged to decode and deconstruct interlocking binary oppositions, such as blackness/whiteness, female/male, propaganda/art, modernity/postmodernity, citizen/immigrant, which dominate in Euroethnic intellectual thought, our racially-gendered relations of power, representational practices, and contemporary [white] nationalist visual grammar. Letter grade only.

ART 181D SC-01: Special Topics in Studio Art- Polemics in Contemp Art/Culture

  • Instructor: Lin, Jessica
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 1:15-2:30 PM
    • Lang Art Bldg, Room 214
    • Media Theory

On Transparency: Polemics of Representation and Embodied Practices in Contemporary Art and Culture. The act of using language to define one’s identity is crucial for discussing and understanding social inequalities. However, it can also serve as an oppressive tool that perpetuates the subjugation of marginalized groups. When expressions of resistance are co-opted and institutionalized, their impact can become diluted, rendering them ineffectual. In this course, we will explore how contemporary artists approach the concepts of identity in their work, whether by addressing, resisting, or subverting these notions. Our exploration will include readings, screenings, and a class project. The course emphasizes critical engagement with discourse and theory, discouraging the mere repetition of ideas. This course meets the Fine Arts GE.

MS 085 PO-01: Dialectical Image

  • Instructor: Esmaeli, Kouross
    • Friday, 1:15-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 207 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

The course aims to guide students to understand the process where visual media participate in changing the world around them and to see themselves as producers of media that is part of that social change. So we will look at theories of social change and theories of visual culture. The students will be expected to experiment with the ideas they read through short media production assignments throughout the semester. The final project of the class will be a written theoretical essay where they will synthesize the theories they have learned and explain, in the form of an artist statement, the way these theories informed their media production.

MS 090 PZ-01: Ecodocumentary

  • Instructor: Talmor, Ruti
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 9:35-10:50 AM
    • West Hall Q120
    • Media History or Media Theory or /Adv. Production

In recent years, as the Anthropocene has become a central framework within the academy, the subfield of ecocinema has developed within media studies. This course will focus on ecodocumentary. Topics include environmental/manmade catastrophe, industrialization, anthropogenic climate change, interspecies relations, ecojustice, environmental racism, consumerism and waste. Readings will draw from a range of fields including ecocriticism and ecocinema studies. Supported by the Robert Redford Conservancy (RRC), this course will teach students the history, theory and production of ecodocumentary. By the end of the course, student teams will have collaborated with RRC partners in the Inland Empire to create short documentaries.

MS 125 PZ-01: Media, Art, and the Nonhuman

  • Instructor: Cecchet, Alessia
    • Wednesday, 2:45-5:30 PM
    • Broad Hall 207
    • Media Theory

This course engages with Western practices of looking, exhibiting, and evaluating the natural world. Over the course of the semester, students will examine Western representational practices (film, TV but also museums and other institutions) and how they work to create and reinforce specific attitudes towards nonhuman entities. Structured as a seminar, the class will create a space in which students will engage with relevant scholarly work, discuss, and analyze these practices, and create tangible, non-language-based responses through artmaking.

MS 125 SC-01: Critical Games Studies

  • Instructor: Moralde, Oscar
    • Monday/Wednesday, 2:45-4:00PM
    • Steele Hall, Room 101
    • Media History or Media Theory
This course provides students with the intellectual framework and critical vocabulary to examine video games as media texts. We will inevitably address questions of politics: how can games shape, and how are they shaped by, the current of public life? Who gets to play, particularly along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class? Live and recorded gameplay demonstrations will provide students with the material for criticism and inquiry, alongside contemporary critical games writing that will serve as models for their own writing projects. Participants do not need previous experience with games or computers, but only a willingness to engage with games and gameplay within a critical context.Course meets Media Theory requirement for Media Studies majors.

MS 131 PO-01: The “Two” and Media

  • Instructor: Engley, Ryan
    • Monday/Wednesday, 11:00-12:15 PM
    • CR Room 02 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

This course focuses on theoretical questions regarding the “two”: the social tie, friendship, confession, and the relationship between the individual subject and the group. This class will ground its inquiry in the fundamental question: what do we make of the encounter between the one and an(other)? To answer this, we will examine a challenging set of philosophical texts and a range of media that revolve around the intersubjective relation (or non-relation) of two central characters or figures. Objects of study will include Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s television series Fleabag, Season 1 of Sarah Koenig’s podcast Serial and Fumito Ueda’s classic minimalist video game Ico. Letter grade only.

Prerequisites: MS 049 PO or MS 050 PO or MS 051 PO or MS 092 PO or equivalents.

MS 148D PO-01: Powers of Pleasure

  • Instructor: Friedlander, Jennifer
    • Friday, 1:15-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 08 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

This course interrogates John Fiske’s contention that “pleasure may be the bait on the hook of hegemony, but it is always more than this; it always involves an element that escapes the system of power.” With this claim in mind, we will: 1) evaluate key arguments in the field regarding pleasure’s complicity with dominant ideological frameworks–particularly with regard to normative views of gender, race, class and sexuality; 2) consider ways in which the critique of pleasure itself may collude with patriarchal, racist, clasist and heteronormative systems of thought; and 3) explore the possibilities for pleasure to undermine established systems of power. Letter grade only. Prerequisites: MS 049 PO, MS 050 PO, and MS 051 PO.

MS 149G PO-01: Theory & Aesthetics- Television

  • Instructor: Engley, Ryan
    • Monday/Wednesday, 2:45-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 08 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

This advanced Media Studies course deepens the study of television from an aesthetic, theoretical, and critical perspective. Students will learn a number of terms, theoretical concepts and methodological approaches to critically evaluate and analyze television texts. This course will build on the concepts taught in MS092 by expanding inquiry into studies of industry and technology, narrative and form, and audiences and social reception. Prerequisites: MS 049 PO, MS 050 PO, or MS 051 PO and MS 092.

MS 149T PO-01: Seminar: Critical Studies- Core Theories in Media Studies

  • Instructor: Friedlander, Jennifer
    • Tuesday, 1:15-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 08 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

An overview of core traditions in Critical Media Studies through in-depth engagement with key texts. This course serves as preparation for the Senior Seminar by consolidating a foundation in critical theory. Areas of focus include the following: The Frankfurt School, The Chicago School, Pragmatism, Structuralism and Post- Structuralism, Semiotics, Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Psychoanalytical Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and Critical Race Theory. Prerequisites: MS 049 PO, MS 050 PO, or MS 051 PO, and one upper level theory class (MS 147 PO – MS 149 PO). May be repeated once for credit.

MS 175 PO-01: “Horror” and The American Horror

  • Instructor: Wynter, Kevin
    • Tuesday/Thursday, 2:45-4:00 PM
    • CR Room 10 (Crookshank Hall)
    • Media Theory

Of all the film genres that partition and divide the products of American cinema, the horror genre has proven to be the most durable and the most easily adaptable to the shifting historical circumstances and socio-political anxieties to which it runs parallel. This course examines some of the key factors that have contributed to the horror genres capacity to maintain its continued viability in popular culture across a wide range of media including graphic novels, video art, and interactive gaming. Beginning with the modern period of the American horror film and then expanding beyond its physical and ideological borders, this course is designed to encourage students to challenge the ideas that have become associated with the term “horror,” and to consider whether some other term or terms may be better suited to describe the types of feelings horror films and its related forms of media actually inspire. We will consider some of the following questions: What is horror? Do horror genre films truly inspire horror or are we, as participants, moved by some other affect or response? Is it possible to locate cinematic representations of horror and its experience outside of the horror genre? Prerequisites: MS 049 PO, or MS 050 PO, or MS 051 PO or equivalent. Letter grade only.

.