Graduate Seminars taught by Visiting Scholars
SPRING 2010
Religion and the Media in the United States - Melani McAlister
Traditionally, the study of religion and media has often focused on how media and popular culture have portrayed religion: God as seen in the movies. This course will instead examine how media of various sorts have been resources for religious communities in the 20th and 21st centuries. We will examine mediated forms of religious practice, from Protestant evangelicals’ use of radio in the 1930s to Oprah’s spirituality to the development of transnational Hindu communities on the internet. We will also examine how news media have reported on religion, in part to understand the sometimes solicitous, sometimes hostile relation between secular and sacred in the United States. The course will focus on both historical and contemporary case studies, and will include significant theoretical reading on religion and media
Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn - Graeme Turner
This course will explore the proposition that we are witnessing a ‘demotic turn’ in media culture: the development of a broader, possibly even a new, field of relations between media and culture in which the participation of ordinary people has become a more fundamental component than ever before. Rather than necessarily signifying the rise of a democratic politics or a process of media democratization, the politics of that participation are contingent and instantiated rather than determined in advance. The course will explore how this politics of participation actually plays out in a range of contemporary media ‘hot spots’ – reality television, user-generated content online, debates about the future of journalism in an online environment heavily populated by bloggers and citizen journalists, the connection between the commodification of celebrity and the construction of social identities, utopian and dystopian readings of the potential of new media, and populist formations of talk radio.
FALL 2009
Media Revolutions, History and the Senses
Media revolutions past and present are attended through the lens of mediation and the senses. Interdisciplinary with a historical emphasis, this class will consider the processes of mediation as they have taken shape in different media forms, including orality or musicianship alongside more traditional media. Because the senses are historically constructed and implicated in mediation, how will our worlds change once media revolutions are accompanied by massive social upheavals and new forms of governance?
Television Genres - Yeidy Rivero
This seminar examines texts, industries, communities, and cultural practices that are engaged in defining and categorizing television genres. Drawing from recent scholarship on television genres (situation comedies, talk shows, reality television, telenovelas, political satire, and others types of programs), we will analyze the intertextual meanings of television genres for particular interpretative communities. Throughout the course we will interrogate the popularity of certain genres in specific historical and cultural contexts and their connection to larger socio-economic processes, relations of power, and cultural practices.
SPRING 2009
Gender, Globalization and the Media - Radhika Parameswaran
This seminar creates a forum for debate over the ways in which the cultural politics of gender structure the historical, economic and social landscapes of media globalization. Media culture, as the course readings seek to show, provides a fertile site to examine how globalized media practices articulate gendered imaginations. Adopting a transnational feminist perspective, the seminar specifically addresses the intersections between and among media technologies, representations, and institutions and the complex scripting of gendered meanings and subject positions in multiple locations in the global public sphere. Course topics include globalization and transnational and postcolonial feminist theories; gender, sexuality, and media; gender and labor in globalized media industries; femininity, consumerism, and global advertising; gender, global media, and morality; tourism, gender, and media economies; and gender, religion, and popular culture. For the major assignment, students will be expected to produce a research paper that focuses on one of the following: a critical review of a set of theories or a body of empirical work in a specific region; textual analysis of media with special attention to influences of globalization; political-economic analysis of media institutions and corporate practices.
The Consuming Self: From Flappers to Facebook - Jeff Pooley
This course will explore a set of overlapping claims that a distinctive model of selfhood emerged in early twentieth-century American consumer culture. We will sort through a rich literature, mostly outside communication studies, that locates a "performing" self in the midst of all the billboards and department stores. Taken as a whole, the literature points to a new modal self concerned with the conscious staging of an attractive personality, bound up in the rise of advertising and the consumer economy. The authors under discussion--including Thorstein Veblen, Philip Rieff, Warren Susman, David Riesman, Erving Goffman, Daniel Bell, Raymond Williams, Jackson Lears, Roland Marchand and Axel Honneth--differ in crucial respects on the nature of this new self, its sources and its consequences. Our task will be to make sense of the competing claims, but also to identify points of overlap. A major theme early in the semester will be the experience of dislocation, anonymity and sped-up living that accompanied major social change in the decades around the turn of the century. We will focus on the personal and social adaptations to this experience, reflected in but also driven by advertising-driven consumption. A major question the course will pose in its concluding weeks: Do popular uses of new social media like Facebook and Twitter--including status updates and other kinds of managed self-disclosure--represent an intensification of the performing self?
FALL 2008
Explorations in Global Media Ethics - Nick Couldry
This course will have two aims: first, to explore the philosophical resources from which a framework for ethical debate can be built about the media process, as it operates on all scales up to and including the global; and second, on the basis of those resources, to review the ethical questions raised by some specific aspects of contemporary media. The philosophical resources explored will include materials from the Aristotelian and Kantian traditions, the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur, and the Christian humanist tradition reflected in Clifford Christians’ work on media ethics. The specific aspects of contemporary media selected for detailed ethical review will be chosen jointly by the course leader and those attending the course, but will include the areas of ‘reality television’, media coverage of private life, and media representations of religious and cultural difference. A relevant reference-point for the course is the course leader’s previous work on media ethics: see N. Couldry, Listening Beyond the Echoes: Media, Ethics and Agency in an Uncertain World (Paradigm books, 2006, Chapter7).
(Il) Legible Blackness - Mark Anthony Neal
The racial stereotypes that circulate in American culture in relation to black bodies (the bodies of those of African descent) are premised, in part, on the idea that said black bodies are legible to the average American. Thus black bodies represent sites of certain presumptions about those embodied in blackness—and given the realities of racial and gendered bias and homophobia—those presumptions are rarely rooted in progressive notions of black humanity. The course "(Il)Legible Blackness" will complicate readings of blackness (as embodied in various popular performances) by rendering "legible" performances of blackness—black criminality and black sexuality for example—as illegible, while also identifying so-called "illegible" performances of blackness—hardcore rappers as cosmopolitan queers, for instance—and rendering them legible. In order to engage in acts that render blackness legible and illegible, the course will examine contemporary and emergent theorists and practitioners of black aesthetics including Fred Moten, Darius James, Kara Walker, Barkley L. Hendricks, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Judith Halberstam, Robert Reid-Pharr, Michael Ray Charles, John L. Jackson, Jr., Verhsawn Young, Tommy Shelby, E. Patrick Johnson, Kimberly Bentson, Roderick Ferguson, Meshell Ndegeocello, Jay Z, the DeepDickollective, Danny Hoch, and Dave Chappelle.
SPRING 2008
Culture, Communication, Rights: Critical Articulations - John N. Erni
This course explores a central question: in the (re)turn to both distributive and recognition justice, how will cultural studies and communication critically articulate with human rights as a global professional, interdisciplinary, and humanitarian practice? We shall only have to note two conjunctural developments so as to ascertain the significance of a necessary encounter among culture, communication, and rights. First, the new and persistent atrocities linked to state and inter-state violence, including prison torture, poverty, epidemics, (war on) terrorism, genocide, and various forms of exploitation in global capitalism have precipitated new social movements that act in concert with international human rights law. To these movements cultural studies and communication studies have had limited institutional, dialogic, or procedural connection/collaboration. Second, the legal field of human rights has been engaging in a critical response to judicial and extra-judicial reform issues at the national and international levels through deconstructive tactics. Some have explicitly or implicitly referenced the theories and practices associated with cultural studies and communication, and thus offered a critical reassessment of theories of power, governmentality, subject formation, and institutions. In turn, however, cultural studies and communication studies have advanced with only a marginal (if often skeptical) concern with the theory of "rights" within cultural struggles. In this course, we shall consider the conditions of possibility, theoretically as well as strategically, for overcoming the apparent non-correspondence between culture/communication and rights, or between cultural/communication and law. In addition, special attention will be paid to the rigorous development of cultural studies in the "inter-Asian" context over the past dozen years. The contested particularisms associated with inter-Asia with respect to the politics of rights will raise crucial questions about the geopolitics of the circulation of rights discourse in global as well as inter-local terms.
Public Space, Public Spheres, and the Right to the City - Don Mitchell
The purpose of this seminar is to explore the transformation of urban public spaces and its importance for the structuring of public spheres, modes of citizenship, and the right to the city. Many have argued that with privatization, colonization by corporate capital, and every more forceful practices of exclusion, we have reached the "end of public space" (as the subtitle of one influential book put it). Others argue that with the rise of new modes of electronic communication, especially the rise of the internet and web and the consequent decline of mass media's monopoly on the dissemination of information, such an end to urban public space is no cause for alarm, as the new space of the public is now elsewhere (and far more inclusive than city-space ever was). -- I would argue that both positions are overly simplistic. What is important are the conditions of possibility for the formation of publics. In these, urban publicly-accessible space remains a vital, and contested, form, always exclusionary, to be sure, but also functionally very different from the virtual spaces of computer-mediated communication (which itself is of course a medium also structured through processes of control and exclusion). Contestation over urban public space is integral to the struggle for the right to the city by dispossessed and marginalized people. -- Participants in the seminar will gain a greater insight into the relationship between law, geography, and democratic possibility, the relationship between property and space in shaping the formation of publics; and the importance of struggles over public space for the struggles of social movements in public space.
FALL 2007
Audience Ethnography: From Response to Media Practices - Elizabeth Bird
In this class students will discuss ethnographic and qualitative approaches to studying media audiences, moving from classic cultural studies to contemporary appraoches that see "audience" activity as less about responding to media texts, and more about developing multiple interactive practices that are inspired by and linked with media. Special reference will be made to recent anthropological work on media practices in a global context.
Media, Democracy and Civic Participation - Peter Dahlgren
The point of departure for this course is the contemporary set of dilemmas facing democracy. The particular focus here is on the role of the media in enhancing or hindering the engagement of citizens in democracy, including both parliamentarian and extra-parliamentarian forms. The theoretical horizons include the public sphere perspective, political communication, and elements drawn from late modern cultural theory. In particular, the notion of civis culture is developed as a six-dimensional framework for analyzing citizens' participation. The framework is applied to a variety of media genres and phenomena, including the traditional press and television journalism, as well as potlitical communication and activism found on the internet.
SPRING 2007
Culture and Modernity in the "Arab Media Revolution" - Marwan Kraidy
Post-911 interest in Arab media has focused extensively on news channels like al-Jazeera, neglecting the remaining two hundred satellite channels of what has become known as the "Arab media revolution." These channels feature programs like reality television, music videos and social talk-shows that have fuelled wide-ranging controversies about Arab-Western relations, cultural authenticity, gender, and the convergence of politics and popular culture. This course uses interpretive and critical approaches to analyze these controversies as exemplars of the role of the media in shaping notions of modernity, authenticity, and otherness in the non-Western world. In addition to theoretical readings on culture and globalization, nationalism, and popular communication, instruction will rely on a rich combination of textual, visual, and ethnographic primary sources.
Discourse and the Nation - Robin Wagner-Pacifici
This seminar explores how speaking and writing the nation creates the nation. Official speeches and documents speak in the name of the nation - but they actually perform the double work of referring to and constituting this entity at the same time. We will read scholarly analyses of historic and contemporary speeches and texts in which a national entity and ethos are forged, e.g., constitutions, laws, policy statements, judicial inquiry reports. These studies focus on the linguistic and generic aspects of these documents. We will also examine such primary documents ourselves, including the 9/11 Commission Report and the National Security Strategies of 2002 and 2006, in order to develop our own analysis of the relations between discourse and the nation.
FALL 2006
Journalism, Entertainment and Society - James Curran
The course begins by considering alternative normative approaches to understanding the role of the media in society, as suggested in history, sociology, cultural studies and democratic theory. It then considers what influences journalism, and how recent changes in the organisation and practice of journalism are affecting the welfare of society. This is followed by an equivalent examination of what influences television drama and film. The implications of recent developments are explored through two case studies: first, Sex and the City, examined partly in relation to debates within feminism and post-feminism, and second, the Sopranos, assessed in relation to competing interpretations of cultural value. The course’s conspectus is then broadened to take account of the way in which different countries organise their media systems, and the underlying objectives and assumptions that inform national media policies. This leads, in turn, to a discussion of media globalisation, ‘cultural imperialism’ and international media regulation; and of the policy choices posed by the rise of new media.
Media, Culture and Citizenship: Histories, Debates, Paradigms - Anna McCarthy
This graduate seminar asks students to engage the varied literature on citizenship in media and cultural studies. Readings include some foundational texts in political theory as well as works by such scholars as Michel Foucault, Toby Miller, Aiwa Ong, Nikolas Rose, Meghan Morris, Chantal Mouffe, Laurie Ouellette, Micki McGee and Lisa Duggan. Our orientation within this material is evaluative with respect to (at least two) questions: How can we understand media and culture as arenas for the reproduction of forms of civic discourse and paradigms of the citizen/person? How do researchers, critics, activists and engaged intellectuals move from the macrolevel of theory (e.g. "governmentality"), populated by conceptual monoliths (e.g. the institution, the state, the corporation), to the messy and contradictory microworlds of practice and experience in which subjects and citizens make--and remake--themselves? We will focus on the ways that civic discourse and cultural discourse enmesh across a range of sites, including media texts and realms of production, distribution, and reception. Screenings and assignments emphasize methods and practices in applying theories of media citizenship to visual culture, including short exercises in archival research designed to develop skills in working with primary sources.
SPRING 2006
Explorations in Cultural Complexity - Ien Ang
It is a commonplace to say that the contemporary world is an unprecedentedly ‘complex’ one, whether we look at the macro-level of international relations or at the micro-level of everyday life. The contemporary moment – ie the early 20th century – has been described in terms of a series of ‘posts’: post-Cold War, post-modern, post-colonial, etc. Various trends characterising the contemporary global condition are processes of ‘globalisation’, rapid technological change, the emergence of militant fundamentalisms, increased cross-border movements of people, and so on. Overall, then, it seems increasingly difficult for us to have an adequate description and understanding of the world we live in, and correspondingly, how we should act within it. For scholars of culture and communication, this situation amounts to a sense of intellectual uncertainty about the theories, concepts and research directions we could meaningfully pursue. This course will address this uncertain state of affairs by focusing on the notion of ‘cultural complexity’ as a possible framework for understanding the present. We will be reading an interdisciplinary range of authors who have attempted to map the contemporary world using a complexity approach to culture and society. While complexity theories have initially been developed in the so-called new physics (eg chaos theory), these theories are increasingly being adopted and applied to the social world.
The Culture of Public Opinion - Slavko Splichal
This course concerns public opinion – what it is, how it manifests itself, and primarily, how it is conceptualized in different traditions – and related concepts. It is designed to introduce graduate students to the intellectual history of studying public opinion, emphasizing the variety of cultural settings and approaches in which research took place. We will examine the relationship between the public and the media, the public and political system, particularly representative democracy, as well as how public opinion may affect the governance. In addition to exploring how and why opinions are formed and expressed, we will also devote some time to empirical research of (public) opinion processes.
FALL 2005
Expression & Monstration in the Public Sphere - Daniel Dayan
This seminar proposes three themes: describing the expressive role of publics in the context of a dramaturgic conception of the public sphere; stressing that visual media and television in particular not only convey images but require to be analyzed in terms of "monstration"; describing the interaction of "monstration" media and performing publics in the treatment of, and response to, terror events.
Transnational Media & Cultures - Kevin Robins
This course will explore new developments in communications and culture associated with so-called globalisation and transnationalisation, seeking to identify logics of both continuity and innovation associated with these dynamics of change. A particular emphasis will be on the value of a geographical perspective for understanding the nature of the contemporary globalisation process, recognising that media and cultural geographies have taken on new complexities, with new transnational spaces now coexisting alongside both national and local spaces. The course aims to encourage students to be critical analysts of contemporary change in communications and culture, and to be reflexive about the concepts and theories used to make their analyses.
Other Courses at Annenberg...
The Scholars Program in Culture and Communication was instituted to energize conversations about the intersection of culture and communication in events of critical public and scholarly import. Though beyond the purview of the Program per se, the existing courses at the Annenberg School offer a fertile starting place for such conversations. Many Annenberg undergraduate and graduate courses with aims that overlap with those of the Scholars Program can be found on the main ASC site: Annenberg's courses