This seminar examines how media operate as powerful tools of socialization and sites of knowledge production, distribution, and social change that shape our perceptions of the world and our place in it. While media including print, radio, film, television, video games, and digital technologies have been identified as sources of education and public action, these sources tend to be simultaneously disparaged as a vast wasteland for consumerism and endless futile activity. This course will critically examine this tension in terms of how media sources not only reinforce and challenge social norms but also inform the terms of public discourse. In addition, students produce a media piece (i.e. a series of photographs, a short video, an audio segment, etc.) to further examine and render visibility to a topic that interests them.
Here is an example of a student media piece
