AP/ANTH 3040 6.00 The Anthropology of Digital Media and Visual Representation

This multimodal course introduces students to important theories and debates on media technologies and digital anthropology. We will engage critical texts and multimedia materials that address digital media structures, content, materialities, and communities. Students will examine topics of media infrastructures, platforms, materiality, media representation, identity, activism, as well as political economies, resource extraction, (settler)colonization, and climate change. Class lectures and assignments will explore important guiding questions: what media are and how they influence everyday lived conditions; how meanings and ideas about identity and social value are produced and distributed across media; how structures of power operate through media infrastructures and economies, and how power is contested by media actions and publics.

We will investigate a wide range of digital media, including podcasts, photography, film, social media, platforms, data centers, and infrastructures, natural resources that enable digital connection, big data and AI to bring attention to how media shape and
are shaped by cultural and political contexts.

We will examine these topics through multimodal readings and assignments set in a global context that require students to apply concepts from readings and class materials towards the development of practice-based assignments. Course assessments includes engaging course readings and materials to create a mind-map, a photo essay, a podcast, and a final video presentation project that includes conducting a digital ethnography of an online community.

Summer 2024 Course Director: A. Omer - ao801@yorku.ca