Youth, Media, and Culture
CMDS 1425
Term: Fall 2024
Day: Thursdays
Time: 10:30 a.m.
Young people are at the core of groundbreaking interventions and innovations in media production and consumption. This class considers theoretical ideas about youth, youth culture, and young people’s media as deeply important to communication and media studies.
We’ll examine popular media, such as TV shows, films, video games, music, and graphic novels, for what they tell us about young people’s lives. By critically analyzing themes of belonging, racialization, globalization, and youth activism, we will assess how representations of and for youth are inextricably linked to the social and political environments they inhabit.
Race, Racism, and the Image
CMDS 2210
Term: Fall 2024
Day: Wednesdays
Time: 4:00 p.m.
How did popular culture teach audiences to recognize race visually and thematically?
What are the themes, technologies, visual codes and conventions that are still used to shape how we perceive certain bodies?
This course uses creative, formal, and historical approaches to interpreting and critically engaging what we see in popular media. Students will analyze images and image-making practices. They will also explore how racialized artists/ performers use counter-visual strategies to interrogate tropes and recover cultural ideas, practices, and texts.
Imagining Data Justice
CMDS 2510
Term: Fall 2024
Day: Thursdays
Time: 2:30 p.m.
We live in a data-filled world, where data-based injustices are increasingly common. From sexist hiring algorithms, to racist facial recognition Al, to automated medical systems that withhold care or provide the wrong kind, to elections ridden with targeted mis- and disinformation, data is now used to classify, judge, punish, and mislead us, often without our awareness. In this course, we explore how communities engage with data injustices to create alternatives, from advocacy and policy solutions, to subverting surveillance and taking control of their own data, to creatively using data to foster social justice.
Music and Society
CMDS 2830
Term: Fall/Winter 2024 – 2024
Day: Tuesdays
Time: 11:30 a.m.
Music is, for most people, a part of everyday life. We engage with music in personal, collective, and sometimes unintended ways. Whether it be through headphones, at dance clubs or concerts, or as background sounds, music is omnipresent. This course is a conceptual and thematic exploration of music and its capacities to shape identities and communities.
Premised by the recognition that music “does something” in the world, we will critically ask: What is music, and why does music matter? How does music shape us and our relations to others? What are the underpinning cultural, social, political, and economic factors that influence the creation and consumption of music? How might music allow us to imagine and make possible a more just world? No formal music training is required to take this course.
Doing Bodies/Doing Technology
CMDS 3517
Term: Fall 2024
Day: Tuesdays
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Media and technology are often presented to us as worlds of disembodied data flitting across networks, unencumbered by physical form. In other words, when we log on, we supposedly leave our fleshy bodies at the door. This course challenges ideas of technology and data as dematerialized and disembodied. Instead, we’ll explore together the ways that bodies and technologies shape each other. How do technologies shift the ways that we perceive and interact with the world around us? How do our bodies become fodder for systems that transform our biological and psychological functions into data? And what assumptions about “normal” bodies are baked into the technologies we use every day?
