145 GLOBAL MEDIA (formerly FILM 160)

This course focuses on topics in national, transnational, and global cinema, television, photography, and/or new media, examining the ways in which shared cultural discourses, institutions, histories, and modes of production are negotiated through various media practices within and between individual cities, nations, regions, and/or global networks. The Global Media course inherits the kinds of topics previously taught in our National Cinema course but expands the possibilities to include other media forms and more hybrid or comparative treatments of the classificatory systems based in nation, culture, politics, or language. Students are expected to acquire new informational content about the national/regional/global media landscape in question, with an emphasis on the role media products play in articulating cultural affinities and differences; to acquire a conceptual vocabulary necessary for the examination of media practices organized in large cultural categories and to understand the advantages and limits of that approach; to develop the analytic skills necessary to interpret in a socio-historical and formal context the art and media objects belonging to that area and learn about the cultural contexts in which those media practices are located, and to develop the research tools necessary for advanced undergraduate writing on film and media in the area studied in the course.