Media Studies

This interdisciplinary course will examine queer/trans artistic and activist practices in global digital cultures. We will explore how queerness and transness are performed and constructed in digital media across different cultures and regions. How do queer and trans folx create an alternative space, in order to survive and thrive in the hostile world? How do queer and trans DIY cultures shape the critical study of digital media today? Topics will include queer/trans politics of representation, the discourses of visibility and violence, the role of social media in trans and queer activism, and the digital culture’s relationship to trans and queer identity and knowledge production. Through critical analysis and hands-on projects, students will gain a deeper understanding of queer and transgender issues in the global media culture, reimagining their own individual and collective pasts, presents, and future possibilities.

This course will offer a thorough introduction to the major themes and issues in digital-media studies, making it a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of digital media. Throughout the course, we will explore various topics across disciplines, engaging in history, materiality, and affect of media technologies. This will include examining the material and cultural histories of computing, which help us understand how digital technology has evolved and impacted society over time. We will also delve into media archaeology, a field that explores a heterogeneous set of theories and methods to investigate the material history of media technology, challenging the supposed newness of digital culture. Another key aspect of the course will be to engage in the turn to affect and emotion in media studies: How do we experience, both cognitively and bodily, the circulation of emotion and affect in social media? How does this experience shape our mode of being in the world? The case studies introduced in the course will focus on transnational digital practices, recognizing that digital media is not confined by geographical boundaries. We will aim to critically understand the development of methods, ideas, practices, tools, and objects within digital-media studies. No prior knowledge of digital-media studies is required.

The emerging field of sound studies has garnered attention across various disciplines, including music, history, cultural studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, and environmental studies. By shifting our focus to the auditory realm, this course will explore how sound offers a mode of knowing attuned to different sonic registers of the everyday. This course will offer an introduction to diverse theories and practices of sound. How do we listen to voices unheard? What roles do digital technologies play in listening to these voices? How does technological mediation shape our experience of sounds? Beyond just voice, what other sounds deserve our attention? How do we navigate feelings of pleasure, repression, rage, and isolation that transcend dominant language? How does the digital culture contribute to community formation through voice, sound, and performance? Readings and discussions will range across digital studies, technology, art, sound studies, cultural history, critical-race theory, feminism, queer theory, and more. Beyond the readings and discussions, students will be responsible for "sonic writings," a site-specific field recording study, and a final paper/project. No prior experience in audio recording and editing is required.

Sound has immense importance in film language as a semantic, metaphoric, and affective device. It is in-frame, out-of-frame, in our memories, in the room, and elsewhere. Outside of film, our relationship to sound in our daily lives can be cultivated and honed to be more receptive to our own world—which, in turn, informs our experience of cinema. This course will cover a brief history of sound in film, from its early days to the advent of digital technology, while emphasizing its ever-continuing role in shaping narrative, emotional, and cognitive experience. Through a combination of lectures, readings, screenings, and hands-on group conferences, students will explore the mutable relationship of sound, film, and everyday life; the philosophy of sound; and the phenomenological aspects of auditory perception in both cinematic and everyday contexts. We will have short written assignments critiquing the use of sound in film from in-class screenings and a final, more substantial, writing assignment that critiques one of those films through the lens of sound using selected essays/texts from class readings. Hands-on group conferences will include making field recordings as a group that function as reflexive exercises or punctuations for our lectures about sound and image.