Issues & Ethics in Electronic Media
[Creative Media Production]
As the capstone course for Creative Media Production, think of this course as the bridge between your life as a university student and your future career in creative media production or any profession in which you engage with media. We will draw from media theory, personal reflection, and professional skill development to prepare thoughtfully for creative work. Although some occupations are explicitly labeled “creative” like film, advertising, and journalism, we will consider both this conventional understanding and the broader reciprocal relationship between creativity and work. We will also examine how creative work is embedded within social, cultural, technological, and economic systems, which shape the work we create, just as our creative work has the potential to shape these systems. Accordingly, the course is organized around three interconnected themes—Creativity, Work & Industries, and Impact. We will consider the following questions: What emerging issues and ethical responsibilities shape creative practice? How do social forces shape work in the creative industries? And how can we as creative professionals thoughtfully engage audiences and contribute meaningfully to society? Along the way, you will reflect on what kind of creative worker you want to become while developing the professional skills and materials needed to confidently continue your professional journey beyond the university.
Introduction to Documentary
[Creative Media Production]
This course is motivated by a deceptively simple question: what is documentary? Throughout the semester, we will explore documentary not only as a genre, but as a professional field, industry, and broader practice of representing reality. Each of these lenses bring forth important questions about evidence, ethics, emotion, narrative, and the value of reality. This class is organized by the lifecycle of a documentary film. We begin by tracing the origins of documentary as a genre while developing original ideas for our own projects. From there, we move into encounters—with participants, collaborators, technologies, and systems of meaning-making—as we develop the ethical, legal, technical, and aesthetic foundations needed to produce compelling and responsible work. We then turn to the different forms documentaries can take in the post-production process, considering how cinematic techniques shape exposition, story, and meaning. Finally, we conclude by reflecting on how documentaries are valued, create impact, and connect with audiences in a shifting media landscape. As both critics and creators of documentary, we will approach these roles as symbiotic, blending theory with practice.
We live in a visual culture. This course offers a critical introduction to the field of visual communication, exploring how images shape and reflect cultural meanings in everyday life. We will examine a broad range of media—from advertisements, documentaries, and reality television to video games, TikTok, and internet memes—through the lenses of visual perception, semiotics, and cultural studies. We will learn to decode visual cues such as form, color, and movement, and to analyze how media represent race, class, gender, and power. Readings include foundational theorists such as Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, and Susan Sontag alongside contemporary case studies and visual texts. Through guest speakers, in-class activities, and hands-on projects like a digital ethnography, we will connect theory to practice while investigating how visual media construct our understanding of truth, identity, and social life. By the end of the course, you will be equipped with the critical tools to analyze the visual culture that surrounds us and participate more thoughtfully in today’s media landscape.
Visual Communications
[Journalism]
Media & Society
[Sociology]
Social Theory
[Sociology]
This course begins with a simple but powerful premise: all media are social. And in modern society, nearly all aspects of everyday life are mediated by media, making it essential to understand this dynamic interrelationship. Through four key approaches—representation, the cultural industries, feminist and queer theory, and digital sociology—we will critically engage with a wide range of media forms, including podcasts, TikTok, Hollywood films, video games, reality television, artificial intelligence, and NFTs. Emphasizing both theory and practice, this course encourages students to connect sociological frameworks with real-world media examples and their own lived experiences as media consumers and producers. Guest speakers from media-related fields will further enrich our exploration. Along the way, we will also engage foundational sociological themes such as race, class, labor, gender, sexuality, and inequality. Our ultimate goal is to better understand how media are socially-constructed cultural texts, with critical implications for how we think about and engage with media in our social world.
This course offers an introduction to the major theoretical traditions of sociology, with an emphasis on understanding, analyzing, comparing, and critiquing different theoretical lineages. We begin by exploring what social theory is and why it matters, challenging the notion that theory is abstract, elite, or disconnected from everyday life. Instead, we will approach theory as something that should be simple, elegant, and useful for making sense of the social world. Each week, we will pair classic theoretical texts with contemporary empirical or applied works that engage with, extend, or critique the theories under discussion. This approach will allow us to see how theory and empiricism inform one another and contribute to the development of new sociological insights. We will also trace the “meta-story” of social theory: how theories evolve over time, how they are shaped by historical context and biography, and how they exert influence in the world. Our class will manifest in a series of friendly group debates over the usefulness of various theories to approach four different real world social pheonomena, from artificial intelligence to social media influencers. By then, you will be able to not only identify and explain the major theories of sociology but be able to think critically about how theories themselves socially construct—and are constructed by—the social world.