Description

This course is an introduction to different theories of analysis in the field of media studies. The readings and lectures trace the development of humanities-based media theory from the 1950s through today. The course introduces students to theories about authorship, genre, audiences, media institutions, identity, race, class, gender, and digital cultures. Students apply these theories to films, television programs, and web-based media.

Course Goals

  1. For students to explain the development of media studies from the 1950s through today
  2. For students to illustrate the different ways that media scholars have used theory to categorize media texts, to analyze race and representation, and to study media audiences
  3. For students to comprehend and paraphrase complex media theory
  4. For students to be able to apply different theories to media texts and generate different meanings
  5. For students to outline how broader intellectual movements and traditions such as neo-formalism, Marxism, feminism, gender studies, cultural studies, modernism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, critical race studies, and digital cultural studies influenced the development of media studies.
  6. For students to produce effective papers that involve summarizing a theoretical article and applying it to a film, television, or web-based media text

Course Objectives

  1. After completing this course students will have a broad understanding of the development of media theory, and they can draw on different areas of it for future classes
  2. After completing this class students will understand how to read theoretical articles for advanced COBF classes and for their own independent research for future COBF classes
  3. After completing this class students will comprehend there is no one right interpretation of a text and that different theories can generate different meanings for the same text
  4. After completing this class students will be able to utilize media theory to be critically literate media viewers and media producers
  5. After completing this course students will be able to use their understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion issues in media studies in future courses and in their future consumption of media

Assessment

  • 25% attendance
  • 25% weekly reading quizzes in-class
  • 32% in-class essay parts (4 total)
  • 8% midterm media artifact presentation
  • 10% final in-class presentation

The last three items here (50% of your grade in total) are all part of the same larger project: an essay that you will draft in class across four parts, with each part applying a media theory concept to a media artifact (film, episode, publication, game, song, etc.) of your choice. You should use the same artifact across most of these exercises, though you may switch to a different artifact for one of the four. You will give a brief, informal, in-class presentation in week 7 or 8 about your main artifact and what your analysis is turning up so far. For our finals week session, I will ask you to review my feedback on all your essay parts, think about how your different analyses fit together, and present once more on what your artifact shows us about media theory.

Laptop/device policy

Research on learning habits, as well as my own experience, supports the idea that for most classrooms, most of the time, smartphones and laptops do more to distract from learning than they do to aid it. I ask that you please bring paper-and-pen notetaking materials to class with you. I will not, as a general rule, allow laptop or phone use during class time. If your device usage is causing problems after a friendly reminder, I will mark your attendance as late or absent. This policy, like most others here, is adaptable; I am eager to hear from you about your access needs and thoughts on personal media devices.

Reading

Our textbook for this course is The Media Studies Toolkit by Michael Z. Newman (Routledge, 2022). I recommend that you purchase a paperback copy, which should be available through the bookstore and should cost $50 new. A digital version is available to you for free through the library; if you do not buy the print book, please consider printing out chapters as we read them so that you can refer to the text in class. I will share other readings as PDFs through our Canvas page. I am happy to print these for you if you let me know ahead of time. The bulk of your work outside class time will be in reading, so please take some time to think about—and check back in on—the reading setups and strategies that work well for you!

…

Readings and assignments by week

Week 1 (Jan 14, Jan 21): Introduction

  • Media artifacts; syllabus discussion; media study as media activism
  • Screen and discuss Twin Peaks episode 1 (1990)
  • Quiz on reading: Newman chapter 1, “Introduction”

Week 2 (Jan 26, Jan 28): Infrastructure

  • Quiz on readings:
    • Megan Mullen, “Space Bias/Time Bias: Harold Innis, Empire and Communications,” Technology and Culture 50, no. 1 (2009): 175–86.
    • Armond Towns, “Transporting Blackness: Black Materialist Media Theory” (Chapter 1) in Rianka Singh and Sarah Sharma, Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (Duke University Press, 2022).
  • Screen and discuss The Matrix (1999)

Week 3 (Feb 2, Feb 4): Industry

  • Quiz on reading + podcast:
    • Newman ch 2, “Industry”
    • Andrew DeWaard interview in Keshia White, Fantasmas: Julio Torres on Art Surviving in Late-Stage Capitalism, 2025.
  • Screen and discuss Hacks episode 1 (2021)
  • Essay part 1 (in-class writing)

Week 4 (Feb 9, Feb 11): Reading

  • Quiz on readings:
    • Newman ch 3, “Text”
    • Chapter 5, “Effects of the Technology and its Uses,” in Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Routledge, 1974).
  • Screen and discuss The Sopranos, “The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti” (1999)

Week 5 (Feb 16, Feb 18): Relating

  • Quiz on readings:
    • Newman ch 4, “Audience”
    • Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/16.3.6.
  • Screen and discuss News from Home (1976)

Week 6 (Feb 23, Feb 25): Representing

  • Quiz on readings:
    • Newman ch 5, “Representation”
    • Thomas J Billard and Erique Zhang, “Toward a Transgender Critique of Media Representation,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61, no. 2 (2022): 194–99.
  • Essay part 2 in class

Spring break!

Week 7 (Mar 9, Mar 11): Ideology

  • Quiz on readings:
    • Newman ch 6 “Ideology”
    • Stuart Hall, “Encoding—Decoding (1980),” in Crime and Media (Routledge, 2010).
  • Artifact presentations group 1

Week 8 (Mar 16, Mar 18): Institutions

  • Quiz on reading and podcast:
    • Newman ch 7 “Policy and Regulation”
    • Claire Donnelly et al., Can Public Media Survive?, 2025.
  • Artifact presentations round 2

Week 9 (Mar 23, Mar 25): Surveillance

  • Quiz on readings:
    • Newman ch 8 “Citizenship”
    • José van Dijck, “Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data Between Scientific Paradigm and Ideology,” Surveillance & Society 12, no. 2 (2014): 197–208, https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v12i2.4776.
  • Screen and discuss Kimi (2022)

Week 10 (Mar 30, Apr 1): Spending/Streaming

  • Quiz on reading + podcast:
    • Newman ch 9 “Consumerism”
    • Liz Pelly interview in Willis Ryder Arnold and Anthony Brooks, How Spotify Shapes How We Listen to Music, 2025.
  • Explore and discuss Spotify + Suno
  • Essay part 3 in class

Week 11 (Apr 8, Apr 13): Agency

  • Quiz on readings:
    • Newman ch 10 “Technology”
    • Jason Edward Lewis et al., “Making Kin with the Machines,” in Feminist AI: Critical Perspectives on Algorithms, Data, and Intelligent Machines, ed. Jude Browne et al. (Oxford University Press, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192889898.003.0002.
  • Screen and discuss short films of Kibwe Tavares: Jonah, Robots of Brixton, and Robot and Scarecrow

Week 12 (Apr 15, Apr 20): Ability

  • Quiz on readings:
    • Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne, “Dismediation—Three Proposals, Six Tactics,” in Disability Media Studies, ed. Bill Kirkpatrick and Elizabeth Ellcessor (NYU Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479867820.003.0017.
    • Benjamin W. Mann, “Autism Narratives in Media Coverage of the MMR Vaccine-Autism Controversy Under a Crip Futurism Framework,” Health Communication 34, no. 9 (2019): 984–90, https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2018.1449071.
  • Screen and discuss CODA (2021)

Week 13 (Apr 22, Apr 27): Action

  • Quiz on reading: Jordan B. Kinder, “Solar Infrastructure as Media of Resistance, or, Indigenous Solarities Against Settler Colonialism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 120, no. 1 (2021): 63–76, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8795718.
  • Essay part 4 in class

Week 14 (Apr 29, May 4): Revising

  • Quiz on reading + podcast:
    • Newman ch 11, “Global and Local”
    • Carinna Friesen, “Mobile Musics, Mobile Technologies: Engaging the Cell Phone in a West African Context,” MUSICultures, October 2016.
  • Re-screen and discuss Twin Peaks episode 1 (1990)

Final session (May 12)

  • Essay revision presentations