Media Studies (MDST)

Courses

MDST 1001 (3) Foundations of Media Studies

Introduces students to key issues and debates and contemporary applications of critical media studies focusing on economic, social, political and cultural implications. Provides an understanding of the relationship between theory and practice and equips students with the tools to critically analyze various forms of textual transmission.

Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 1002 (3) Introduction to Social Media

Introduces students to network structures and principles, the technology and infrastructures that allow them to flourish, and the cultures that grow up through and around them. Explores how social media enables community, how it assembles and empowers agents of change and how design informs individual and group behavior.

Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 1003 (3) Critical Media Literacies

Learn to strategically access, analyze, evaluate, and produce communication in a variety of forms. This course explores the expanding nature of literacy in a digital world. Students will use applied research practices and communication tools to expand their existing media literacy skills and to design innovative presentations and projects that take advantage of new media. Meets Practice Course Requirement.

Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 1009 (3) Truth, Beauty, and Conspiracy

With conspiracy at the forefront of social and political discourse, this course illuminates these problems of knowledge and representation by approaching conspiracy culture from the perspective of media theory. Explores conspiracy theories as narratives, analyzing their specific narrative features and the ways that different media platforms represent conspiracy. Students also consider how conspiracy narratives complicate the relationship between knowledge and aesthetic form. Offered in Fall or Spring.

MDST 2001 (3) Introduction to Global Media

Explores a world in which new media have enabled humans to be joined in a global system of socio-cultural and economic relations. Underscores the political dimensions of global media, the convergence of global culture, and the ways in which values are produced. Prepares students to become critical of media practices and empowered as active civic participants.

MDST 2002 (3) Media and Communication History

Examines the historical development of communication forms, tools, technologies and institutions (orality, writing, printing, photography, film, radio, television, computers, internet); their influence on culture (forms of expression and social relationships); and their impact on social and individual experience. Applies knowledge of communication history to contemporary social issues and problems in media and society, domestically and internationally.

MDST 2010 (3) Media and Social Movements

Surveys the history and contemporary efforts of social activists to bring about democratic media reform and examines how media are used as tools for connecting and advancing social movements. Emphasis is given to media activism and social movements in the United States, as well as to similar and related transnational activism and movements. Meets Practice Course Requirement.

Requisites: Requires a prerequisite course of MDST 1001 (minimum grade C-).
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 2011 (3) Disruptive Entrepreneurship in the Internet's New Economies

Grapples with the disruptive business models that drive the online economy: both the dominant ones and the alternatives vying to transform it. In addition to the Silicon Valley model, this course explores lesser known internet economies around the world and proposals for a more equitable online future. Meets Practice Course Requirement.

Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 2012 (3) Hacker Culture

Chronicles the evolution of hacker culture from its origins as a geeky subculture to a criminal underground to its adaptation by CEOs. Considers how hacker formations sometimes represent a new kind of politics, sometimes a rejection of politics. Explores the contested figure of the hacker in the past, present and science-fiction of the internet. Meets Practice Course Requirement.

Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 2031 (3) Documentary and Social Change

Explores how local, national and international filmmakers use documentaries to provide cultural observation, education, entertainment and memories to making sense of and transform the realities of contemporary societies. Emphasizes contemporary issues and practices in the production of documentaries, including the participatory means such as the crowdsourcing of documentary footage and the use of newer, non-theatrical means of distribution. Meets Practice Course Requirement.

Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 2032 (3) Visual Literacies & Design

Examines cultural visual experiences from critical perspectives and social effects. The course acquaints students with visual design in ways that include image-making as a cognitive and perceptual practice, the production of visual significance and meaning, and the role of technology in creating and understanding mediated images. Students will use a variety of means to produce visual narratives. Meets Practice Course Requirement.

Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 2046 (3) Future Histories of Technology

This class explores both literature about future technologies and literary technologies that move across periods, regions, and disciplines. Our cultural and historical approach to future histories of technology will illuminate how race, gender and sexuality, class, and nationality structure seemingly neutral research and development, usage, and innovation. Ultimately, our goal is to see how we¿re not passive consumers but active participants in reimagining the present and future of technology.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: ENGL 2046

MDST 3001 (3) Media Research

Introduces theoretical approaches and practices used to analyze the content, structure, influence and contexts of media. Explores factors shaping media, including: politics, economics, technology, cultural traditions. Studies concepts, theoretical approaches and research methods of media criticism, and adopts and adapts these frameworks in analyses of mediated communication.

MDST 3002 (3) Digital Culture and Politics

Examines issues at the intersection of digital media, culture and politics, such as regulation and network architecture, piracy and hacking, and grassroots activism. Engage with a range of theories about cultural politics, democracy, liberalism and neo-liberalism in relation to digital information and communication technologies.

MDST 3021 (3) Comic Books: Culture and Industry

Explores practices of comic culture across a broad range of graphic stories. Using culture studies approaches to industry analysis and fan community discourses, students examine culture created through and around graphic texts, particularly representations of race, gender, sexuality, institutions and ideology. Considers the political economy of the comic industry, the struggles of independent producers and active fan practices.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only.

MDST 3022 (3) Social Media Cultures

Expands students' understanding of network cultures, including how social media tools influence conversation strategies, how interfaces interact with perceived communication values, and how network boundaries reinforce distinct cultural identities. Students engage in projects to measure network behavior, create strategic messages to achieve communication and information goals, and to engage in social listening.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 55 or more hours.
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 3101 (3) History of Computing and Information

Focusing on two topics: the changing role of information in everyday life over time and the increasing role of information in disciplinary studies such as social science, engineering, computer science, mathematics, digital humanities. Examines information related academic disciplines, businesses, industries and technologies from multiple perspectives from the 17th century to the present.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: INFO 3101

MDST 3201 (3) Media, Culture and Globalization

Surveys the political and economic structures of media system in developed and developing countries and discusses the impact of privatization, ownership consolidation, and globalization on the flow of information across national borders. Also looks at how global media flows and counter-flows affect conceptions of nationhood and cultural identity.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCI) or International Affairs (IAFS) majors only.

MDST 3321 (3) Media Industries and Economics

Focuses on the institutions and practices of the media industries. Surveys the histories, structures, and activities of these organizations and the contemporary issues surrounding them.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) in College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCIU).
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 3331 (3) Sports-Media Complex

Explores the rich connections between the sports industry, spectating, the media complex and social life. Using theories of cultural studies and drawing on specific examples from the sports world, students focus on how sport shapes and reinforces understandings of gender, race, class and sexuality. Addresses major questions about the political economy, commodification, mediation and reception of the spectacle of the sports complex, as well as politics and cultural consequences of its transnational reach.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: JRNL 3804
Requisites: Restricted to College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCI) students with a minimum of 45 credit hours completed, or non-CMCI students who have completed CMCI 2001 (minimum grade D-).
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 3341 (3) Designing Alternative Media Platforms

Explores alternative forms of media to exhibit student research and build connections with community leaders. Surveys alternative exhibition traditions such as Social Practice, Relational Aesthetics and Craftvism to expand the impact of student work, culminating in the design of a unique cultural event focusing on each individual's research. Software/digital presentation skills. Meets Practice Course Requirement.

MDST 3401 (3) Media, Food and Culture

Explores the topic of food as a subject of popular culture: essential to life and the enter of local, national and transnational conflict and social movements. Students will examine media representations of food, what our food choices say about us and what the mediated politics of food mean for our collective future.

Requisites: Requires a prerequisite course of MDST 2002 (minimum grade C-).
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 3711 (3) Media and Popular Culture

Examines culture in the form of discourse, symbols, and texts transmitted through the media. Explores the relationship between such mediated culture and social myth and ideology.

Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 3791 (3) Media and the Public

Provides an overview of how publishing in print and electronic forms has been tied closely to democratic ideals for centuries. Explores how the idea of the public is central to the theory and practice of media politics, and how the contested concepts of "the public sphere" and "public opinion" have long been linked to debates about the proper relationship between media and democratic citizenship.

MDST 4003 (3) Digital Media Production and Design

Introduces techniques, technologies of online development and online media presentation. Contextualizes the technical and social implications of the Internet through historical and critical perspectives. Students engage in online media projects designed to emphasize the affordances, conventions and usability considerations of effective online communication. Meets Practice Course Requirement.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: MDST 5003
Requisites: Restricted to students with 55 or more hours.
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 4071 (3) Writing for Screens

Students will be taught the fundamentals of screenwriting, but will also learn from peers. Students will workshop scenes, share, and discuss. Students will work scenes through description, dialogue, and action, combine those scenes into sequences, and those sequences into scripts. Students will learn how to create dramatic tension, how to write compelling dialogue, how to deal with character development. Formerly offered as a special topics course.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: ENGL 4071
Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of MDST 2002 or MDST 3021 (minimum grade B).

MDST 4111 (3) Crime, Media and Contemporary Culture

Addressed in the course are a range of issues from within a variety of literatures that consider the ways in which the media cover crime. Those literatures are particularly drawn from sociology and the emergent, and increasingly dominant, field of cultural criminology. The focus of the class is to get students to think of "crime" as a constructed and mediated concept and set of narratives that often create problematic public "understandings".

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 4121 (3) Deconstructing Disney: Mediated American Mythology

Explores various Disney cultural products ¿ some with which students will be very familiar, some students may have never seen ¿ in order to discuss the cultural messaging The Walt Disney Company has presented over its long and illustrious history. Students will conduct analysis research in popular culture studies.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).

MDST 4211 (3) Asian Media and Culture

Offers an understanding of the various people, cultures and nations of East Asia through their media systems. Provides a critical overview of the historical, cultural, social, political and economic dimensions of East Asian communication systems in today's digitally connected/disconnected world.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: MDST 5211
Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Asia Content

MDST 4220 (3) Viral Video & Media

Students will examine how viral videos are produced and shared on social media platforms by developing an understanding of the components that make a viral video as well as by engaging in a critical analysis of those viral videos. Students will engage in critical analysis, consider strategies for virality, and learn about production and publishing. Students will analyze their own and their peers¿ work in terms of genre, convention, format, structure, and audience.

Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of MDST 2002 OR MDST 3021 (minimum grade B).

MDST 4221 (3) Media Technology and Cultural Change

Explores how media technologies affect social orders and shape cultural practices across the globe. Compares and critically evaluates different theories of technology, emphasizes the social construction of technology, asks how media technologies inform conceptions of social reality and individual identity and considers how media technologies can be understood across a range of academic disciplines.

Requisites: Requires prerequisite courses of MDST 2002 and MDST 3001 and MDST 3002 (minimum grade C-). Restricted to students with 87-180 credits (Senior, Fifth Year Senior).
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 4231 (3) Youth Media: Culture and Politics

Emphasizes the sociological understandings of youth cultures, identities and practices in relation to media and politics. Topics include the influences of consumer branding, participatory culture, youth media production and representation, use of social media, mobile phones, gaming, and other digital media, and integrating them around themes of youth styles, gender, ethic, political identities, consumer culture, social behavior and other trends.

Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of MDST 3711 (minimum grade C-). Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 4241 (3) Visual Culture and Human Rights

Provides the critical tools needed to understand images and their impact on the recognition and restitution of human rights claims. The course examines both visual practices (e.g. documentation, archiving, witnessing, advocacy and surveillance) and visual media (e.g. photography, film, video, drone and satellite images), unpacking the growing entanglement between visual culture and human rights.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 4311 (3) Mass Communication Criticism

Introduces the critical perspectives most often employed in qualitative media analysis: semiology, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalytical criticism, sociological criticism. Texts from contemporary print and broadcast media. Meets Practice Course Requirement.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: MDST 5311

MDST 4331 (3) Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality in Popular Culture

Studies the construction, interconnections, and replications of gender, race, class, and sexuality in popular culture and how these constructs become cultural norms and mores. Uses critical methods with a focus on producing responsible viewers and readers.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).

MDST 4341 (3) International Media and Global Crises

Examines strengths and limits on media¿s role in globalized crises (e.g. financial, climate change, health) in light of changing distribution of global power. Introduction to current crises; context-analytical approach to media technologies, financing and uses; application to national cases.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Junior or Senior) Media Studies (MDST) majors and minors, Journalism (JRNL) majors or International Affairs (IAFS) majors only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Asia Content

MDST 4361 (3) TV and the Family in American Culture and Society

Examines the history and character of two central institutions in American society--the family and television--to gain deeper understanding of their formative and enduring roles. Topics include: intersecting histories of the family and television; economic logic of the TV industry and programming; representations of the family in television programming; how families use and interact with television.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 27-180 credits (Sophomores, Juniors or Seniors) only.

MDST 4371 (3) Media and Religion

Examines the way religion uses media as a social and political force. Introduces the major themes and trends in the mediation of religion and the religious inflection of the media in professional, popular, and emerging media contexts.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).

MDST 4372 (3) Islam, Pop Culture and Media

Explores the shifting boundaries of cultural and religious Muslim identities through media representation and production in Muslim-majority countries and in the West. Using popular culture as a complex site of struggle, this course examines how Muslims address questions of gender, ethnicity, class, democracy, sexuality, religion, and modernity in a variety of media forms and practices.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 4401 (3) Fan and Audience Studies

Considers how audiences and fans are conceptualized, how they are constructed by media enterprises and how they operate within their cultural ecosystems. While media shape the sociocultural, political and economic dimensions of the social world, fan studies suggest a more active set of practices form sites of resistance and enable a greater degree of influence over cultural production.

Requisites: Requires prerequisite courses of MDST 2002 and MDST 3001 and MDST 3002 (all minimum grade C-).
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 4402 (3) Transmedia Worldbuilding

Guides students to develop entertainment concepts for transmedia delivery. Students will develop concepts and characters built around storytelling themes capable of producing serial and multimedia storylines. This course considers essential elements of storytelling; how to design and actively participate across media platforms; essential elements of meta-narratives; and how to create an immersive and interactive experience for audiences.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).

MDST 4601 (3) Media Law, Policy and Ethics

Explores ethical and legal complexities of information and communication technology. Combines real-world inquiry with creative speculation to probe everyday ethical dilemmas faced by digital consumers, creators and coders, as well as policy-makers. Explore themes such as privacy, intellectual property, social justice, free speech, artificial intelligence, social media and ethical lessons from science fiction.

Requisites: Restricted to students with 57-180 credits (Juniors or Seniors).
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 4841 (1-6) Undergraduate Independent Study

Involves in-depth independent research and/or project work completed under the direction of a faculty member that demonstrates learning at the upper-division level within the discipline. Department consent required.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 4871 (1-3) Special Topics

Special Topics

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 15.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.
Requisites: Restricted to students with a minimum of 75 hours taken.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 4931 (1-6) Internship

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.
Requisites: Prerequisite of MDST 2002 and MDST 3001 and MDST 3002. (All require minimum grade of C-). Restricted to MDST majors
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 5001 (3) Connected Media Practices

Provides a crucial frame through which students understand the evolution of film, television and gaming in the digital era. Explores an impending revolution in how screen media are created, circulated and consumed. Relates to a larger trend across the media industries to integrate digital technology and socially networked communication with traditional screen media practices.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5002 (3) Media Activism and Public Engagement

Explores politics of media activism. Relies on survey of existing theory and scholarship on media activism and close analyses of activist practices within both old and new media and on local, national and global scale. Special attention paid to questions of relativity and efficacy and value of media activism as both aesthetic and political activity.

Requisites: Requires a prerequisite course of MDST 5001 (minimum grade C-). Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5003 (3) Digital Media Production and Design

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: MDST 4003
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Grading Basis: Letter Grade

MDST 5005 (1) MAPE Workshop

Connects classroom work to community practice. Students will discuss applied projects and collaborate on public initiatives.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 4.00 total credit hours.

MDST 5071 (3) Screenwriting

Students will learn the fundamentals of screenwriting, but will also learn from peers. Students will workshop scenes, share, and discuss. Students will work scenes through description, dialogue, and action, combine those scenes into sequences, and those sequences into scripts. Students will learn how to create dramatic tension, how to write compelling dialogue, how to deal with character development.

MDST 5121 (3) Deconstructing Disney: Mediated American Mythology

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5211 (3) Asian Media and Culture

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: MDST 4211
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5220 (3) Viral Video & Media

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5311 (3) Mass Communication Criticism

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: MDST 4311

MDST 5331 (3) Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality in Popular Culture

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 5341 (3) Designing Alternative Media Platforms

This course helps students construct alternative form of media to exhibit their research and build connections with relevant community leaders. Through the practice and examination alternative exhibition traditions of such as Social Practice and Relational Aesthetics students connect with community members to design alternative platforms for media projects that respond to the needs of external communities.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5401 (3) Fan and Audience Studies

Drawing upon a variety of theoretical perspectives and tools of measurement, students will explore the structures, forces and environments that produce culture. Students will also interpret popular culture as a site of cultural meaning, and to understand the historical approaches scholars have used to analyze meaning in media messages, fan practices, and institutional responses.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5402 (3) Transmedia Worldbuilding

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5405 (3) Queer and Trans Identities in Popular Culture

Give students the theory, media history, and cultural frameworks to advocate for better queer & trans presentation in popular media. Uses queer studies, critical theory, media surveys, and trans theory as a tool for discussing and addressing gaps in media representation. Explores the emergence, codification, and rejection of queer and trans identities and deconstructs the popular media that contributed to the formation of these identities.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: MDST 4405
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5841 (1-3) Graduate Independent Study

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5851 (1-6) Graduate Professional Project

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 6.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5871 (1-3) Special Topics

Special topics in Media Studies.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 15.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5931 (1-3) Internship

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 3.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 6031 (3) Documentary and Social Change

Explores how local, national and international filmmakers use documentaries to provide cultural observation, education, entertainment and memories with the hope of making sense of, and transforming, the realities of contemporary societies. The course emphasizes contemporary issues and practices in the production of documentaries, including the participatory means such as the crowd-sourcing of documentary footage, and the use of newer, non-theatrical means of distribution, including YouTube, Vimeo and other digital outlets.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 6051 (3) Media Theories

Studies theories and perspectives of mass and networked communication and explores the role of media in society.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6061 (3) Media Research

Introduces concepts, theoretical approaches and research methods of media research. Students apply these frameworks in research on mediated communication. Covers qualitative and quantitative methods of gathering and analyzing data.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6071 (3) Critical Theories of Media and Culture

Introduces students to critical theories and analysis of media and popular culture. Examines major theoretical traditions and/or theorists that significantly inform media studies (e.g., culturalism, structuralism, Marxism, critical theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism) and applies these to media analysis and criticism.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6201 (3) Global Media and Culture

Explores the historical, cultural, social, political and economic dimensions of media systems in various parts of the world and their relationship with technological and cultural processes. Aims to provide a critical overview of the profound changes in media and culture in today's digitally connected/disconnected world. Formerly MDST 6201.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6211 (3) Communication and International Development

Studies and analyzes communications technologies and techniques used in addressing social problems in developing countries.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6241 (3) Visual Epistemologies: Theory and Practice

Examines visuals as a form of knowledge on its own terms with an emphasis on both theory and practice. It first considers how social, cultural and cognitive mechanisms shape visual ways of knowing, and it discusses methodological approaches for working with and in images. Then it traces the complicated status of visual knowledge over time and across institutional contexts¿religion, art, science, the law, journalism and politics.

MDST 6250 (3) Algorithms, Culture, and Power

Explores how automated computational processes (algorithms) affect the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of media and other cultural goods. Also examines the history and politics of algorithms with respect to their growing prevalence in daily life. Foregrounds themes of power, identity, bias, aesthetics, infrastructure, epistemology, and political economy. Employs theories and methods from media studies, science and technology studies, digital humanities, and/or cultural studies.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 6301 (3) Communication, Media, and Concepts of the Public

Introduces students to historical and contemporary uses of fundamental concepts in research and theory about media institutions, particularly public, community, mass, publicity, public space, public opinion, public interest, and the public sphere.

Equivalent - Duplicate Degree Credit Not Granted: CMCI 6301
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6311 (3) Power, Politics and Mediated Culture

Examines various literatures that consider the role of power in shaping social orders and the social beings that constitute that order and the place of media in both processes.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 6341 (3) Children, Youth and the Media

Examines the concepts of children and childhood from the historical, social, cultural, economic and political perspectives, this course explores the interaction between mass media and the socialization and cultivation process of children and youth. Multiple theoretical traditions are used as a framework to study a variety of issues related to children and the media.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6350 (3) Media & Cultural Policy

Survey the research literature and practical significance of cultural policy as it relates to culture as a basis of social definition, inclusion, exclusion and conflict. The study of cultural policy does not focus exclusively on the role of government, but rather on a broader range of institutions that play central roles in governing contemporary culture, including museums, libraries, and media industries.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 6351 (3) Media, Culture & Food Politics

Stresses intersections among media industries, food industries, and politics, with an emphasis on how public knowledge and activism about food relate to questions of a sustainable environment, human health and safety, and social justice for food producers and consumers. Examines a wide range of political discourses about food, the politics of food labeling, the globalization and hybridization of food, public policies governing food, food activism, the biopolitics of food, and food-related manifestations of cultural capital. Previously offered as a special topics course.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 6551 (3) Media and Communication Policy

Surveys historical and contemporary developments in media and communications policy, emphasizing social and cultural dimensions.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6552 (3) Media and Public Scholarship

Historicizes the role of the public intellectual through readings and discussions of biographies of selected scholars and accounts of historical changes in the habitats ¿ the spaces of politics ¿ in which particular types of public engagement by intellectuals occurred in the past. The course will include a ¿media practicum¿ to enable students to understand what it means to become a scholar who has a public voice through direct and indirect engagement in a media-saturated age. Previously offered as a special topics course.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 6671 (3) Media, Myth, and Ritual

Explores cultural practices of media audiences. Addresses theoretical and methodological implications of studying audiences from a culturalist perspective, with particular focus on media audience practices. Students engage in field research projects related to course content. Formerly MDST 6671.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6711 (3) Media and Popular Culture

Introduces fundamental methods for understanding the construction of meaning in film, television, popular music and advertising. Traces the study of popular culture through film theory, mass media analysis and cultural studies. Surveys various strands of research that seek to understand popular culture and its effects.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6721 (3) Feminist Media Studies

Explores the complex relation between feminism and global media consumption and production. Students will be introduced to key theoretical approaches to engage critically with film, print and broadcast media, digital media, and art. Students will engage with themes that frame feminist media studies today: intersectionality, gaze, (in)visibility, consumerism, resistance, bodies, representational narratives, queer identities, decolonial feminism as a theoretical tool of relationality, and explorations of decolonizing feminist practices originating in the global South.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 6771 (3) History of Media and Communication

Examines history of communication, including the means (technologies) of communication, social practices (institutional, collective, individual) that intersect with the study of communication and media, and cultural forms (texts, products). Situates the study of media, technology, and culture within historical contexts, comparative historical research, media archaeology, genealogy and media history.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6781 (3) Political Economy of Media

Examines economic problems and political issues relevant to media institutions and industries.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 6871 (1-3) Special Topics

Special topics. May be repeated up to 15 total credit hours hours

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 15.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 6940 (1) Master's Candidate for Degree

Registration intended for students preparing for a thesis defense, final examination, culminating activity, or completion of degree.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 6951 (1-6) Master's Thesis

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 7001 (1) PhD Colloquium Series

Introduce the new doctoral students to the Media Research and Practice program and its faculty members and their research. The colloquium series will also include workshops on program planning, publishing, attending conferences, writing a dissertation, preparing and presenting a job talk, etc.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 2.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.

MDST 7011 (3) Proseminar in Media Communication Theory 1

Introduces the principal concepts, literature, and theoretical and paradigmatic perspectives of media studies and mass communication and their ties and contributions to parallel domains in the social sciences and humanities. Formerly MDST 7011.

Requisites: Restricted to doctoral students in Media Studies (MDST), Journalism (JRNL) or Advertising, PR and Media Design (APRD) only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 7021 (3) Proseminar in Media and Communication Theory 2

Continues the introduction of principle concepts, literature, and theoretical and paradigmatic perspectives of media studies and mass communication and their ties and contributions to parallel domains in the social sciences and humanities. Formerly MDST 7021.

Requisites: Requires prerequisite course of MDRP 7011 (minimum grade C-). Restricted to doctoral students in Media Studies (MDST), Journalism (JRNL) or Advertising, PR and Media Design (APRD).
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 7051 (3) Qualitative Research Methods in Media

Provides a survey of various qualitative modes of inquiry, attending to the philosophical, conceptual, and practical foundations of qualitative research in media, communication, and information. The course is designed to support students in developing a critical understanding of the different considerations in and stages of qualitative research, including the development of research questions, theoretical and conceptual frameworks, methodological approaches, data collection, data analysis, and assessment of reliability and validity of qualitative data.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 7061 (3) Quantitative Research Methods in Media

Examines various methods of quantitative data gathering methods and analysis in mass media and social media contexts.

Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 7841 (1-6) Independent Study

Independent study.

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 9.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 7871 (3) Special Topics

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 15.00 total credit hours. Allows multiple enrollment in term.
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives

MDST 8991 (1-10) Doctoral Dissertation

Repeatable: Repeatable for up to 40.00 total credit hours.
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.
Additional Information: Departmental Category: Core Curriculum and General Electives