Media Studies

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

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.

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

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 graduate students only.

MDST 5211 (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 4211
Requisites: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5220 (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: Restricted to graduate students only.

MDST 5311 (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.

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

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 inter-active experience for audiences using digital communication tools.

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

MDRP 7871 (3) Special Topics

Special topics.

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