Steinhardt's Academic Initiatives and Global Programs asked us to circulate the following summer course description to our students.

Please contact the course instructor, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco (mso3@nyu[dot]edu) with any questions.

Remember that Steinhardt courses are outside of GSAS. Draper students can only transfer a *maximum of eight credits* from outside GSAS to their degrees, so please contact Robert Dimit (robert[dot]dimit@nyu[dot]edu) if you plan to enroll in this summer class.

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Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the New Immigration

Course # INTE-GE.1545, INTE-GE.2545

Meets Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays 2:00 – 5:00pm

5/21/2012 – 6/9/2012

4 points

Graduate students from all schools are welcome to enroll in this course.

The objective of this course is to introduce students to a sampling of recent theoretical and empirical work, in various academic disciplines, dealing with immigration. We will achieve this objective by systemically examining very recent research in comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives with a particular focus on the emerging Inter-American immigrant system. Students will learn about the most recent trends in Latin American, Caribbean, and to a lesser extent Asian migration to the US, and will compare the nature of current immigration scholarship in the United States to developments in other postindustrial settings. An examination of the comparative materials will highlight isomorphic conditions – as well as difference – in immigration debates, policies, processes, and outcomes. This course will be interdisciplinary. We shall examine recent data and theoretical work in a variety of fields

such as economics, education, law, policy, psychology, sociocultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, and sociology.

Please contact the course instructor, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco (mso3@nyu[dot]edu) with any questions.

Summer Grad Courses in Media, Culture, and Communication

The Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (MCC) in Steinhardt asked us to circulate the following summer course descriptions to our students. If you have questions about the classes, please contact Jillian Sullivan (jillian.sullivan@nyu.edu) in MCC directly.

Remember that courses in MCC are outside of GSAS. Draper students can only transfer a *maximum of eight credits* from outside GSAS to their degrees, so please contact Robert Dimit (robert.dimit@nyu.edu) if you plan to enroll in one of the classes below this summer. 

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   DEPARTMENT OF MEDIA, CULTURE, AND COMMUNICATION   

SUMMER 2012 COURSES

MCC-GE 2147 Reality and Documentary TV

Professor Susan Murray

May 21 - June 8, 2012

Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu 10.00 AM - 12.45 PM

Class#: 4395 (4 credits)

This course will survey the historical development and shifting definitions of documentary and reality television. We will explore the ways in which television has understood and utilized non-fiction formats at particular historical moments; trace the formations and deployment of realist aesthetics; explore the ethical obligations/problematics of these forms and their practitioners; examine the implications and meanings of documentary/reality hybrids; and consider the reception of and cultural meanings derived from particular documentary and reality texts and subgenres.

MA Area of Study: Visual Culture and Cultural Studies

Sample Syllabus

MCC-GE 2166 The Global City and Media Ethnography

Professor Allen Feldman

May 21 - June 8, 2012

Mon,Tue,Wed,Thu 4.55 PM - 7.40 PM

Class#: 1969 (4 credits)

This courses focuses on the theories and methods of media/sensory ethnography, visual culture, performance studies, through the linked topics of transcultural and trans-local processes, diaspora identities, the post colonial and human rights. The curriculum is aimed at graduate students from diverse disciplines who want to explore creative media practice as a research methodology. Through social historical and trans-cultural ethnographic perspectives practice-led pedagogy promotes a self-reflexive contextual and critical understanding of the use of media for the conduct and dissemination of research and the creation of social knowledge through participatory cultural production.

MA Area of Study: Global and Transcultural Communication; MA Research Course

Sample Syllabus 

MCC-GE 2137 Visual Cult/Politics of Memory: Global Perspective

Professor Marita Sturken

Buenos Aires, Argentina

June 4 - June 22, 2012

Class#: 2148 (4 credits)

*Requires Department Consent & Application

This course examines the intersections of visual culture, commemorative politics, social movements, and nationalism in an analysis of the politics of memory in the global context.  We will examine the debates and contestations over memorialization and artistic engagements with the memory of traumatic events in several key sites around the world, including Argentina, the United States, Chile, Germany, and South Africa.  The course will have a particular focus on the politics of memory at work in Argentina over the memory of its “dirty war” from 1976-1983, with visits to particular sites and projects in Buenos Aires in which artists, architects, and activists are engaging with questions of memory and the aftermath of trauma.  It will put these local sites into comparative dialogue with examples of artistic and architectural memorialization in other contexts such as the memorialization of 9/11 in the United States, of the Holocaust in Germany, of Apartheid in South Africa, and of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.

We will examine the key role of visual culture in the politics of remembrance and the relationship of commemorative politics to social movements.  The realization of memory through architecture, design, art, photography, digital media, and museums has been central to the politics of the memory of violence and trauma over the last few decades.  Through explorations of how art, photography, and design have played a key role in shaping cultural memory in these contexts, we will investigate the aesthetics of memory, the role of pedagogy in remembrance, the spatialization of memory, and the deployment of memory through these forms into political action.  The course will draw on the scholarship in visual culture and memory studies to examine the politics of memory from a global perspective.

The course will take place over a three week period in Buenos Aires, meeting regularly at the NYU-Buenos Aires site and with field trips to relevant sites in the city, including the Parque de la Memoria, ESMA (a former military school and site of torture that is now a museum and cultural center), the Plaza de Mayo, and Memoria Abierta, a nonprofit organization that has produced a Topografia de la Memoria through the work of designers and architects. We will take one trip to Rosario, 180 miles away, where the country’s first national Museum of Memory was recently opened and where grassroots memory art is visible in streets throughout the city.

Guest speakers in Buenos Aires will include architects, designers, and activists involved in memorial projects in the city. 

The course will be conducted in English, with additional recommended readings in Spanish for bilingual speakers.

Sample Syllabus

Apply here!

MCC-GE 2383 Topics Global: Censorship/Social Movements and Alternative Media

Professor Brett Gary

June 27 - August 14, 2012

Paris, France

Class#: 4177 (4 credits)

*Requires Department Consent & Application

This course will explore concepts of media censorship, cultural and political anxieties and instability, and social movement media, primarily in the United States and France. It will center on understanding how cultural hegemony is attained, but how established norms are  subverted and challenged through the formation of political and cultural counter-publics and resistance movements.

Examples will be drawn from the past fifty years in France and the US. The course will include walking tours that track the student uprisings in Paris in May '68, Algerian and Vietnamese contestations of French colonialism, and the neighborhoods of self-exiled African American writers Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Other sites will also be visited, such as the church of Saint Bernard de la Chapelle (a symbolic focus of the contemporary movement for immigrants' rights), and one of the locations of the altermondialiste (global social justice) movement ATTAC.  For the U.S. we will consider the Berkeley-based Free Speech movement, the civil rights and anti-war movements, and more recently, police management of the anti-war marches in 2003 and suppression of protests at the GOP conventions in 2004 and 2008, and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

While considering mainstream journalistic coverage of resistance movements, along with various forms of censorship in French and US media, we will also explore how resistance movements have developed their own communications strategies involving various media, including print, film, and social media, along with staging sit-ins, protests, marches, strikes, occupations and other techniques of mobilization and communication.   A variety of media formats will be reviewed, from tv, film and print media, to social media.  Please contact jillian.sullivan@nyu.edu for a sample syllabus.  

Apply here!

Two Upcoming Talks: Latin American Media Today / Building American Indian Studies Inside and Outside of Academia

Two Upcoming Talks of Interest at NYU:

Latin American Media Today

NYU Steinhardt professor Juan Pinon, visiting scholars, and journalists will examine the nature and ongoing global configuration of Latin American media today. The panel will analyze new developments in traditional media and discuss issues of representation, diversity, and democracy. The event will be held on Thursday, Feb. 16, 5:30 pm at 20 Cooper Square, 4^th floor. For details, click here.

Building American Indian Studies Inside and Outside of Academia

Join us for a presentation by Dr. Ned Blackhawk, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale, and Dr. Theodore Van Alst, Assistant Dean of Yale College and Director of Yale’s Native American Cultural Center. All are welcome. Thursday, Feb. 23, 12:00 noon at the NYU School of Law, Vanderbilt Hall, Room 201. Please RSVP at cmep@nyu.edu.

via the NYU Minute e-newsletter

Call for Papers: Thinking Through Collapse (Due this Wednesday, Dec. 7)

Please note the deadline for submission is this Wednesday: December 7th.

Thinking Through Collapse
Friday, March 23, 2012

In the past year we have been confronted with many sites of present and impending collapse: the collapse of oppressive regimes in the Arab world, a global economy pushed to its limits, our own political system in paralysis, the teetering of the fourth estate, continuing environmental collapse and so on. In each of these sites, visions of apocalypse exist alongside those of renewal, inviting the imagination of new forms of organization and sustainability. In the academy, they are prompting new interdisciplinary assessments of the conditions – historical, social, political, economic, cultural, technological – that have brought us to these limits, and are forcing the question: where might we go from here?

In light of the above, the 2012 Neil Postman Graduate Conference takes Thinking Through Collapse as its theme. We hereby invite faculty, masters students and doctoral candidates whose work touches on questions of limits, collapse and renewal across disciplines to submit proposals for our spring conference.

Email mcc.events@nyu.edu ("call for papers" in the subject line) with a 300 word abstract of scholarly or artistic work widely related to the conference theme.

For more details visit: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/about/graduate_conference

Graduate Study Abroad Classes Steinhardt This Summer: Info Session Tomorrow, 2/1

Dear Students:

Steinhardt's Department of Media, Culture, and Communication has asked us to share the announcement below about their summer study abroad classes. All of these classes are graduate level. If you are interested in enrolling in any of these courses, please consult with Robert Dimit directly at robert.dimit@nyu.edu.

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Learn more about summer study abroad opportunities in Media, Culture, and Communication at our upcoming information session:

Tuesday, February 1 @ 5:30 pm
Media, Culture, and Communication department couches (239 Greene Street, 7th floor).

Professors Marita Sturken, Terence Moran and Nicholas Mirzoeff will introduce their respective courses and be available to answer questions.

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Memory, Architecture and Design: Comparative Perspectives
Marita Sturken (Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU) and Brigitte Sion (Religious Studies, NYU)
New York: May 31 – June 2
Buenos Aires: June 5 – June 22

Propaganda and Persuasion in International Cinema
Terence Moran (Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU) and John Downing (Communication, Southern Illinois University, American University of Paris)
Paris: tentatively May 29 - June 18

Globalization, Memory and Visual Culture
Nicholas Mirzoeff (Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU) and Waddick Doyle (Communication, American University of Paris)

Give Bigotry No Sanction: Exploring Religious Freedom and Democracy: Symposium, 1/31

Facing History – along with New York University and the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development – are sponsoring a symposium on “Give Bigotry No Sanction: Exploring Religious Freedom and Democracy.” The symposium will take place on Monday, Jan. 31 at 7:00 PM in the Kimmel Center, Rosenthal Pavilion, 60 Washington Square South, and will be preceded by a reception at 6:00 PM.

“To Bigotry No Sanction, to Persecution No Assistance"—So wrote George Washington in a landmark letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790. Drawing on this classic exchange about religious freedom, Facing History and Ourselves now begins a public dialogue on the nature of citizenship, religious liberty, and equality in a democracy.

Please join us for a symposium at New York University on Monday, January 31, as we launch Give Bigotry No Sanction: Exploring Religious Freedom and Democracy, a multi-year initiative exploring issues of religious freedom and intolerance around the world. Symposium speakers include NYU president John Sexton, dean of Harvard Law School Martha Minow, and Special Representative to Muslim Communities for the U.S. Department of State Farah Pandith.

To register, please visit the RSVP site:

www.facinghistory.org/registerNYU

Spring Courses of Interest in Steinhardt's Media, Culture, and Communication Dept.

Dear Students-

Professors in Steinhardt's department of Media, Culture, and Communication have asked for the following spring course offerings to be shared with Draper students. If you are interested in enrolling in one of the courses below, you can contact the department directly. Please keep in mind, however, that credits earned in Steinhardt courses will count as transfer credits towards your Draper degree, and that GSAS will only allow a maximum of eight credits to be transferred. Before you enroll in one of the courses below, please contact Robert Dimit for approval at robert.dimit@nyu.edu.


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Media, Culture, and Communication
Spring 2011 Graduate Courses

See the department’s website for sample syllabi. Contact mcc.graduate@nyu.edu with questions.

E58.2030 Architecture as Media
Erica Robles
Wednesday 7:15 - 9:25 pm
Call number: 43154

This class reads architecture and the built environment through the lenses of media, communication, and culture. Through analyses of a range of spaces - from Gothic Cathedrals to suburban shopping malls to homes, factories, skyscrapers and digital cities - students will acquire a vocabulary for relating representations and practices, symbols and structures, and for identifying the ideological and aesthetic positions that produce settings for everyday life. 4 credits.

E58.2100 Seminar in Media Criticism I
Mark Crispin Miller
Monday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 43155

Analysis of the media environment from a variety of critical perspectives. Emphasis on writing as well as reading media criticism. 4 credits.

E58.2129 New Media Research Studio
Jonah Brucker-Cohen
Tuesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 43471

This course is devoted to the research of new communication channels that evolved with the rise of information technology and digital connectivity. These new tools develop new practices, ethics and power relations and require us to approach them from a different angle. Since the pace of digital media adoption is constantly increasing we will try to develop a more experimental research practice, in which we will act as participating agents within the explored new media environments. In that sense students should expect to be ‘embedded' and ‘report from' deep within social networking sites, multi-player online immersive environments, the blogosphere, the open source movement, internet based media art, cell phone networks, and more. The practice would resemble field journalism and will encounter the similar anthropological conflicts of the researcher's role in its subject of research. Projects will be executed both in groups and individually and will be using an assortment of collaborative web tools to conduct and document the research online. In addition to the individual researches each week will feature a theme and will be discussed through assigned reading, listening and viewing materials. 4 credits.

E58.2140 Issues in Organizational Communication
Deborah Borisoff
Wednesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 43156

Students examine major concepts and issues related to organizational communication including: 1) types of organizational cultures; 2) dimensions of organizational entry (e.g. the interview process); assimilation (e.g., fitting in); and factors that influence this process (e.g., gender, culture, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation; 3) examination of how employees and work are valued; 4) transformations in leadership (e.g., how it is defined; enacted); 5) diverse channels of communication (e.g., face-to-face; working in teams; the impact of technology; 6) effective strategies for dealing with conflict in organizational settings (e.g., communication strategies; work/life challenges). 4 credits

E58.2165 Transnational Communities and Media Cultures
Radha Hegde
Monday 2:00 - 4:10 pm
Call number: 43472

This course examines the emergence of transnational communities, recent patterns of migration, and the role of media forms and practices in redefining culture and national belonging. We will explore how media practices define culture and identity for diasporic groups within the landscape of global cities. What role do media play in the (re)imagining of cultural politics, nationalism, and everyday life in the context of global relocations? How do technology and media enable new configurations of cultural resistance and identification within (and between) different immigrant groups? What does this mean in terms of negotiating the global and local in various aspects of immigrant lives? 4 credits.

E58.2184 Comparative Media Systems
Rodney Benson
Tuesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 40827

How are news media similar or different around the world? Beyond the personal idiosyncrasies of individual journalists and media owners, which factors play the greatest role in shaping "national news cultures": professional values and traditions, level and type of commercialism, government regulations, bureaucratic pressures or organizational dynamics, and/or audiences? Too much of our media criticism proceeds from hunches and assumptions, rather than real evidence, for the simple reason that it limits itself to a single national context (and often a single time period). International comparative research allows us to "see" in new ways, test existing theories, and develop new ones. This course offers a conceptual and methodological guide (drawing on theories of Habermas, Bourdieu, Castells, and the latest work in the sociologies of culture, news, and globalization) to mapping the world's increasingly complex and inter-connected media environments. After a general consideration of the factors that structure news media systems and the roles that media play in democratic societies, the course incorporates (1) a survey of comparative methodologies: ethnography, in-depth interviewing, surveys, discourse and image analyses, etc., and (2) national, trans-national, and comparative case studies, representing the major types of Western European journalistic "models" as well as some important non-European variants. 4 credits.

E58.2200 Media Events and Spectacle
Salvatore Fallica
Wednesday 7:15 - 9:25 pm
Call number: 40828

The focus of this course is the analysis of our contemporary image- based mass culture. The mass mind is a metaphor that describes the various sources that have produced these artifacts of contemporary culture. So, the "what" of the mass mind is located in and around the culture industries that develop, produce and distribute the images, narratives, sounds and events that create the fabric of everyday life. Two major questions dominate the semester: How have we tried to understand this mass culture in the past? And, how do modern scholars try to explain this culture today? In past versions of this course we have studied the sitcom and the various sub-genres of television including advertising. We have studied the Superbowl and other forms of media events, standup comedy, talk show culture, nineteenth and twentieth century minstrelsy, men's and women's magazine culture, Shakespeare in popular culture, and, of course, contemporary music - from Bing Crosby to Ludacris.

Some possible texts include: Philip Auslander, 1999. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York: Routledge; Nick Couldry, 2003. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. New York: Routledge; Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; Joli Jensen, 2002. Is Art Good for Us? Beliefs About High Culture in American Life. New York, Rowman & Littlefield; McNair, Brian. 2002. Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire. New York, Routledge; Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette, 2004. Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture. New York, New York University Press. 4 credits.

E58.2201 Mediating the Biopolitical Body
Allen Feldman
Monday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 43157

This seminar will engage the political philosophy and media ethnography of human and nonhuman bodies. We will explore the body and animality as political media through Foucault, Derrida, Agamben, Esposito, Lacan, Hegel, Heidegger, Arendt and Merleau-Ponty. Today's wars on terror, refugees, migrant labor, minorities and the immune compromised are campaigns of inhumanization that condition what counts and does not count as human through inoculating images of humanity's alters, and antagonists; all those bodies which lack humanity and signify the human in that lack. Emblematic visions of the monstrous, grotesque and disfigured do not mask and distort a determining political reality lying behind such images but are in themselves formative and structuring forces by which an order of bodies-human and unhuman-- is crafted in acts of political speciation. The political is today poised between a sovereign humanitas and a bestial, monstrous and creaturely inhumanitas comprised of communicating, excommunicated and communicable bodies. Is animality the negated and yet necessary staging ground of the political? Is the creaturely the inadequate name for what cannot be mastered by the anthropological machine? Is biopower condemned to visualizing its exception and what exceeds it as bestial life? The animal/ human faultline in Western metaphysical thought and practice can be remapped as zoopolitics where animality as political species navigates times and spaces of violent exposure, disappearance and abandonment but where animal embodiment is also a zoo-anarchism that trespasses across the thresholds of anthropologizing biopower. 4 credits.

E58.2286 Young People and Media Cultures
Joellen Fisherkeller
Tuesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Call number: 40833

What roles do popular media play in society and culture, and in particular the experiences, thinking and values of young people? How should we address the issues raised by the contemporary communication environment, and by the reality of young people's interactions with popular media? In this course, we will consider these questions. We will focus on debates and issues raised by various media environments that now characterize contemporary existence and young people's growth and experiences. Most importantly, we will investigate how young people actually use, value, and find meaning in multiple media in different social contexts, and discuss the social, cultural, and political implications of these situations. Finally, we will propose some ways to deal with the issues raised by the course.

Readings include: Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing up in the Age of Electronic Media (Polity Press, 2000); Fisherkeller, JoEllen Growing Up with Television: Everyday Learning among Young Adolescents (Temple University Press, 2002); Packet of Readings that focus on children and youth in media cultures. 4 credits.

E58.2304 Global Media and International Law
Ted Magder
Tuesday 2:00 - 4:10 pm
Call number: 43329

This course examines the history and role of international law and international regulatory instruments as they pertain to global media governance. It provides an historical overview of the various institutions and actors involved in global media governance, and assesses the various principles and practices that constitute the regime of global media governance, including the regulation of broadcasting, telecommunications, the Internet, and trade in media products. Students will undertake original research in a selected area of global media governance with careful attention to original documents in the field. 4 credits.

E58.2310 Sound Studies
Martin Scherzinger
Tuesday 7:15 - 9:25 pm
Call number: 43160

This course examines central themes in the emerging field of "Sound Studies". We explore a range of histories, archaeologies and ethnographies of sound and listening, as it intersects with topics in media studies, metaphysics, science and technology studies, political economy and musicology. How has our experience of sound changed as we move from the piano to the personal computer, from the phonoautograph to the mp3? How have political, commercial, and cultural forces shaped what we are able to listen to, and how we listen to it? Finally, how have performers, physiologists, architects, acousticians, engineers and philosophers worked to understand this radical transformation of the senses? 4 credits.

E58.2382 Topics in Globalization: International Development
Helga Tawil-Souri
Wednesday 2:00 - 4:10 pm
Call number: 43202

This course introduces students to theoretical foundations in historical and contemporary issues in communication and international development. Topics include state-building, modernization, dependency and globalization, as they concern the ‘Third World.'

Part One of the course focuses on mainstream development, its proponents (such as the UN, the World Bank and international non-profit organizations) and its application and practice. Part Two will delve into the critiques of development and its connections to longer historical, political and economic inequalities, such as imperialism, colonialism and globalization. In Part Three, each class will be devoted to a particular topic or problem and relevant case studies from they key regions (Latin America/Carribean; Africa; Middle East; Asia; "The Fourth World") that students will present on.

This is an inter-disciplinary course that draws on readings in political science, economics, history, sociology, communications and media research, and public policy. Topics of discussion are international in scope, and encourage cross-linkages between different theoretical concepts and geographical locations. Keeping up with global affairs, gaining familiarity with economic terms, looking up historical events, etc. are of utmost importance. 4 credits.

E58.2405 Topics in Visual and Cultural Studies: Communism and the Cold War
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Thursday 2:00 - 4:10 pm
Call number: 43410

In the era of the permanent memorial, it is noticeable that Communism and the Cold War are being increasingly marginalized in accounts of present-day crises. This class offers a counterpoint by examining the legacies of these experiences in visual and cultural studies. It suggests a different history of the present than is usually told, with particular regard to visuality in film, art and performance. Each participant will undertake a research project using materials in the Tamiment Library (and elsewhere if needed) and will present the results in a mini-conference at the end of the semester. 4 credits.

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Larissa Kyzer
Program Administrator
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John W. Draper Master's Program
New York University
Graduate School of Arts and Science
14 University Place
New York, NY  10003
ph: (212) 998-8678
fax: (212) 995-4691
http://www.draper.fas.nyu.edu/page/home