Media Epistemologies: Propaganda, Conspiracies, and Other Ways of (Not) Knowing

Catalog description

How do we evaluate claims to the truth? Who and what do we consider legitimate sources of facts and opinions? What assumptions guide how we interact with media, our institutions, and each other? In our current age, seemingly dominated by fake news, conspiracy theories, and a crisis of “truth”, these questions are more important than ever. This is not a course about theories of media reception, but rather a course that takes the ways that media have been imagined within the process of knowledge production as its object of study. Drawing from a wide variety of fields including media studies, cultural theory, Black critical thought, and feminism, this course will examine how knowledge is configured, debated, and defended in our hypermediated landscape.