Culture, Film, Media & Transformation of Self

Catalog description

This course is designed to explore the convergence of media and human experience. As students look forward to postgraduate participation in civic life, the central question of the course will be, how does media promote or impede human transformation? Drawing on students' training in philosophy, history, and religion, the course addresses media interventions in individuals' struggles to be moral agents in a complex social world. Students will here consdier the increasing convergence of politics, business, and entertainment and the influence media can hold in our development of informed and ethical responses to social and political challenges. As part of this exploration, the course examins perceptions of and sensitivity to power structures and representations of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in media industries. This course explores films across the decades of the 20th and 21st centuries that take as their subject matter the news, marketing, documentaries, television, social media, and the film industry itself, igniting discussion of the nature and function of film and media in contemporary culture and opportunities for change made possible and sometimes thwarted by the media.