Global Media Industries (INTL 202 / MCST 202): Global media have a tremendous influence on how we see and act in the world. But while media are central to the production of a sense of "the global," media industries are materially, culturally, and geographically situated. Exploring this complex terrain can help us to better understand our own media environments, as well as some of the pressing issues that media systems worldwide face today. Who owns the media and who regulates it? How have its centers of power shifted over time? How do media systems located in different political, economic, and historical conditions result in different kinds of products? What is the impact of media industries on the earth? In this course we will follow a wide range of media forms (telegraph, radio, film, television, social) across time and space, focusing on questions of labor, infrastructure, and ownership. Course assignments make connections between past moments and contemporary questions, in relation to some of the media that matters most to you.
Infrastructure and Inequality (INTL 230): Infrastructure is a site where hopes and dreams are invested. It is also a place where unequal influence is laid bare. Looking to infrastructure and asking who pays, who profits, who labors, and who is left out, offers a telling lens on political questions ranging from globalization to citizenship to public space. It also helps us understand the physical world around us as fertile grounds for political activism. In this course we will consider infrastructure’s technical politics, tracing water pipes and railway networks; interstate highways and fiber-optic lines. Students will learn theoretical frameworks and practice methodologies for studying infrastructure in social context. We will consider a range of case studies internationally (and transnationally), as well as spend time analyzing local infrastructures – at Macalester, in the MInneapolis-St. Paul area, and in Minnesota. Through close attention to the making, maintenance, and user experience of these systems, we will practice reading the politics built into our built environments.
Digital Cultures (INTL 260 / ANTH 260): This course takes up the cultures, sub-cultures, and counter-cultures of the internet, studying online social worlds (from influencers to hacktivists) and the ways in which IT-informed ways of being seep into social life offline (from ideologies of innovation to algorithmic systems of oppression). Doing so, we will also query the concept of culture, exploring its contents, contours, and limitations. What makes a culture? How do we know it when we see one? What is the ongoing utility of the culture concept in the face of multiplicity, contestation, and change? We will also learn and practice ethnography, a methodology central to studies of culture across disciplines. Students will complete a series of independent research experiments, using ethnographic tools (including participant observation, interview, visual and archival analysis) to deeply investigate a digital culture of their choice while also reflecting on their own digital practices.
Surveillance and Power (INTL 330 / MCST 330): This course considers surveillance as a social formation, inseparable from the theory and exercise of power. On the one hand, it takes up the pressing questions surveillance raises, from the development of cutting-edge technologies to the complex work of regulation. On the other hand, it situates surveillance historically as central to projects of imperial conquest, state formation, and colonial rule. Engaging with theoretical works, primary sources, empirical studies and artistic renderings, students will grapple with problems of surveillance and power across geographic and historical contexts, and as intertwined with formations of race, class, gender, and nationality. Tracing surveillance as it runs through our societies, institutions, and our own lives, we will work to identify what holds “surveillance” together as a concept, and what differentiates the many and varied shapes it can take.
Senior Seminar: Afterlives (INTL 482): The familiar rhythm of an obsolete industrial order. The disquieting echo of a colonial category. The generation-spanning aspirations of a migration journey. The instinctive reach toward a long-lapsed faith. All of us, always, live amidst afterlives: situations that live on past their purported end points, shaping what comes after in unruly ways. In this course we take up a deceptively simple question: how does the past make itself felt in the present? Following restless spirits, radioactive isotopes, abandoned buildings and other figures of the not-yet-gone, we will explore a range of possible answers offered across time, space, and scholarly disciplines. Doing so, we will interrogate the afterlife as an avenue for thinking through our entanglements, antipathies, and responsibilities as global(ized) citizens, while asking what it means to live in relation to afterlives yet to come. Students in this course will read a series of four books that each propose their own approach to understanding the ongoingness of history. At the same time, students will develop their own portfolio project, examining their chosen object of study in conversation with the methods, concepts, and figures explored in course texts.