Bob's Java Jive, photograph by John Margolies, 1979, Library of Congress Free to Use and Re-Use Collection.

CA 531 examines the history of advertising with a focus on the rise of strategically designed commercial messages and the growth of advertising agencies. As powerful hubs for the innovation of new and increasingly targeted creative and consumer research practices, ad agencies embedded messages in the landscape and in successive waves of new media forms to sell branded products. These embedded messages fostered a new way of life that was centered on directed patterns of consumption.

Narratives of Mental Health and Illness: Humans are natural storytellers.  We make sense of our experiences by creating narratives of our identities, relationships, and social realities.  The stories we tell, become “dwelling places,” creating frameworks for interaction in different domains of our lives. This course will focus on narratives of mental illness and health.  Such narratives are complex as, at this time in history, western culture is actively trying to break long held beliefs that such illness narratives are private matters, best not discussed. The silencing of mental health stories has mirrored systemic mental health treatment underfunding and gaps in access. Along with the myriad impacts from the COVID pandemic, we are in what is being called a mental health crisis. Further, consider narratives of health and wellness. Media in general, social media especially, highlights narratives of being our best self, physically, mentally, and emotionally. In this course, we will explore how these narratives reveal and conceal the intricacies of individual experience, and the ways our cultural narratives impact our ability to think critically about illness, health, and wellness. We will consider how we craft stories of illness and wellness within relational, historical, social, political, economic, and cultural contexts. We will also critically explore a variety of topics relevant to narrative theory, including canonical stories, subjectivity, culture, time, secrets and lies, memory, trauma, reframing, and truth.  Using autoethnographic research methods, students will conduct original research projects. Readings include theoretical, methodological, autoethnographic, non-fiction, and fictional texts.