Course Title & Description: Critical Studies of Disinformation - This course examines the sociotechnical dynamics of disinformation in contemporary society. As media scholars, we will explore the role print, broadcast, and digital media play in the creation and spread of disinformation and the corresponding implications for democratic society. We will consider key distinctions between related concepts including disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. We will also highlight the challenges in identifying and labeling “false” information and explore how the identification of “truth” relates to broader struggles around the social construction of knowledge. Our review of these concepts will be informed by history, culture, and politics, and we will pay particular attention to the ways social categories – including race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual identity – shape the dynamics of disinformation. In our investigations, we will look beyond the contemporary United States to consider the spread of false information in historical and global contexts. Finally, we will explore specific examples of disinformation and consider strategies for combating this complex and evolving social issue. 

Course Title & Description: Cinema & Society - This analysis course will introduce students to the study of film as a distinct medium. The first half of the course will cover the fundamental units of film language (narrative form, mise-en scène, cinematography, editing, sound), and the relationship between film form, expression, and meaning. With this solid foundation, we will then attend to the complex interplay between cinema and social context. The second half of the semester will thus cover film ideology, stardom and celebrity, the film industry, national, international, and transnational cinemas, and other relevant topics. In addition to twice-weekly lectures and discussions, students will watch one film together per week during a separate, mandatory screening block. Throughout the semester, students will be exposed to films from a variety of genres, in a variety of forms (narrative, documentary, avant-garde), from diverse social, cultural, and historical milieus. 

Course Title & Description:  Multimedia Communication: This class is designed to teach students a basic suite of multimedia production skills to be used for communicating ideas, research, and other forms of student scholarship. Like a class in Public Speaking, which aims to help students develop a skill set and is informed by the study of rhetoric, students in this course will learn multimedia production with the ultimate aim of having students apply those skills towards engaging in forms of multimedia-enhanced discourse. Towards this end, students will learn: basic principles of videography & photography, video editing, photo editing, and audio production.  After learning basic skills, students will choose one form of multimedia communication to focus on, culminating in the production of a capstone project. The goal of the capstone project is for students to use multimedia to communicate a piece of their own scholarship, research, or other scholarly endeavors in a creative way. This could be a video essay, a mini-documentary, a podcast, a multimedia-enhanced research publication, an animated ‘explainer video’, a narrated photo essay, or a range of other potential projects. This class does not require (or expect) any prior experience with media production. Students should be willing and eager to learn, as the class will cover a lot of ground quickly in establishing the basics of production. Students who have experience with digital video, photography, video editing, or any kind of multimedia production are strongly encouraged to enroll; the class has a flexible structure to enable those students with already developed skills to work on advancing their knowledge toward mastery.