The Department of Media and Cultural Studies provides students with a critical, interdisciplinary analytic skill set that is simultaneously local and transnational, pertinent to social justice and political movements, encompassing the theoretical and the practical. Media and Cultural Studies brings together a group of faculty and students from a range of fields and specialties who are engaged in the critical analysis and making of media and culture.<br>As public intellectuals, practicing critics, and cultural interlocutors, poets and artists, filmmakers and musicians, sociologists, and policy experts, we infuse theory with practice, the creative with the evaluative.<br>We study how political economy and dominant as well as emergent ideologies condition the historical and contemporary production and distribution, circulation and contestation, reception and appropriation of media and cultural texts.<br><br>We analyze how ideology, power, and identity intersect and articulate through media and culture.<br>We interrogate the relationships between the conditions of production (policy, ownership, institutions, regulation), the formations of social movements and practices of expressive cultures, and the production of meaning through different media texts and technologies.<br>Our graduates are scholars, social activists, media and policymakers, critics, independent media makers, and participants in creative and media industries, who can move flexibly between the applied and critical, the professional and scholarly, the empirical and theoretical, and the social-scientific.<br>Our approach encompasses political economy and media policy, critical race, ethnic and gender studies, ethnography, and historical, material, visual and textual analysis, methods are drawn from the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences, analyzing the relationship between media ownership, production, circulation, and reception, employing a problem-based approach to the analysis and media and culture, to critically analyze the relations between institutions, ideology, and identity, synthesizing critical analysis and cultural production, blending theory with practice.<br><br>Our department examines the culture and media of the last century, commercial norms and governmental policy as well as alternative strategies, and the newest forms of media technology and innovation. We analyze old and new technologies, including visual, aural, audiovisual, and computer-generated texts. Our work traverses the local to the global, global north and global south, tracking influences and borrowings from Hollywood to Bollywood, from anime to videogames, to understand the processes of globalization, transculturation, displacement and diaspora, cultural hybridity and imperial domination.<br><br>We research and teach about feminism, indigenous and decolonization movements, citizenship and democracy, dissent and alternative media, the formation of new subcultures and expressive identities. We study audiences and cultural practices, old and new forms of media, from print-journalism to video-games, blogging, and other forms of digital media. Teaching interests include: historical, existing, and speculative media policies and ecologies, political economy, video, and gaming culture, photography and documentary and experimental filmmaking, music and sound design, global communication and social change, transnational cinema and media indigenous and community media activism, performance cultures, graphic narratology, and environmentalism and sustainability.