Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines the contemporary construction and maintenance of race and ethnicity, through movies, music, and the Internet. Provides grounding in scholarship on media, race, ethnicity, and identity. Explores the historical role of entertainment in racialization. Investigates contemporary issues and forms of media and race. Students who have taken CMNS 486 with subtitle "Race and the Media" cannot take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

Race has shaped myriad aspects of our digital world—from the representations of social groups in entertainment media, to the infrastructures and policies that support technological development, to algorithms and the collection of data, to the interfaces that shape online engagement. Media such as networked television, streaming platforms, social media, and videogames saturate our everyday lives and social institutions. These media provide images and narratives that inform our social identities and understandings of other social groups. These mediated representations of race shape and are shaped by the technical designs and industry structures that enable their production, circulation, and appropriation. For these reasons, nondominant groups have sought to access and control technologies of media production and distribution to complicate and challenge dominant racial discourses that are reproduced through cultural texts, computational processes, and media industries. These groups have deployed digital media in ways that expand the public sphere, contest the status quo, and more meaningfully depict their concerns and desires.

This course uses digital media as a focal point to examine the mutual shaping of media representations and media infrastructures in the construction of race in our society. Through readings, discussions, screenings, demonstrations, and written assignments, students will ground themselves in the research on critical race studies of media and technology. By examining how race intersects with other axes of identity in media representations and infrastructures—such as class and gender—students will apply concepts from this scholarship to contemporary issues such as digital labour, algorithmic bias, predictive policing, mediated protest, and diversity and inclusion in tech. Students will analyse screenings and readings in conjunction with reflections on their own experiences, and build on this material to design, execute, and write up their own research projects.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: