Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Topics on the cultural production of acoustic, visual, and/or multimodal communication. Explores cultural contexts of media production, media artifacts, media perceptions, and alternative media practices. Topics include: advertising, film, gaming, radio, television, and questions of representation in media professions. This course can be repeated once for credit (up to a maximum of two times).

COURSE DETAILS:

Topic for Spring 2025:  The Indigenous Internet

Cybernetics frames human identity as the performance of Self on the Internet (Halberstam 1991). The Internet has become a “global village” where sovereignty and embodiment vary according to the technological and cultural contexts behind avatars and builds (McLuhan 1967; Morse 2022). Digital communications, once seen as a digital divide separating Indigenous communities—First Nations, Métis, and Inuit—from technology, are now reshaping Indigenous cultural narratives and aesthetics (Dyson, Grant & Hendriks 2007, 2016). No longer positioned in opposition to tradition, cyber-“space” is a networked reality where Indigenous Peoples assert their identities and resist Western colonial ideologies that propose to dominate Indigenous land, life, and sovereignty by producing, distributing, and sharing digital art and media (Gajjala 2002). Through a decolonizing lens, this course will address the need for Indigenous social critique in the sociology of technology by studying the Indigenous artists and creators who are recoding and repopulating the digital landscape with their knowledge (Wajcman 1991; Haraway 2013; Russell 2024). By seeking data sovereignty, building digital kinships, and cultivating digital spaces to sustain culture and community, Indigenous cyber communities are defining Indigenous relationships with technology outside of the colonial gaze (Wemigwans 2018; Walter & Russo Carroll 2021; Carlson & Frazer 2021). Whether expressing identity, or even engaging in subversive digital tactics (Loyer 2020)—trolling—Indigenous Peoples are using the Internet to express aesthetic modes of kinship, culture, and activism.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

Software and Hardware Requirements

Access to Presentation software is required for this class (i.e., PowerPoint, GoogleSlides).

To ensure you can access all course materials and complete assigned coursework, we recommend you have access to a computer and the Internet.

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: