This course explores what it means to be a fan, how culture shapes fandom, and the role fan communication has in shaping culture. Through weekly readings, in-class discussions, autoethnographic writing, and multimedia examples, we will examine how fans are not passive consumers but active producers who can reshape the media they love. Key themes include the historical development of fan studies as an academic discipline, the prevailing stereotypes about fandoms and the truth/fiction in those, and how the controversies within fandoms relate to broader social movements. By the end of the course, students will gain a deeper understanding of the cultural significance of fandoms and their impact on media, communication, and society.

Unit One: Introduction to Fan Studies

Unit Two: Fandoms as Political

Unit Three: Media Fandom Proliferates

Unit Four: Looking Forward

Television and visual media play a vital role in shaping how we imagine and perform our identities, relationships, and sense of nationality. In our era of rapidly evolving media landscapes, where traditional TV viewing habits have transformed, understanding visual media has become increasingly complex and important. This course provides conceptual tools for critically analyzing visual media, with a particular focus on television. We explore key questions such as: How are meanings created through television? How does TV influence societal norms around gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and nationality? The course examines three crucial dimensions of television: production/distribution, texts, and reception. By the end of the semester, you will develop the skills to construct your own original critique of television.

Unit One: Cultural Studies of Media

Unit Two: Politics of Media Representation

Unit Three: Culture and Politics of Genre Media

Unit Four: Audiences Matter Too?

This course focuses on the relationship between the dominant means through which a culture communicates and the ways knowledge and being are shaped or influenced by those means of communication. We will investigate this link in multiple ways—historically, theoretically, narratively, visually. When we read fiction or watch film and television, we won’t do it as critics in a rhetorical or cultural fashion but as observers interested in thinking through the implications of mediation in popular culture. We ask what do these narratives say about us (rather than what can we say about those narratives). Over the course of the semester, we will think about media ecology broadly and consider the ways digital culture shapes or influences us and the ways we want to talk about these changes as we move forward.

Unit One: Foundations of Media Ecology

Unit Two: Digital Culture, Algorithms, and Surveillance

Unit Three: The Media Ecology of Speculative Futures