TCCS 715 Representation, Media, and Technology

This elective is open to PhD students who have completed their core requirements for the program in Transnational, Cultural, and Community Studies. This resolutely interdisciplinary course will encourage students to develop a set of tools to help them construct frameworks for interpreting cultural production and reception in a global context. We will ¿ following the example of Argon Appadurai¿consider global flows of people, technology, media, finance and knowledge in an attempt to understand the complex set of processes that have come to be understood as ¿globalization,¿ especially in its most local instantiations. After some introductory theoretical and historical works we will then organize our inquiries around four major case studies having to do with sports, food and drink, tourism, and music. In each case we will push ourselves to consider how new technologies have shaped the global circulation of people, goods, and popular culture products. The course operates from the assumption that the ¿real¿ and the ¿representational¿ are mutually constitutive and must be understood in this dynamic relationship.

3 Credit(s)