How does

mediate what it means to be human?

Taught by various EH faculty

Fall 2024 taught by Sucharita Kanjilal

This course explores the complex ways in which media animate our social, sensory and political worlds, and enable particular relationships between people, places, bodies and things. A key focus of this class will be to de-Westernize our understanding of media theory and practice, and critically evaluate what media “do” in time and space. We will tackle questions such as: Under what historical and social circumstances do people consume, produce and distribute media? How have people appropriated global, national and local media, especially in the Global South? How do power relations produced by race, gender, class, caste and capital shape encounters with media and media industries? Our class will engage with a range of media forms, from colonial cookbooks to movie theatres, community radio stations to the YouTube industry. We will read scholarly works from across the fields of media studies, feminist theory, anthropology and digital geography, putting key media theorists (such as Stuart Hall, Marshall McLuhan, Laura Marks, Lila Abu-Lughod, Lev Manovich and Charles Hirschkind) in conversation with contemporary media practitioners, artists and organizers. We will also prioritize working on media projects ourselves, in order to assess our own positions as producers as well as users and consumers of media.