Credits: 3
Prerequisites: 04:567:215 Gender, Race, and Class in the Media
Corequisites: None
This course examines how race is produced, represented, and contested through media institutions, technologies, and cultural practices. Drawing on critical race studies, media studies, and cultural studies, the course explores how media shapes racial meaning, sustains hierarchies of power, and serves as a site of resistance and transformation. Students will analyze news, film, advertising, digital platforms, and emerging technologies to understand how race operates across local, national, and global contexts.
Learning Objectives
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
- Explain race as a social, political, and historical construction rather than a biological fact, and identify how whiteness operates structurally within media institutions and industries.
- Analyze media texts using key theories of representation, ideology, and power, and connect media representations to broader systems of empire, capitalism, and state power.
- Critically assess stereotypes, controlling images, and racialized narratives across media forms, and examine how technology, algorithms, and surveillance reproduce racial inequality.
- Evaluate media activism and antiracist interventions critically and historically.
- Produce original, well-supported analyses of media and race in written and/or creative forms.