Communication

This course focuses on the analysis of various media texts, historical developments within media, and their social and cultural contexts in the English-speaking world. It provides a foundation for understanding film, television, and digital media, and their relation to representation, culture, technology, and aesthetics. The course introduces media such as photography, feature films, avant-garde cinema, documentary films, television, digital media, print, and social media; and covers the concepts, methods, and various cultural theories within film and media. Formal and stylistics elements of film such as mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing, as well as approaches to understanding narrative and genre, are also covered. Students examine media products as a part of their social and cultural contexts and work collaboratively on the creation of a multimedia product.

This course examines how journalist have occupied a unique place in Western popular culture and looks at questions such as why are journalist so ubiquitous in popular culture; how accurate have those depictions been now and in the past; how has the depiction of journalist changed over time, and how have those changes mirrored the public perceptions of journalists and journalism; how do those depictions of journalist compare to reality; how has popular culture dealt with real life ethical dilemmas that confront journalists; and how effective have real-life journalists been at telling their own narratives — portraying the gritty reality, or embellishing the fictionalized view of the profession.

The first part of this course serves as an introduction to the general characteristics and typology of arguments. Furthermore, students learn how arguments can be standardized and how argumentative structures can be visualized by drawing patterns. This part of the course also contains an introductory lecture, entitled “Standardizing Arguments”. In part two, an informal but systematic method for evaluating the quality of arguments, the ARG method, is introduced. During this part of the course an introduction to bad arguments, so-called fallacies, is provided as well. A lecture on evaluating arguments accompanies this part of the course. In the third part, the knowledge and skills provided in the first two parts are applied to complete texts, seeking to isolate the arguments they present systematically and evaluate whether or not they are good arguments. In part four, standardization and patterns of arguments, as well as the ARG method, are used to construct arguments. Furthermore, students practice how the skills learned throughout the course can be applied to writing academic papers. Students considering enrolling for the skill training in argumentation should be aware that the course does not focus on rhetoric and debating skills (although it can be assumed that the analytical skills acquired in this course will be helpful for debates). Prerequisite: Students who take the course need to have written at least one academic paper.

Modern media are everywhere; they mediate nearly all aspects of everyday life. Media forms old and new – newspapers, magazines, films, radio, television, pop music, Internet, social media, and mobile phones – are shaping our social and political life, cultivating our cultural imaginations, and articulating our personal experiences and a sense of belonging in a rapidly changing world. This course examines the many roles of the media in the web of modern life.

Through the combination of theoretical teaching and gathering and writing practice, this course combines news gathering and writing skills.