This course will consider how art, film, and the social life that surrounds them are means of dismantling ableism. Understanding labor as fundamental to American legal definitions of disability, we will think about practices that unwork common sense framings of work, dependency, value, and exchange. Reading American disability rights frameworks against the grain, students will collaborate on creative projects and will be invited into study with visiting artists, filmmakers and activists to reframe ableism, access, and debility in global contexts.

This course presents a global introduction to horror and invites students to explore the tenets of the genre in praxis. Particular attention will be given to recent surge of horror films that are conscious of the genre’s gender, sexuality, and race-based biases. Students will be trained to deconstruct these biases in the films they make as part of their final project for the course.

This course offers a broad overview of the study of comedy and politics in contemporary U.S. popular media, electioneering, and governance, drawing expansively from methodologies in the critical Humanities and Social Sciences, including Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School, British Cultural Studies, and contemporary Critical Race Theory, among others. The concept of ‘ideology’ will serve as a lynchpin in the course. We will examine how the structures and appeals of comedic performance, both as a means of commenting on politics and as a device employed by politicians, have shifted over time in ways that resonate with similar shifts in academic definitions of ideology (i.e., ideology as a product of the culture industry, ideology as irrationality or reification, ideology as practice rather that cognition, ideology as affect, etc.)

This course is an introduction to the field of cultural studies by way of media theory. Through our theoretical readings, students develop critical frames of analysis to examine our experience of culture in units clustered around globally momentous media(ted) events in the recent. Topics may include the so-called AIDS crisis, 9/11, War on Terror, and BLM, among others.

An interdisciplinary study of the history and politics U.S. film through an immersive exploration of New York City; a dynamic landscape where different peoples, interest groups, political movements, and other forces vie for power, wealth, recognition, and representation. For each topic, we will examine key films in the history of New York City filmmaking.