The goal of this course is to build the skills and vocabulary necessary to conduct an informed critical analysis of the representation of Asian Americans through an examination of film, television, and other media productions about as well as by Asian Americans and with the support of readings on film theory, racial studies, feminist studies, cultural criticism, and independent cinema. This course examines “Asianness” in dominant culture, where the distinction between Asian and Asian American is often blurred. We seek to understand the artistic and political strategies that frame Asian Americans and film, and to understand that social representation is connected to social practice. Further, we engage in discussions about the dynamic between communities and the media. Film, television, Internet, and digital/social media texts that we study include independent work by Asian American makers as well as mainstream/Hollywood examples. The overarching thematic questions in the course are: Which story-telling forms or venues are effective in sharing and shifting perspectives in regard to Asian Americans, and why? How can we challenge and change systems of representation? What does it mean to have a voice?

This course examines the relationship between race and television. We study history, theory, and criticism, with a particular approach to genres, for example, sit-com, stand-up comedy, drama, music, dance, sports, news, reality programming, niche programming, and online series, and more. Our goal is to define the components of racial discourse as related to, emanating from, and generated by televisual media, and to identify which mechanisms and figures are involved. Further, we seek to identify points of intervention in the creative process and/or in business practices. Questions we consider include: How is television involved in racialization and the formation of racial identities? What is the link between the representation of race relations on television and the social practices beyond it? In what ways have representations of race shifted, what stimulated such changes, and in what directions do we see media discourses heading? Such questions embody Television Studies itself, specifically, the tri-polar relationship among: industry process, text-image/visual structure, and viewer experience/audience power.

This course examines the relationship between feminism and the media. Can the media be feminist? Which media? Visual culture is political and politicized. How feminism is represented is part of how feminist projects and movements have been successful, hindered, complicated, and negotiated. In this course, we consider some of the historical roots of women-in-film, learn about television as a “feminine” medium, and analyze ways that contemporary media genres and phenomena engage with or disavow feminism. We explore different genres (ranging from popular to radical, including experimental and avant-garde) and study different eras of feminism, gauging the convergences of movements and visual culture. The goal of this course is to come to understand ways that media operate vis-à-vis feminism, and to discern strategies, possibilities, and roles among different media such as: film, television, print journalism, music video, collective, independent, alternative, mainstream, online, and social media. Key framing questions are: What marks feminist media, and what constitutes media feminism?

The goal of this course is to come to understand how reality sits on a spectrum in terms of programming, as well as in terms of how television is predicated on its relationship with viewers. This course explores the genres and subgenres of nonfiction and reality television ranging from news to talk shows to syndicated programs to prime-time series to the plethora of content that has been developed for streaming services. We consider notions of ‘the real,’ ‘realism,’ and ‘reality’ within the context of the televisual apparatus – which consists of unique narrative devices, camera interventions, textual expressions, industrial practices, audience pleasures, and intertextual “flow.” Televisual pleasure is distinct from film fantasy; so both comparative theory and close textual analysis are ways to understand more about the sustenance and growth of reality television. What about reality programming is both dismissible yet compelling? How is it simultaneously “low-brow” yet (sometimes) progressive? We examine and articulate how television as a “live-medium” which exists as part of “the everyday” functions alongside a drive for non-fiction. Together, we will come to a theory of the production of stories on television.