Graduate Courses

Can a field of study as cross-disciplinary as media studies have a set of canonic texts? Should there be a canon? And if so, which texts and scholars would we regard as canonic to the field? In 2002, Elihu Katz et al. answered these questions with a book that mapped five schools of thought - Columbia, Frankfurt, Chicago, Toronto, and Birmingham (British Cultural Studies) - and explored how they came to define areas of research and shape the formation of distinct scholarly communities. Yet two decades ago, media and communication studies scholars were only beginning to take seriously the critiques and interventions being developed by scholars of race, gender, and postcoloniality. Now, students and scholars in media studies and other allied disciplines in the humanities and interpretive social sciences are grappling with the epistemic, ideological, and moral flaws of Eurocentric thought and in the process, re-vitalizing keywords, concepts, and theories. In this seminar, we will read and engage with canonic texts, delve into the historical conditions of the production of those texts, their afterlife and varied impact(s) on the field, and engage with critical responses that help recast their theoretical and analytic value for us today. Scholars who have done this work of re-imagining canonic texts/schools of thought - for instance, Armond Towns on Marshall McLuhan, Roopali Mukherjee on the Frankfurt School, and Paula Chakravartty on critical political economy - will join class sessions as guest speakers.