MUTA1235 Visual Popular Culture and the Politics of Meaning-Making (5 cr)
Description
Content
Visual culture pervades today’s cultural landscape as a seductively entertaining yet politized, and politically engaged, form of meaning-making. The aim of this course is to present an overview of the essential theories and concepts related to analyzing visual popular culture (such as images, memes, television and film) as well as to facilitate students’ individual development in visual literacy and understanding of the ways popular culture affects people’s lives (in terms of, e.g., the construction of gender, race, sexuality) both on micro- and macro-levels.
Completion methods
The course consists of a preassignment (1-2 pages) based on two short preliminary readings, lectures with discussions and examples (incl. a film screening), individual learning diary (6-8 pages), a group presentation, and independent work (i.e. working on the presentation and learning diary).
Assessment details
Active participation in the course (80% attendance of face-to-face lectures and discussions is mandatory), successful completion of course assignments (pre-assignments, group presentation, and learning journal).
Learning outcomes
1. Be familiar with essential theories, methods and concepts (e.g. representation, social construction, discourse analysis) related to analyzing popular visual culture and its role in cultural meaning-making.
2. Critically discuss and analyze popular visual cultural items.
3. Critically discuss and analyze the role popular visual culture has in today’s society in shaping, for example, cultural understanding of gender, race and ethnicity, class, body norms, living/nonliving, and sexuality.
4. Develop a heightened awareness of the role of popular visual culture in constructing and shaping the lives of individuals through politized, politically engaged forms of meaning-making.
5. Critically explore their personal attitudes and beliefs about popular visual culture and be more knowledgeable of its impact on their own and other’s lives.
Description of prerequisites
Literature
- Hall, Stuart: “The Spectacle of the Other: Introduction.” In Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans and Sean Nixon (eds.) Representation (Second Edition), Sage, 2013, pp. 215–228.; ISBN: 9781849205474
- Wanzo, Rebecca: “Pop Culture/Visual Culture.” In Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 651–672.; ISBN: 0-199-32858-7