This intermediate topical course addresses new and evolving issues around digital technologies and networked publics, examining their social, cultural, political, and global ramifications both on- and off-line. Coursework will engage digital media theory and scholarship. Topics courses may be repeated with a different topic for credit. Note: specific topics may fulfill distinct core requirements.
Critical Game Studies: Aesthetics and Politics
Are video games addictive? Does video game violence affect people in RL (real life)? Are video games art? Can video games change the world? Even as video games have emerged as a multi-billion dollar media industry, how we discuss them remains contentious. Critics disagree over their status as a “serious” mode of artistic expression, along with their place in the “culture wars” that have shaped the political life of the United States and the world. This course provides students with the intellectual framework and critical vocabulary to examine video games as media texts via aesthetics: the value of gameplay experiences and how we fit them into our lives. How do we play, and why? The course will also address questions of politics: how can games shape, and how are they shaped by, the current of public life? Who gets to play, particularly along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class? Live and recorded gameplay demonstrations will provide students with the material for criticism and inquiry, alongside contemporary critical games writing, which will serve as models for student writing projects. Participants do not need previous experience with games or computers, but only a willingness to engage with games and gameplay within a critical context.
Women Making Moves - Women’s Migration and Media
The course will apply a theoretical and practical framework to facilitate an understanding of gendered migration patterns within Asia with a focus on Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Asian diaspora. This course will be designed to encourage students to critically engage in understanding global migration flows and trends, but to also look closer at more personal narratives of migration. We will discuss forced and voluntary migration, issues of sex work and the emotional labor industry, the crossing of borders, and what it means to belong. The thematic focus will be on the feminization of migration, the monetization of the migrant worker’s body, and looking at how feminist activism is perceived within an Asian context. Students will collaborate on a visual research project that examines themes of migration and how it impacts their daily lives. Additional Core Requirement Met: Global Connections.
The Art and Politics of Virtual Reality
Recent years have seen an explosion in consumer-grade virtual reality (VR) technologies — devices like the HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift, and Samsung Gear VR have brought a wealth of new experiences to audiences and users, both inside and outside their homes. The new wave of VR content and hardware may feel unprecedented; in fact, the history of VR begins over a century ago. This course will examine “reality” and the “virtual”, two long-contested terms, through the lenses of history, culture, embodiment, and space. Students will walk the boundaries of “virtual reality” through readings, screenings, workshops, and VR experiences. Through this work, students will enter the discourse surrounding VR, where they will struggle with the complicated political questions that surround VR as an art form: Who gets to define what is ‘real’ and what is not? How (and for whom) is something ‘virtual’? What kinds of rules, procedures, laws, and people should govern these strange spaces and places we call “virtual reality”? And how can VR be used not simply as a vehicle for entertainment or escape, but also a space for cultural questioning, activism, and social change? This course is connected to the Oxy Cinematheque Series that will occur during select evening course sessions.
Introduction to Game Studies and Culture
Games are changing how we create, mediate, and understand our world. This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of game studies with a media studies and design focus. Students will read research, play games, analyze games, and think through game design. Students will also examine issues facing gaming culture. A survey of subjects will describe the foundational theories of the field, identities and game culture, and implications/effects of gameplay. Topics to be explored include disability, education and games, cheating, sexuality and games, narratives, addiction, news games, and violence.
Who Owns the Internet?
This course takes a historical, critical, and experiential approach to the competing sets of interests that have struggled over control of the internet since its inception. These players - military, academic, corporate, activist, regulatory, user, etc. - will be explored through sets of readings, screenings, field trips, and hands-on workshops. Central to our inquiry will be questions of infrastructure, surveillance, and resistance, as they mark out the terrain, on which digital culture thrives, and, through which, major actors exert their influence. Students will have the opportunity to both learn about digital cultures and work in digital modes in this course, with hands on components emphasizing geo-spatial analysis, multimedia presentation, social media engagement, and webmaking.