Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0289 - Audience Research

Countless scholars have discussed the ideologies communicated through media texts, but most persist in privileging their own analytical interpretations. In this course students will explore various theorizations of audiences, methodologies employed to study them, and results of how audiences interpret films, advertisements, television programs, novels and other cultural texts. We will also seek to better understand why people make radically different meanings of the same texts. The course is designed for advanced Division II and first-semester Division III students committed to both reading and analyzing existing audience studies, as well as to conceptualizing, carrying out, and documenting their own audience study. Students must have completed at least one prior course in media studies, and they should begin the course with at least a general sense of the issues they wish to explore in their study.

Independent Work Multiple Cultural Perspectives Writing and Research