Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0255 - Images of War: Theory/Practice

This course will introduce students to interdisciplinary work in media and language acquisition. Students in this class will be active readers, lookers, thinkers, and makers. War is a subject making activity. We learn to engage with images, understand their proliferation, and to contend with them as a mass language. In recent years, the battle- and playing- fields have shifted and access to information and images has also changed. U.S. troops pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, democracy movements emerge in the Middle East, Occupy movements take root in Europe and the U.S. and the War on Drugs claims new victims; meanwhile PDAs/Handheld technologies, social media networks, twitter, live web-streaming, podcasts, eclipse mass-media broadcast channels distributing news and information. These shifting terrains become points of contact between multi-lingual participants. Though English is a dominant online interface language, English speakers are more aware that our counterparts across the globe are facile in multiple languages -- and our access to 'what's really going on' expands once we add second and third languages to our repertoire. Students will engage with materials in multiple languages: Arabic, Spanish, English, visual, and digital in order to tap into resources that can elucidate and expand our understandings of struggles for democracy and sovereignty across the globe. Weekly reading and looking assignments will provoke written and visual responses. Students will participate in group work and dynamic class discussions. This is a rigorous theory/practice workshop class designed specifically for Division II students. We will challenge traditional modes of production and presentation collectively. Students will focus in on their critical skills that will enable them to describe, interpret, and evaluate the ways in which images represent the world around us and be required to produce written responses, two visual projects, and a research project/presentation. This will be a challenging course for serious students in the media arts, social sciences, and critical studies. This course has received funding from the Mellon Language Acquisition grant in order to incorporate foreign languages (in this case Spanish and Arabic) into the course.

Writing and Research Multiple Cultural Perspectives