Understanding Media Studies

Fall 2014

Shannon Mattern

Carmel Pryor | Georgia Gallavin | Natalie Galivanes


Why are we here?
Via Alan Fletcher,
The Art of Looking
Sideways
create a collaborative, explicitly
intradisciplinary space within the department
to explore the often competing commitments
of our discipline and to articulate the stakes
(individual, fieldwide, institutional, cultural) of
the various approaches to reforming the field

provide students with opportunities to locate
themselves and their professional
commitments in relationship to the field

Virginia Crisco, Chris W. Gallagher, Deborah Minter, Katie Hupp Stahlnecker & John
Talbird, Graduate Education As Education: The Pedagogical Arts of Institutional
Critique Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture
3:3 (2003): 359-376.


familiarize [students] with the rules, conventions,
folkways, and habits of mind that inform the
profession and the discipline

as sites for institutional critique, not as idealized
future spaces wherein fully realized and
credentialized professionals do their work
Digital Etiquette

Laptops, iPads, smartphones, and other communication
devices can serve as important learning tools. Therefore, we
do not want to preclude their use in class. All we ask is that
you use this technology courteously and appropriately, to help you
engage with the class, not to check out.
*


*
Do I really need to say this? Please dont wear headphones during class.



9

Mapping the Field
11
Saul Steinberg, View of the World from 9th Avenue,
1976
Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stevens, ca. 1979-90, 1999
Guy Debord, Naked City, 1957;
Constant Nieuwenhuys, Symbolische voorstelling van New Babylon, 1969
How Do We Map
Media Studies?
Liberal Education
Tradition
Social Sciences
Humanities
Design Education
15
Diderots Systme figur des connaissances
humaines, Encyclopdie, 1751
Liberal
Education
Social
Sciences
19
John Durham Peterss List of Media Studies
Forefathers/mothers:
John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, George Herbert
Mead, Lewis Mumford, Kenneth Burke, Margaret
Mead, Robert Park, Harold Lasswell, Floyd Allport,
Robert Lynd, Edward Bernays, Robert Merton,
Lazarsfeld, I.A. Richards, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis,
Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Rudolf Arnheim,
Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer,
Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal, Antonio Gramsci
Humanities
Design
Education
disciplines are defined not by cores of knowledge (i.e.,
epistemologies) but by views of Being (i.e., ontologies)
(Shepherd 83)

it is precisely the nature and purpose of disciplines and
their disciples to forward a unique view of Being among all the
alternatives and say, There is something primary, or
essential, about this particular view. Disciplines depend on
disciples acting as advocates for the ontology they forward,
making implicit and explicit arguments that their view
matters. (Shepherd 84)

Via Julia Lupton: http://bit.ly/ifguWJ
26
John Culkin:
Media studies
represents the arts
and humanities in a
new key.