IAM 302 Media and Popular Cultures
Media and popular culture are powerful, possessing substantial societal agency and influence. This course provides an overview of the various aspects of popular culture and media and how they are intertwined. Students explore the relationships between mass media and popular culture through an interrogative approach and scenario-based learning activities. By exploring, examining, and debating a series of questions and critical issues throughout the course, students acquire knowledge and skills necessary for research in the study of media, mass communication, and popular culture studies, theoretical ideas used in the study of mass media and its representation of and impact on popular culture. Students explore many differing views regarding the importance of media and popular culture, the role of media in the functioning of a democratic and egalitarian society, how media promotes social inequality and inhibits political discussion or involvement, biases in the representation of culture in the media, and other related issues.
Learning Outcomes
Identify key elements of popular culture, decode what these elements say about the world, and evaluate the limitations and possibilities of those perspectives on the world.
Identify, explain, and problematize particular ways in which popular culture of various historical periods reflects the representations of those times and places.
Demonstrate an awareness of how the global circulation of culture changes how they think about the world, their place in it, and their identity.
Demonstrate and explain how other individuals use popular forms and practices to construct identities and social affiliations that are different from theirs.
Identify resources (books, scholarly journals, websites) available to help them continue learning about the variety of strategies used by commercial industries for popular culture to enter the media stream, as technologies/new media evolve.
Discuss critical issues related to the impact of communication media on the representors and the represented by applying multidisciplinary methods and theories in the study of media and popular culture.
Produce a well-formulated, well-researched, and polished written analysis of issues in relation to media and popular Muslim cultures based on an independent case study.
Demonstrate skills in library research, building a bibliography, and using standard conventions of style for scholarly writing.
Evaluate the validity, reliability, or utility of the acquired knowledge and skills necessary for inclusive civic engagements and intellectual dialogues.