Cinema and Media Studies

In this course, we will use a single franchise – Sonic the Hedgehog – as an access point to study media history, aesthetics, social and cultural practice, and the relationships between games, film, and other artforms. Originally released in 1991 for Sega’s Genesis console, the Sonic series has spawned over three decades of games, cartoons, manga, novels, films, music, board games, action figures, fan art, cosplay, and merchandizing. Both the volume and the variety of these texts allow the Sonic corpus to be a focal point for questions with broader stakes for the study of games and media in general. Some of the questions we will be considering in this course include:

What has been the relationship between particular videogame characters and franchises and the business practices and strategies of entertainment industries? What form does stardom take in the world of digital games, and is it an appropriate concept to apply to a mascot like Sonic? How have established game franchises responded to major technological and aesthetic shifts in the medium? How might we understand the concept and practice of adaptation as applied to the digital games, and what does it reveal about the medium specificity of and the relationship between games, film, comics, novels, and other forms? What can a game franchise that has taken a wide variety of generic forms (platforming, racing, fighting, and pinball, to name just a few) tell us about how genre works as concept and system in digital games?

The ideal of the amateur author has repeatedly been invoked in different moments and for different purposes throughout the history of modern China. Non-professional writers have often been considered more “authentic”— their perceptions less hindered by conventions and more sensitive to the details of everyday life. In the socialist world, amateur writing and art was one of the strategies to contrast the division between mental and manual labor. And today, we assist to a veritable explosion made possible by digital media which fully reveals the inherent contradictions of amateur creativity. Seen by many as a means to escape oppressive labor regimes, it ends up being the most commodified form of labor of our times. This class will proceed through a series of case studies to understand the valorization of amateurism in modern Chinese culture in historical and comparative perspective. Special attention will be paid to the media environments that make it possible, and to the ways amateur writing and art depict labor. Our overall goal, in sum, will be to familiarize ourselves with some of the ways in which the relation between creativity, amateurism, and labor has been represented and theorized.

This seminar will draw on media technology studies, game studies, and feminist science studies to think about care as an operative theoretical concept that can help reframe our understandings of contemporary technology. We will be concerned with media representations of caring technologies—technologies that give care and technologies we care for and about. We will also be concerned with how care itself is mediated by technology—on whose behalf do technologies care? What does technology care about? What does it mean to care in a technogenic world? Readings and assignments will draw on video games, animations, and films, but also treat technoscientific objects as media objects: machine learning algorithms, infrastructures, sensors and medical implants are designed and calibrated to mediate flows of information and material, producing ways of seeing, knowing, and relating. We will address three primary axes of technological care: (1) imaginaries of caring and being cared for by artificial intelligence, (2) the care and maintenance of techno-social infrastructures, and (3) technologies that mediate care-giving relationships.

This class will introduce a toolkit for thinking about and researching media, mediation, and new media cultures. We will begin with questions of technology. These will include the tension between technological determinism and the social construction of technology, as well as methods for investigating the historical evolution of media technologies. To explore how power operates within and through media, we will engage concepts and theoretical frameworks including algorithmic bias, transmedia, fan studies, platform studies, and media infrastructures. Students will develop critical and aesthetic perspectives on digital media, with special attention to games, participatory media, and code.

This course is about how planets are imagined through media as environmental and social systems, with a focus on exchanges between science fictional "world building" practices and scientific ways of knowing. We study the history of science fiction and science borrowing from one another to explain how Earth and other planets work, and how both fields have used media to depict planets. When science fiction creates imaginary worlds, are its tools similar or different to those used by exoplanet astronomers or Mars rover teams? How do these shared planetary imaginaries affect the public's understanding of the climate crisis? Examples will be drawn from both fiction and nonfiction, and both technical and aesthetic media, including climate models, video games, television, pulp magazines, and film. The course culminates with a creative, group planetary world building assignment.

How have insects affected ways of knowing and relating to the world?

This course opens a dialogue between insects and Japanese audiovisual cultures, including fiction, poetry, visual art, manga, anime, and film. We aim to address the important and profound challenge that recent trends in animal studies, environmental humanities, and eco-criticism pose to received ways of studying human cultures and societies. The challenge lies in offering alternatives to the entrenched reliance on a nature-culture divide, which gives culture explanatory preference over nature. In the case of Japan and insects, for instance, there exists a fairly significant body of scholarship on how Japanese people respond to, interact with, and represent insects, and yet priority is generally given to culture, and Japan is treated monolithically. To offer alternatives to this monolithic culturalism, in this course we will (a) open dialogue between culture accounts of insects and scientific accounts and (b) explore different forms of media offering different milieus where human animals and more-than-human insects come into relation without assuming the ascendency of one over the other.

The course explores a central aspect of Chinese contemporary culture, namely the process of transposing new and old stories from the page to the stage to the screen. In addition, the class seeks to expand the concept of adaptation to investigate how cinema appropriates and repurposes other media, and why specific intermedial genres emerge more prominently at certain historical conjunctures. The films we will watch encompass three genres: comedy, opera film, and documentary, each respectively characterized by thematic and formal engagements with television, regional theater, and screen-based news. Some of the screenings will be followed by discussions with filmmakers, in person or on Zoom. 

How do video games reflect, theorize, and alter history? This lecture course will draw on strategies from history, media, and game studies to understand the place of games in the history of knowledge and our knowledge of history. How have historical simulations, ensconced in media objects, represented scientific, social, and cultural processes? How do games invite players to perform and inhabit historically specific subjectivities? What is the role of digital media in the public understanding of history? By representing alternate and future histories, games articulate theories of historical change, suggesting and popularizing modes of political, economic, and social agency. We will consider how games represent the structure of time, causality, and choice, and how the hardware and software of video games constrain and enable certain representations of history. Through lectures, discussions, group play sessions, written and practice-based assignments, and theoretical readings, we will think about what it means to ‘game’ history and to historicize games.