Media, Material, and Popular Cultures

3 units

This seminar introduces students to key conversations in the fields of media, material, and popular culture across the Hispanic World. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to explore how media shape culture and alter the material dimensions of cultural production, dissemination, and consumption, paying special attention to the historical formations of popular culture in rural and urban settings. We will study various print, aural and visual mediascapes and analyze the roles mediation (culture circuits), objects (books, speeches, sound or visual recordings), and practices (production and consumption) play in the formation of identity, community, and everyday experiences of nation, globalization, race, gender, and ethnicity. We will address key concepts, research questions, theories, and methodologies in the fields of media and cultural studies, critical theory, material culture, and popular culture, both in the Hispanic World and globally. This course aims to collectively think about new ways of defining objects of study, connecting media and popular culture, and linking interdisciplinary methodologies to broader research questions across the humanities.