Laura-Zoe Humphreys

From the city symphonies of early silent cinema to the navigation of cities and urban social relations through mobile phones and social media, new media technologies have been integral to how urban life is both imagined and experienced. Urban infrastructures and technologies themselves, meanwhile, also have important mediating qualities, as skyscrapers through electrical grids, roads, and vehicles become contested signs of modernity, opportunities for the enactment of power, and sites of struggle. Drawing on interdisciplinary readings and methods, this course examines how media construed broadly has historically represented, shaped, and transformed cities and rights to the city with unequal consequences across race, class, gender, sexuality, and Global North/Global South divides. Taking seriously Friedrich Kittler's provocative suggestion that the city should be thought of as a medium, we also reflect on what media is in the context of the urban, examining how more traditionally conceived notions of media-film, photography, sound recordings, and mobile phones-intersect with urban infrastructure and technologies, which also take on signifying qualities.

From transformations in work and intimate relationships to panics over media piracy, in the 21st century, digital media has come to play an ever more important role in politics, economics, and identities. Ethnography – a methodology based on long-term immersion in the lives of the people who the ethnographer is interested in studying – is particularly useful as a means of understanding lived experiences and effects of digital media. Ethnography has also been central in highlighting the operations of digital media outside of the Global North, which all too often dominates popular and scholarly discussions. But digital media also confronts ethnography with new challenges as researchers must devise ways of studying social dynamics over both online and offline contexts and between geographically distant locations. In this course, we consider how ethnographers have adapted to these new methodological challenges and how ethnography can shed light on a range of pressing topics in media studies, including the politics of infrastructure, labor and the information economy, media piracy, fan cultures, journalism and disinformation, and contemporary social movements. As part of the course, students also conduct their own ethnographic research project on a digital media topic of their choosing. This course, then, will at once introduce you to debates within digital media ethnography; expand your understanding of how digital media reinforces or challenges difference and power in locations around the world; and teach you how to design and carry out your own ethnographic research project from data collection through writing up results in an engaging manner. This course meets the Writing Intensive SLA Tier-2 requirement.

From the 1980s on, ethnography rapidly became central to the study of media both in one of the method’s foundational disciplines—socio-cultural anthropology—and in communication and media studies. Anthropologists discovered that paying closer attention to media technologies and texts shed new light on questions of difference, identity, and power, while also opening up challenges to the concept of culture that had long been integral to the discipline. Scholars working across the humanities, meanwhile, discovered that ethnography—including immersive and long-term fieldwork, participant observation, and in-depth and contextualized interviews—provides essential tools for understanding how media affects people’s everyday and lived experiences in diverse socio-cultural contexts. Ethnography has also been integral to expanding the study of media outside of the focus on the Global North that still predominates in popular and scholarly conversation in the United States. Taking this interdisciplinary background as our starting point, in this course we examine how ethnography sheds light on two growing areas of research that are essential to contemporary media studies: media technologies and space and textual circulation and reception. As part of the course, students will complete two ethnographic exercises culminating in a final research paper on media spaces and technologies or the reception of a media text. This course, then, will at once introduce you to the history and uses of media ethnography across a range of social science and humanities disciplines; expand your understanding of how media reinforce or challenge identity, difference, and power around the world; and teach you how to apply ethnographic methods in your own research.