Critical and Cultural Studies of Mass Communication: Course Outline

Introduction to cultural studies

• The Ruling Class and the Ruling Ideas
• History of the Subaltern Classes; The Concept of “Ideology”; Cultural Themes: Ideological Material
• The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
• The Public Sphere
• Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)

Social Life and Cultural Studies

• The Medium is the Message
• Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory
• From Culture to Hegemony; Subculture: The Unnatural Break
• Encoding/Decoding
• Politics of Empirical Audience Research

Political Economy of Mass-Communication

• Propaganda Models
• Gendering the Commodity Audience: Critical Media Research, Feminism, and Political Economy

The Politics of Representation: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

• Stereotyping
• Hybrid Cultures, Oblique Powers

The Postmodern Turn and New Media

• Post modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
• Feminism, Post modernism and the “Real Me”
• Postmodern Virtually

Internationalization and Social Movements

• Disjunctive and Difference in the International Cultural Economy
• International and the Local in International Communications
• Oppositional Politics and the Internet: A Critical/Reconstructive