How do you imagine life in an African city or in a Siberian village? What does it mean to be a Chinese worker or a yuppie from Boston? How are we encouraged to take sides in a conflict? Informing us about various places and people, the media form our notions and feelings about them. This seminar will challenge you to look at the diversity of the world from a new vantage point as we explore certain aspects of contemporary media representations of natural, built and social environments and pertaining cultural/social identities. You will learn the cutting-edge concepts and methods of media criticism and practice their application to a critical interpretation of media content. Discussing news and advertisements, magazine feature stories and TV documentaries, photos and maps, we will examine their rhetorical and audiovisual means of expression and explore how they shape public perceptions of particular places, identities and ways of living and how ideologies are thus sustained. We will also debate the actual and potential effects of certain images and narratives disseminated by the media.

2–6 LP

Beginning:

Thu 16.11.17, 14:00–17:30

weekly til Thu  21.12.17