COMM375

We construct our identities through a constitutive interplay of the self and the world around us. One of the materials we use for this construction of self is media. Media contains images and messages about who is valued, what is valued, fandom, race, gender, nationality, diaspora, and class. Because we spend more than half of our waking lives with media technologies, it would be surprising if it did not become an important resource for us to make sense of our own identities. The purpose of this class is to examine how different social groups have constructed their individual and group identities through the use of media and how they interpret media through the standpoint of their group identification. Students will be asked to put themselves into the perspectives of social groups to understand how they interpret and why the use the media that they do. This will happen primarily through readings and a final ethnographic research report that examines audience’s uses of media.