This graduate course focuses each semester on a topic of current research within the field of communications. Each week, the topic will be explored in a dual format: a seminar accompanied by a guest lecture by a different researcher in the field. The course aims to provide a comprehensive overview of debates of contemporary relevance to communications scholarship.
This course has two parts.
The first part will explore three notions of power and visuality in different world traditions considering how they use visual culture to produce power, whether spiritual, political or commercial. We will consider three notions of sovereignty linked to images: the traditional monarchial religious sovereignty of kings, popes and lamas; the sovereignty of the nation represented in the houses of representatives or Parliaments; and the sovereignty of global capitalist media corporations such as Netflix and Instagram based on self-representation, narrative and narcissism.
The second part of the course will study contemporary visual culture through the global monoliths Netflix and the GAFAM companies, which represent a shift away from sovereign national media systems towards accelerated global circulation of images and stories. Our first case study will analyze Netflix’s most successful show, The Crown, with its often-controversial depiction of the British monarchy and its aesthetics of power in a declining authority over a world empire. We will further consider Instagram, Facebook and global brands.
Exploring the concept of sovereignty through its core meaning, supreme authority within a territory, we will ask what does territory mean in a globalized media system? Following Nicholas Mirzeoff’s use of Thomas Carlisle’s idea of visuality, we will consider how we internalize images and how this process is used to have power over us or to provide the means for us to have agency over our lives.
If visuality is a means of ordering and narrating the chaos of life in ways we can understand, who has the authority of the visualizing? Who has the right to look? Who has the right to be seen and the right not to be seen (surveillance)? How do we choose what and whom we look at and how is it chosen for us?