Graduate Courses

The climate crisis. The migration crisis. Economic crisis. Democracy in crisis. In this course we take a critical interpretive lens to analyze the role that media play in the growing “crisis imaginary” plaguing the twenty-first century. Drawing on scholarship informed by critical theory across various disciplines, we explore key questions about the relationship between mediation and crisis thinking. How do the different affordances of media (from radio to television to networked digital platforms) shape the public’s perception of a crisis? How are the political stakes of a crisis informed by who has access to and power over the technologies and infrastructures of media? How is the very temporality of a crisis, its emergence, duration, and (in)finitude, a question of mediation? Finally, we consider what happens when media itself is in crisis: when the institutions and norms — and theories — set up to make sense of ongoing crises are themselves in a moment of transformation or undoing.