. . . or two. Fresh editions of “Media, Race, and Identity” and “New Telecommunication Media” (no, I haven’t done anything to get that outmoded title officially changed since last semester). As ever, there are some changes from previous iterations, though most of those are minor. My biggest regret is that I couldn’t quite find a way to squeeze Mrs. Davis back into the technology course. It worked (sort of) in the fall because I had an extended mid-semester trip that allowed/forced me to drop two weeks of face-to-face meetings, and replace those with some extra asynchronous work. It was a perfect window in which to fit ~8 hours of smart, thematically relevant video . . . and that window isn’t in play this spring. Nor is Mrs. Davis something that I think would work well in smaller doses. At least not in terms of using it to help a few dozen undergrads think through some of the potential social, cultural, and political ramifications of AI. The big payoff in episode 8, for instance, is not likely to hit nearly as hard (or even to make sense) for folks who haven’t seen episodes 1-7. And there are enough big twists and turns across the series to make the “obvious” takeaways one might have from, say, just the first two episodes not at all what one would take away from the whole schmeer. So Mrs. Davis is (sadly) out. But I anticipate a lively and rewarding semester anyway.
cultural studies / critical media studies