Media and Communication

Semester and Year Offered: Semester 2 (Winter)

Course Coordinator and Team: Venugopal Maddipati

Email of course coordinator: venugopal@aud.ac.in

Pre-requisites: None

Course Objectives/Description:

Evolution of communication design from print to audio to audio-visual to web – with a special focus on the politics of representation, negotiating ideas around propaganda, nationalism, revolution, mass movements, pop, indi, counter culture, advertising.

Brief history of photography, radio, cinema, television and internet based social media with a focus on their engagement with communities, both urban and rural.

History of audio-visual production with a focus on the evolution of various practices within documentary film, social realism as a form, ethnographic practices and the politics of documentation and representation of urban and rural communities.

Course Outcomes:

On successful completion of this course students will be able to:

1. To understand and locate media within cultural practice
2. To form an overview of larger media practices both historical and contemporary
3. To be able to relate to the politics of audiovisual media and representation in students own work, while working with communities and subject areas

Brief description of modules/ Main modules:

Assessment Details with weights:

• Assessment 1, short report on a reading/topic discussed in class – 30 %
• Assessment 2, short essay on chosen area/ topic– 30 %
• Term paper, final project, an exercise in chosen media either textual with images or in photography created by the student. Details of assignment will be determined in consultation with student – 40 %

Reading List:

• Adorno, Theodore, &Horkheimer Max, The Culture Industry, Enlightenment as Mass Deception
• Balicki A, Reconstructing Culture on Film, in Principles of Visual Anthropology
• Benjamin, Walter, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
• BhabaHomi, The Location of Culture
• Chomsky Noam, Manufacturing Consent
• Devereaux, L & Hillman, R, Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography – Modernism and the Photographic Representation of War and Destruction
• MacDougall D, Transcultural Cinema
• Case Study: Edward Said, Covering Islam – how the media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world

Additional Reference: