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Black Twitter, the art of hip-hop, the OJ Simpson trial, and documentary filmmaking techniques are just a few of the topics students can learn about while earning a Black Media Studies (BMS) minor at Tech. The minor, which was recently approved by the Senate of the Academic Faculty, is housed in the School of Literature, Media and Communication (LMC).
The founding faculty members behind the minor are Dr. Joycelyn Wilson, Dr. Susana Morris, Dr. André Brock and Professor John Thornton. The group has been working together for a few years to help bring the miner to life. Dr Wilson explained that the miner was initially supported by the support of Dean Jacqueline Royster, the former dean of Ivan Allen College, and Dr Richard Utz, the former head of the LMC department, who helped bring the Dr. Wilson, Dr. Morris. and Dr. Brock to join Prof. Thornton in increasing the presence of BMS scholars at Tech.
“That effort is happening at the institute college and school level,” Wilson said. “At the institute level in the sense that Georgia Tech, as part of the strategic plan, has strengthened its model of diversity, equity and inclusion in tangible ways. Not just in brochures or just in February or something like that, but in this industry, which is a lot of work. Part of that work is presence and presence in spaces that provide opportunities not only to talk about diversity, inclusion and equity, but to do so through research and we are scholars who do it in different ways.
Once the group of founding professors came together, the next step was to define what Black Media Studies was while carefully crafting the mission statement of the minor proposal.
“The beauty of this minor is that it gave us the opportunity to really define what Black Media Studies means, what it is, how you practice it and how you understand it,” Wilson said. “We first wanted to answer the question that was put to us. What is Black Media Studies? This is what colleagues have asked us. We’ve been asked this outside of school, and we wanted people to know okay, this is what it is. That’s why we’re here… so we were able to draw our description into this proposal, answer all the questions that were put to us, and then we kind of threw it between the four of us. We were all coining words and making sure the content was accurate, making sure we created a proposal that was damn bulletproof because we were writing this in the middle of this anti-racist movement and in the amid critical race theory debacle. You know, we’re always pushing through everything that’s going on around black studies and race and racial inequality.
With the approval of the Academic Faculty Senate, the support of Dean Husbands Fealing and other LMC faculty members, and the behind-the-scenes work done by the Office of the Registrar and other administrative offices, the BMS minor is now a reality. Dr. Morris explained that students taking courses towards the BMS minor can expect to learn to see the world through a critical new lens that can be applied to their future careers.
“We really emphasized critical thinking. We give a lot of different perspectives and it’s really about being armed with knowledge and being able to think critically about media history and race and class and gender and how to produce media,” Morris said. “We don’t just teach traditional literary analysis. We ask them to do all kinds of writing, production, and different kinds of end products. There are many things students can expect, but hopefully the learning will translate to the lecture hall, the operating room, the classroom, the courtroom…all of them. rooms.
The creation of the BMS minor at Tech joins a handful of other similar university programs in the United States, helping to launch and promote the field. Dr. Morris explained that she hopes the minor will help attract more students from the city of Atlanta, as well as students who seek a more humanities-based education.
“I think Black Media Studies, along with many other great programs and majors at Georgia Tech, could be a way to attract students from the area who might be like, ‘well, I was going to go to Morehouse. , but maybe I’ll consider Georgia Tech. We might have students who might think about UGA rather than technology, you know, because now we have things that are cross-disciplinary and humanities-oriented, and you can actually do a minor even though you are an engineering major.
Dr. Wilson believes the minor will be especially beneficial for engineering students who may never interact with these topics in their major coursework.
“I’ve found that when students take the courses and come out of engineering, it really changes their perspective. Even at this precise moment, it gives them the opportunity to think about the world in a broader way,” Wilson said. “They don’t leave our classes as they arrived, so imagine if it’s a full miner. That’s why I was saying it’s way more important than the CRT argument that was created and politicized for a program that has absolutely nothing to do with what we’re doing. I want this to be very clear. What we’re doing is really moving in a direction where we can all see ourselves in these very humanistic ways beyond race, beyond culture, beyond the social constructs that were created to divide us. And through the Black Media Studies lens, we’re able to have those conversations.
The founding faculty members of the BMS Minor hope to have created a solid and lasting foundation for the future of intersectional education at Tech for all students.
Although the courses presented in the minor have been available to LMC students for a few years, the minor opens up the opportunity to learn from Tech’s top scholars in Black Media Studies to all majors.
“That’s really what’s so fascinating about the minor is that it’s not just LMC students, it’s something that’s available now, across the institute, and we wanted to make sure that if by any chance we all end up going somewhere else or retiring or whatever, that we put something in place that has the legs for other professors and scholars to step up to superior,” Wilson said.
Students interested in a minor in BMS will be able to provisionally declare their minor as of May 2022.
Today we still have radio, the cheapest and most widely used medium in South Africa; printing, which began in the 1800s; television, which we’ve had since the mid-1970s, and there’s a growth in online news sites and social media.
The pandemic is over, but what will likely persist is that we will be vaccinated once a year for the rest of our lives. All good; it’s kind of a hybrid end to the pandemic.
Teaching media studies, mostly face-to-face starting this week in 2022, means some serious hybrid thinking. Hybrid doesn’t just mean blended learning – some online and some face-to-face – it also means flexibility in approach, content, delivery and assessment. It could mean more freedom from old habits.
But just as with journalism, where the basics matter, i.e. fact-checking and accuracy, which cannot go out of fashion, because that is what matters more than anything else, so too in the teaching of media studies, the basics of applying theory to cases, and cases to theory, will remain. Even though some theories we teach debunk them, for example the hypodermic needle theory – the one-way transmission of communication (Harold Lasswell in the 1920s on the power of the media over the public). You receive information, you absorb it, you believe it, that is, the political model of mass propaganda that worked in Nazi Germany. Of course, we teach this to criticize it.
Today there are more than one-way and two-way streets – there are multi-way streets and interactions are the norm. But there are also downsides: with more online engagements, there is also more vitriol. And we have to ask ourselves about what we read, especially on social networks.
Delivering the lessons, however, will mean extending beyond what many have done in the past: presenting PowerPoint slides and having a discussion or asking, “Any questions?
The end, to borrow from Georg Hegel, of the “master-slave” relationship of the speaking lecturer and the absorption of the students – one-way street – was happening anyway, and participation was happening. Then the pandemic happened. And technology has saved lives.
First and second year of confinement: how the technology worked and did not work
Let’s take the honor class media and politics course. In the first year of lockdown 2020, I found that students were hiding – literally – behind a name they registered for a class and not showing their faces except for two or three confident, out of a class of maybe 20. I had a student who signed up for the Zoom conference for the whole hour but when I asked him a question about what he was thinking, there was no no answer. I said, “You’re muted.” A friend of his must have told him that I was trying to engage with him. Later he apologized and said he had to take his mother to the physio, where unfortunately there was no WiFi. He had to leave his phone behind, registered as it was for class.
In 2021’s icebreakers on “So what’s been your experience with online learning during the pandemic?”, I expected more grief about loneliness. Surprise: most cited conveniences such as savings on transport costs to Wits and being anywhere, such as in your car, on your phone and accessing the conference .
By 2021, we have introduced continuous assessments and students themselves speaking first, for half of the course, as in a one-read discussion, five minutes each. They learned a lot more.
Other things I heard. Some academics prefer continuous assessments because exams are “emotional abuse.” And there are others who say that open-book, take-away courses are “exams”? Seriously, what kind of gauge is that of knowledge? Yet all masters and doctorates are “open book” and some do very well in dissertations and theses and some do not.
In this almost post-pandemic period, I have learned a few things. This is definitely the end of Hegel’s master-slave relationship – although there will always be vestiges of that delay. A hybrid that advances.
Now we will certainly have to expand in teaching, because visuals, sound, jokes and humor, satire and music all matter, almost as much as words and theory.
Because we did this while teaching online, it can now become the norm. It’s not about going back to normal now, but incorporating what we did that worked and incorporating that into the “hybrid model”. We will now do live face-to-face lectures and publish them on online sites.
For sure, it’s the end of the master-slave relationship: me the expert, you the learner and empty vessel absorbing everything. As the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire said: “Liberating education consists of acts of cognition, not transfer of information”.
What I learned in 2021 is that unless you insist on participation, through assessments or presenting a reading, students hide; they register that they are there and then slip away to a dream world or to do other important things, like household chores or taking mom to the physio.
It’s also a fact that most of us can’t concentrate on listening to someone for more than 45 minutes. For me, hybrid means flexibility and freedom. In content, delivery and reviews.
But presenting in a fun way is essential regardless, as is linking media theory and politics to everyday issues locally, continentally and internationally.
Media studies students don’t talk much about journalism as future career paths. They mention academia, public relations and event planning.
During teaching, we advise on how to do research. But more practical things are needed to bridge the gap between academia and industry. A few years ago, I discovered that students had been taught for years how terrible journalism was; they learned that journalists “deliberately sensationalize to sell stories, to profit for media companies.”
I arranged tours so they could see and hear for themselves how the news is. The sociology of news production is a sophomore course, but at the honors level, they had never even been in a newsroom.
Before Covid, two years in a row, I took the entire media and politics honor class to various television, print and radio newsrooms. It linked reality to theory and theory linked to reality. But it also debunked many previous opinions about how the news was made. Broader education, meeting industry, also brings freedom.
The students loved it. They had never heard of a daily “press conference” before, let alone sat down to hear how the stories were chosen. Education, also through the media, can bring freedom. What does not change is that the freedom to think and to have a different point of view will always remain intrinsic to learning. DM168
This story first appeared in our weekly newspaper Daily Maverick 168 which is available for R25 from Pick n Pay, Exclusive Books and airport bookstores. To find your nearest retailer, please click onhere.
Francesco Casetti, a seminal figure in the field of film studies, has been named the Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies, effective April 17.
The Sterling Professorship is awarded to a tenured faculty member who is considered one of the best in their field and is one of the university’s highest faculty honors.
He is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and an affiliate faculty member of the Yale School of Architecture (YSOA).
Although initially trained as a semiotician under the mentorship of Christian Metz, Casetti has shaped the trajectory of film and media studies through methodologically and theoretically expansive work. His early work, which includes essays on the films of Visconti, De Sica and Bertolucci, provided a scientific model for the analysis of film and the moving image. He then turned his attention to viewer issues. In his seminal monograph, “Inside the Gaze” (1986), Casetti was the first to assert that films offer more than gratification to viewers: instead, they actively create their viewers. In this work, Casetti skilfully weaved together concepts from semiotics and psychoanalysis, offering a completely original vision of the interrelationship between film and viewer.
Casetti’s work on television — exemplified by ‘Tra me e te’ (1988) and ‘L’ospite fisso’ (1995) — which introduced the concept of ‘communicative negotiations’, combines media analysis with ethnography; while his historical and historiographical research on film theory advanced new understandings of the role of cinema in shaping concepts of modernity (“Theories of Cinema, 1945-1995” (1993) and “Early Film Theories in Italy , 1896-1922” (2017)). In his historical research, Casetti explores with adventure the 20and and 21st centuries, comparing recent cinema to early 20th century cinema, as in his much-loved book “The Light Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come” (2015). His current research focuses on three subjects: the theory of early cinema and cinephobic postures in the first half of the 20th century; the relocation of cinema to new spaces and on new media and the persistence of an “idea of cinema” in the digital age; and the screen as an optical and spatial device.
Casetti’s work has influenced the global understanding of the history and meaning of moving images. He publishes in English, Italian and French, and his books and essays have been translated into Spanish, Hungarian, Czech, Chinese, Korean, Slovenian and other languages; his work has been recognized at international congresses in Geneva, Rotterdam, Naples, Frankfurt, Berlin, Venice and other cities around the world.
An enthusiastic collaborator and facilitator, he initiated interdisciplinary projects at Yale, including a Mellon-Sawyer seminar on the genealogies of the excessive screen, with colleagues in Comparative Literature, German, Art History, and other areas. In 2021, Casetti was one of the first professors to participate in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ transversal courses initiative, for which he developed a new course on cinema and physics in collaboration with Michel Devoret. In 2018, he co-hosted a seminar on Truth and the Media in conjunction with the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism.
Casetti is currently Director of Graduate Studies in Film and Media Studies and served as program chair from 2015-2019. His contributions to academic committees have been substantial: he is currently a member of the Humanities Doctoral Education Advisory Task Force and previously served on the Humanities Strategic Committee, Creative Arts Advisory Committee, Poynter Fellowship Advisory Board, and other key administrative bodies.
Bryce Newell shows an example of a body-worn camera commonly used by law enforcement. Photo by Owen Lowe-Rogstad.
Often seen as a tool to hold police officers accountable, police-worn body cameras have come under attack for consistently failing to achieve this goal and for creating privacy complications.
“One of the things I was watching and thinking about was what police-worn body cameras mean to people interacting with officers,” Newell said. “The most monitored communities will be those whose images and sound are captured much more frequently than other communities.”
As a result, Newell said, individuals in over-policed communities may be targeted with much higher frequency by law enforcement for minor offenses, leading to distrust of police on the part of those same communities.
While working on his doctorate in information science at the University of Washington, Newell became interested in issues surrounding privacy and surveillance, particularly police surveillance. He began working with the Washington State Police Department which piloted police-worn body cameras.
He found that while police-worn body cameras held some officers accountable, bystander video had more of an impact on holding officers accountable for their actions. This phenomenon has created uncertainty for police departments, as citizens can post their own images anywhere, including on social media sites, where they can be widely shared.
“With the body camera footage, the officers feel like they can control the narrative a bit more,” Newell said. “They can tilt their body and point it where they want. They can start and stop recording whenever they want. In my work, I argue that what police officers really fear is a lack of control over what is recorded and how it is communicated to the wider public. They could potentially be put in a bad light for doing something they don’t want the community to see.
When police respond to sensitive situations like domestic violence calls, Newell said privacy issues arise when their images reveal where people live and show them the most vulnerable. If a state has extensive public disclosure laws governing the release of police body camera footage, anyone can submit a public records request to view it, and police may not be able to redact information people shared with officers on camera. Some states, such as North Carolina, have passed laws requiring a court order to access footage from police-worn body cameras.
Throughout his research on this topic, Newell has discovered that body cameras worn by police do not always achieve the publicly stated goals of these programs.
“Police agencies in the United States have been pushing the idea that if we put cameras on officers, their work will be more visible,” Newell said. “What I’ve seen from the perspective of officers in Washington and other states is that cameras are more likely to be useful to them in capturing evidence, prosecuting people for various things, and aiding in court cases. of guilt.”
As technology becomes more advanced and police departments develop additional surveillance tools to capture on-the-job footage, Newell warns we will still have to find other ways to hold police accountable.
“We can’t forget how technology sits in the social context, because it makes others more visible – even more visible than the agents themselves,” he said. “We need to make sure that the laws of our states are set up to allow and restrict access to some of this information. We need to maintain strong rights for viewer video to happen, for citizens to record the police.
—By Alli Weseman, Class of ’22, School of Journalism and Communication
Alli Weseman (she/she) is a second-year student in SOJC’s Masters in Multimedia Journalism program in Portland. She has been independent for Portland Monthly Magazine and hopes to work in a newsroom one day.
The recent approval of the Tech’s Black Media Studies minor, a program made up of many courses that I have taken as part of my own LMC curriculum, has made me reflect on the immense impact these courses have had on me.
Before coming to Tech, my required reading repertoire was dominated by the works of white men who wrote primarily about the trauma of war.
Only one of the books studied throughout my four years in my high school literature and AP classes was written by a black person: “Their Eyes Were Looking at God” by Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston’s celebration of female femininity and sexuality was the first literature I truly felt connected to as I sifted through the slew of Hemingway, Salinger and Frost that I was forced to sift through.
My library has become more and more diverse since coming to college and I have to thank the professors in the LMC department, and specifically the professors of Black Media Studies for that.
When I came to Tech, I chose to pursue a social justice thread within my major because I knew coming from a conservative high school that I had a lot of catching up to do.
For context, when I was transplanted to Winder, GA in eighth grade, I attended a college named after former Georgia Governor Richard B. Russell Jr. He is the author of the Southern Manifesto and obstructed civil rights legislation during his tenure as a senator.
You might be wondering what I learned about this man who aggressively advocated racial segregation in my social studies class? I learned all about how he helped strengthen our military by bringing more bases to the state, with his racist legacy swept under the rug for me to find out many years later for myself.
My first exposure to Black Media Studies during an introductory gender studies class in my sophomore year. It was taught by Dr. Susana Morris, a feminist and scholar of Afrofuturism who has since occupied the coveted place in my life of being my all-time favorite teacher.
This wasn’t your normal gender studies course, it was a gender studies course taught through a science fiction lens, which offered unique opportunities to decipher gender in fictional worlds where boundaries of the gender binary are repelled by extraterrestrial species.
Since that summer, I have tried to take every course Dr. Morris has to offer, including African American literature and media, culture, and society.
I also managed to slip myself into a class with Tech’s renowned hip hop culture expert, Dr. Joycelyn Wilson. Coming to the end of my tech career, I can say that my Black Media Studies classes had the biggest impact on my education and greatly influenced the way I see the world.
From analyzing how news outlets covered the testimonies of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas in the 90s, to delving into hip hop artists’ poetic ways of portraying class struggles, to learning how modern gynecology was built on the backs of exploited black women, black media studies showed me a world I never would have known if I hadn’t gone out of my way to take classes focused on social justice.
Without understanding intersectionality, I would not be able to confidently enter the professional world after graduation and ensure that I am doing everything in my power to make decisions that take into account the impact they will have on people who are not like me.
What excites me about completing this Black Media Studies minor is the access the minor will provide for students outside of the LMC major to experience the courses that have taught me the most.
What terrifies me is that students may not see the merit of a minor in Black Media Studies.
Technology sends thousands of students around the world every semester who have had minimal interaction with proper ethics or social justice education.
We send mechanical engineers around the world who design robots to automate the way rural minority farmers make a living. We’re sending future doctors out into the world who don’t understand the nuances of medical misogyny, racism, and bigophobia and how their intersections lead black women to experience three times the maternal mortality of white women. We send people out into the world who are still wondering why Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize, ignoring the deeper messages of his culturally significant snapshot of modern black American life.
The Institute praises the “progress and service” of our student-engineers while favoring the teaching of equations over equality.
This mindset is reinforced by the fact that many students outside the liberal arts college refuse to think critically about anything that happens outside the confines of this campus.
The roots of the civil rights movement are just down the street from our institute, but many students will never interact with the rich history and cultural currency Atlanta has to offer because they’re too busy stressing about transferring. heat and differential calculus.
I strongly urge any student reading this to minor in Black Media Studies. If you don’t have the time or the credits to do so, use one of your humanities or free elective credits to take at least one class from some of the brightest professors Tech has to offer.
I’m tired of enrolling every semester and watching STEM students asking around for the easiest humanities course to take. Stop looking for “easy A’s” and taking “the chair story” because you’re afraid your worldview will be challenged.
Tucked away on the third floor of the Skiles is an educational opportunity that will easily complement any major here in an incredible way and I sincerely hope to see more students take advantage of it.
Examples of digital papers created by undergraduate students for their digital media studies capstone projects. Top left: close-up of a poster designed by the Cracker Box Palace team; close up of posters for the Just Sing Out project; and details of the MEDIA project website. (Illustration by the University of Rochester)
Rochester students show how digital media can help solve real-world problems.
Each year, seniors majoring in Digital Media Studies at the University of Rochester spend their final semester working in teams to complete capstone projects. Projects demonstrate their newly acquired knowledge of media history, theory, design, and technology in a digital media project that addresses real-world problems or needs.
The pandemic has posed an additional hurdle this year, forcing students to find new ways to engage and work with each other virtually, and in some cases, collaborate across time zones.
“Organizing six people in different locations was a challenge for us,” says Sofia Hennessey, part of a team that created a digital destination for students looking for a basic tech education.
“Our students’ ability to continue to create meaningful work while dealing with a global pandemic and amid our nation’s addressing of racism is a testament to their sense of community,” said Stephanie Ashenfelderacting director of Undergraduate Program in Digital Media Studies.
And it’s a successful group. “These graduates already have big plans and many are heading to graduate school in various programs all over the world, including Amsterdam, Southern California and New York,” she adds.
The projects are very varied, as a sample of this year’s flagship projects shows.
Share the digital toolkit
Project title: MEDIA
Members of the team: Alex Chase, Jennifer Ngene, Dominique Dorvil, Kun Fang, Sofia Hennessey, Henry Vargas
The cornerstone was born out of the shared experience of the group – a feeling that they could benefit from a more technical education that was not necessarily included as part of the major. Their project complements the Digital Media Studies major with new opportunities in technical education and provides a framework for creative students to work on their portfolios with a view to entering the workforce.
Visit the MEDIA project websitewhere team members share their process and what they learned along the way, from ideation to iteration to launch.
Help an association on its digital brand
Project title: cookie jar palace
Members of the team: Fiona Chen, Carolina Lion He, Harry Ma, Yujie Zhous
The team worked with an existing community partner, cookie jar palace, a farm and wildlife rescue organization in Alton, New York. The nonprofit had a list of things they wanted students to tackle, from building an app to creating a new website.
“Their problem was that they had a lot of problems,” says Carolina Lion He ’21. “It’s kind of a tough incentive. It’s very open yet very expansive and perfectly designed for a cornerstone of digital media.
The team worked with the nonprofit’s board of directors, learning about the group’s need to build a brand identity, through regular online communications.
Check Cracker Box Palace Project Sitewhere team members share their approach to this open-ended project and learn about the set of identity-building assets they’ve created.
Help others sing out loud, in an unknown language
Project title: just sing Members of the team: Juliette Ding, Jingxuan Fang, Noah Honickman, Lingling Li, Keyuan Qin
“Language barriers have become the biggest obstacle for people to sing a song in a foreign language,” the team notes on its project site. But that hurdle shouldn’t stop friends from sharing an interest or appreciation for those songs.
The team provides a platform for anyone who loves a song in an unfamiliar language and really wants to sing it. The platform, which currently focuses on East Asian pop songs, provides phonetic versions of the lyrics. Team members built and built a website with front-end and back-end applications, in addition to producing an animated promotional video for the site.
The project “encourages people not only to get their transliteration lyrics, but also to upload their lyrics, so that there is an exchange between a fan and the fan group,” says Lingling Li.
Read more
Keywords: Arts and Sciences, Class of 2021, Digital Media Studies Program
New Delhi: Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) plans to launch a series of new courses and programs including Media Studies, Mathematics, Statistics, Data, philosophy and religious study. Officials said master’s degree programs in public policy and criminology are also likely to launch soon. “A school of mathematics, statistics and data science could be launched next year,” they said. The university plans to increase its student body from the current 4,000 to 30,000 once the new campuses in Dheerpur and Rohini are operational, AUD Vice-Chancellor Anu Singh Lather has said. “We are on a mission to establish AUD as a research university. In accordance with the national education policy, we will focus on multidisciplinary aspects. We would like to venture into many other ideas in aspects of NEP. We also plan to introduce certificate courses in artificial intelligence with online or blended instruction,” the VC said. Apart from aiming to certify at least 500 students on the various certificate courses this year, the university also plans to link the competence centers with outreach and outreach work. Lather further stated that once the new campuses are ready, the university should vacate its Kashmere Gate and Lodhi Road campuses.
The Journalism course at the University of Jammu includes continuous interaction with journalists, workshops, exposure to technology, institutional visit
University of Jammu (image source: official website)
Jammu: The University of Jammu on Saturday launched the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, which was inaugurated by Vice Chancellor Manoj Dhar who described it as the fulfillment of a long-awaited desire of the region. Speaking on the occasion, Prof. Dhar dedicated the department to the people of Jammu and explained his long-term academic and infrastructural vision for the department.
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VC was adamant that this department will not operate like any other existing department; every effort will be made to make it one of the best departments, if not the best. In this context, he explained how the field of journalism is constantly expanding and the role of technology in the field of media, both print and electronic. He pointed out that in addition to the regular classroom lectures, the course will also include the continuous interaction with the best journalists available in this country, regular workshops, exposure to the latest technological know-how, special lectures, practical work . business experiments, institutional visit.
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Unveiling his broader vision for the Department, Dhar spoke about the establishment of a Center for Media Studies which will include an oral history cell, a language lab and a community radio station. “All these components are also in the final stages of completion. These components, once functional, will become nodes where students can hone their necessary skills and hands-on experiences in handling the latest equipment,” Dhar said while congratulating Shyam Narayan Lal and Vinay. Thusoo for their exemplary work and commended their efforts to achieve the set goal of establishing the department. He concluded by saying that the Department will be an important feather on the university’s cap and that he hoped the passed out students would become “our brand ambassador” in the days to come.
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Shyam Narayanan Lal, Head of Journalism and Media Studies Department, dwelt in detail on the trajectories of how the department came to be. Dr. Vinay Thusoo, Coordinator of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies, led the function’s proceedings and also gave a formal vote of thanks.
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UTSA – for now, under the umbrella of University College – will offer students the option of majoring or majoring in Film and Media Studies. The program will be offered at the start of the Fall 2022 semester in August.
The path leading to an upcoming degree is a welcome opportunity for students interested in majoring in filmmaking, a degree that has not yet been seen at UTSA. This is the perfect time for UTSA, given that San Antonio prides itself on a culturally rich and diverse population. Dr. Paul Ardoin, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Humanities and Director of the Film Studies Program at UTSA.
Ardoin called the degree “cafeteria-style” in that students will have the opportunity to select courses from three different program categories.
“It is divided into three boxes. A history box, a theory and culture box and a production box, and major students will choose four to five courses, minimum, from each box. It will also be based on the particular interests of those students…but it will not conclusively give a single student a complete education in all film and all media,” Ardoin said.
During the upcoming fall semester, the major will exist as a sort of “incubating major,” where students will have the opportunity to choose their own direction. At the end of this period – Ardoin specifies two years – the program will migrate to the College of Liberal Arts and Fine Arts (COLFA), where students can expect to focus on specific tracks such as writing screenplay and production.
Emily Flores, a junior majoring in digital communications, spoke about the UTSA film program schedule.
“I think it was kind of like fate because…I was getting really frustrated, I felt like none of the digital communication classes were going to help me at all, or get me a foothold. [film] industry. So I would start calling other schools, thinking about transferring and going to another school that would possibly offer a film major…they [UTSA] announced that they were offering a new film major,” said Flores.
“Certainly, I think it’s great that they are [UTSA] do this kind of film festival and invite all the students and give film students a chance to show what they’re doing,” Martinez said.
Prior to the fall semester, UTSA offered students the opportunity to minor in film studies. Aside from a student organization, options for future student filmmakers are few and far between. Flores expressed hope that more student engagement will come from the new major.
“I know there is a great club here at school, the UTSA Film Club [Rowdy Film Association]. I hope…what I think would be really cool, now that there’s a film major is there just isn’t a film club,” Flores said.
Ardoin spoke about the process of the different stages encountered in setting up the program.
“Part of that was assembling a kind of advisory board of current professors who have those interests and that expertise. [and] get together and talk about what we want it to look like. Part of what that will look like depends, of course, on who signs up in the fall. There has been a lot of talk about needs… What new courses do we want to add so that students have a lot of choice, which is our main focus for the fall,” Ardoin said.
Ardoin further referred to the presence of the UTSA program among graduate film schools at NYU, USC, and the University of Texas at Austin, to name a few.
“Given where we are, we’re set up to have a totally different type of identity. None of the institutions we’ve talked about are predominantly Hispanic [institutions]none of them serve the number of first-generation students we serve, none of them are in a community like ours…like our city, which is in some ways simultaneously recognized as [a] a city that is profoundly perfect for filmmaking and has a history, but is also significantly underutilized,” Ardoin said.
As mentioned earlier, this is the first time a degree like this has been offered at UTSA. Film production courses are offered at the San Antonio community college level, specifically at Northwest Vista College. However, Ardoin was adamant about wanting it to happen at the college level and about San Antonio’s place as a movie-friendly city.
“So there’s production going on there [Northwest Vista College], but people want it to happen at the college level. This will be the first time this has been done in an established and committed way. So the [are] huge opportunities here. San Antonio is working hard to bring more productions to town, but we should also be creating more productions ourselves and we should be creating filmmakers, we certainly have the talent base for that,” Ardoin said.
Many students who will soon be majoring in film have likely found themselves in something “more practical” or adjacent to film. Ardoin spoke about the importance of making this course available to students now.
“Part of it is having the device for students who could do this work [film], to do this work. And part of that is creating a legitimate career path out of that for them. Many of our students who made good films felt like they were majoring in something “hands-on” while doing film work. But now that we have a formal program, it allows us to set up community and industry partnerships to place people on internships. To ensure this is both a practical and creative, growing major,” Ardoin said.
Martinez hopes to see more support from UTSA when it comes to supporting student filmmakers.
“I think it would be a great idea for UTSA to reach out or partner with a theater-like Santikos [that’s also local] and maybe we can do some screenings there. Out in a park on a spotlight…it [would] feel a lot more real to the filmmakers too… seeing it on the big screen,” Martinez said.
Ardoin talked about a space currently under construction in the McKinney Humanities building. When completed at the start of the fall semester, the hall will house state-of-the-art production spaces and a screening room for filmmakers.
“…this space is called the Film Production Hub, has nine rooms and opens this fall. The space is approved. Funding is half guaranteed, with the other half fully expected – nearly half a million dollars in total, north of 400,000 (I forget the exact figure). 90% of our equipment will be new for the fall…” said Ardoin.
More information about the Film and Media Studies program, courses and contact details can be found on their website. Also, more information and news about the program can be found on the UTSA Film Studies Instagram @utsafilmstudies. The student film exhibition will take place on April 27, from 6 to 9 p.m. Participants can confirm their presence at the event on RowdyLink.
