UM graduate courses

FTVM 600 – Film, Television, and Media Proseminar

This course introduces developing researchers in the study of Film, Television, and Media to graduate studies and to the academic profession. The course covers departmental, institutional, and field-wise professionalization, ethical research training, campus resources, pragmatic research skills and tools, and additional training to prepare students for success in the doctoral program and beyond.

FTVM 619 – Topics in Digital Media: Working Feelings in the Digital Economy

This course examines the twinned meanings of “working feelings” within the context of the digital economy. The first concerns digital forms of emotional labor and affective labor to manage the feelings of ourselves and others. The second explores how we feel, and are encouraged to feel, about work itself, particularly amid increasing conditions of economic precarity and employment insecurity.

FTVM 620 – Topics in Media: Mediating Sex

This course examines the mediation of and mediating force of “sex” as an act, as a concept, and as itself a form of technology. To do so, this course explores how ideas about and practices of sex are defined, represented, circulated, and contested through cultural, textual, discursive, and material forms—from mainstream films and mobile dating apps to medical categories and legal definitions. Additionally, this course interrogates how understandings of sex serve to mediate the development, adoption, use, regulation, rejection, and obsolescence of new and emerging media and technologies in their historic contexts.