Media Studies, MA
The MA in Media Studies at Pratt, offered at the Brooklyn campus, is situated in the uniquely vibrant environment of an art, design, and architecture school. Students who value both media scholarship and media practices are encouraged to apply. Classes are small and students work closely with their professors.
Our program is connected to a larger community of artists and designers on and beyond our campus who are using and producing the very media we study. Creativity or the creation of ideas, worlds, and things is a central feature of our program. Our students engage “media” as more than a set of technologies with which to create and share information. “Media” encompasses an array of cultural, social, aesthetic, and economic processes, policies, and practices that shape the ways we experience and interpret the world. In other words, we understand media creation and media forms to be world-making projects that have histories and politics.
Students and faculty investigate the significant social, political, cultural, economic, and aesthetic questions of our time as we read contemporary theory, rethink media forms, and revisit relevant archives to consider the ways in which gender and sexuality, race, nation, and power as well as technology mediate our understandings and experiences of the world we inhabit. The coursework invites and requires students to practice both critical analysis of media and basic media production skills. Depending on their interests, the electives may focus more on scholarly practices or art practices. In all cases students in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt will gain a deeper knowledge of media theories, politics, and practices.
The Master of Arts in Media Studies graduate program consists of 30 credits, taken over three semesters, and a thesis, which is finished in the fourth.
The core sequence for the MA consists of Mediologies I and II (6 credits total) and Encounters I and II (2 credits total), elective seminars and project courses of which Experimental Media Lab and Methodologies Lab are strongly recommended (18 credits total), an internship course (optional), and a final thesis with a required Final Project/Thesis Workshop (4 credits total).
Mediologies courses (HMS-650A/HMS-650B) provide students with crucial critical and theoretical tools; students take this two-course introductory sequence during their first year. These courses are designed for students with substantial experience in media studies as well as students with less exposure.
Practices courses comprise a range of electives, including those taught in other programs, such as digital arts. These courses enable students to acquire basic competence in media aesthetics and production.
Encounters courses (HMS-549A/HMS-549B) enable students to engage directly with others working in media fields, and with timely issues and ideas, in an open-discussion “salon” environment.
The Final Project/Thesis Workshop (HMS-659A) offers an intensive, small support group in which students can develop and write their thesis, which they complete in the fourth semester by taking HMS-659B (Thesis in Progress).
Students may also choose to undertake an internship for academic credit (HMS-9700, HMS-9701, HMS-9702, HMS-9703) and professional enrichment.
In addition to the core courses described above, the program offers a range of electives in areas of specialization and interdisciplinary constellations within media studies, enabling students to develop particular areas of concentration, first through coursework and then in their one-to-one work with thesis advisers. Faculty represent areas that include new media; documentary studies; global media; media and the urban environment; media and performance; music/sound studies; media/attention economies; media ecology; archaeology of (new) media; and media, activism, and social change.
Elective seminars run in the format of small discussion courses focused on individual or team presentations on the analysis of texts, films, objects, themes, and theories. Elective project courses are semester-long laboratory/workshops in which students and one or more faculty members—in any one of several departments—engage a topic, idea, interface, space, or modality focusing on the interface between the theorization and production of media objects. Foci will vary based upon specific expertise and interests of involved faculty and students.
ADMISSIONS REQUIREMENTS
Applications for admission to the Master of Arts in Media Studies are due January 5 for the following fall; the program accepts fall entrants only. Applicants should have a BA, BS, or BFA from an accredited institution. Candidates must submit:
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a statement of purpose in which they describe their interest in the program;
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10–20 pages of relevant writing sample(s), with emphasis on analytical writing about media;
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transcripts of undergraduate coursework; and
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two letters of recommendation.
All applicants must follow the standard admissions process for graduate programs at Pratt. See www.pratt.edu/graduate-admissions/apply/.
Chair
Gina Marchetti
gmarchet@pratt.edu
Office
Tel: 718.636.3790
www.pratt.edu/programs/ma-media-studies/
Faculty Bios
www.pratt.edu/graduate-media-studies/core-faculty
| Semester 1 | Credits | |
|---|---|---|
| HMS-650A | Mediologies I | 3 |
| HMS-549A | Media Studies Encounters 1 | 1 |
| HMS-645 | Experimental Media Lab | 3 |
| All Institute Elective | 3 | |
| Credits | 10 | |
| Semester 2 | ||
| HMS-650B | Mediologies II | 3 |
| HMS-646 | Methodologies Lab | 3 |
| HMS-640 | Mentored Studies I | 1 |
| All Institute Elective | 3 | |
| Credits | 10 | |
| Semester 3 | ||
| HMS-549B | Media Studies Encounters 2 | 1 |
| HMS-660A | Media Studies Final Project/Thesis | 2 |
| All Institute Electives | 6 | |
| Credits | 9 | |
| Semester 4 | ||
| HMS-659B | Media Studies Thesis in Progress | 0 |
| HMS-641 | Mentored Studies II | 1 |
| Credits | 1 | |
| Total Credits | 30 | |
This course covers a range of authors whose fictional works involve questions of modern religious faith. Novels exploring aspects of Eastern theology, mysticism and Catholicism are investigated for their spiritual responses to contemporary social and political events and conditions, as well as for their stylistic elements.
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in literary studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in modern and contemporary literature and culture in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in world literature and culture in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in literary and cultural theory in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in literary and cultural studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes. <html> <body> <a href=\"http://tinyurl.com/jm9g3ww\" target=\"new\">Detailed descriptions for Special Topics Courses</a> </body> </html>
This course investigates relationships between image and narrative in cinema. Weekly creative assignments-- informed by close readings of film excerpts and text-- will culminate in the design of a short, poetic film project. We will view visionary work by innovative filmmakers, and engage in close reading, followed by active discussion, to deepen our understanding of artistic choices-- in the use of metaphor, point of view, association, montage, image/action, frame, composition, time, space, kinetics, transformation, multiple perspectives, reflexivity, gesture and the body, non-linear narrative, amongst others-- in the act of visual storytelling central to the cinematic enterprise.
This course considers the vision of prominent and pioneering films, with particular attention to the gaze, subjectivity, ambivalence, multiplicity of perspective, identification and disruption, as cinematic vocabulary and subject. We will look at films-- in the works of artists such as Agnes Varda, Lois Weber, Claire Denis, Marguerite Duras and Alain Renais, Julie Taymor, Susanna Bier, Rainer Fassbinder, Wong Kar Wai, Ang Lee and Todd Haynes-- with an emphasis on identity, sexuality and gender.
This class will explore the semiotics of cinema as elaborated by Deleuze in his books Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. Deleuze develops a taxonomy of cinematic signs that displaces both linguistic-based semiotics and psychoanalytic approaches. How can we extend Deleuze's categories to incorporate innovations in digital and new media?
This course is an introduction to some of the key concepts in the history of film and media theory. However, rather than merely reading about these theories, students will also experiment with and apply these theories in practical exercises involving writing, photography, video and other media.
Is film a visual medium? This course explores some of the theoretical concerns in designing the sound of a film, including the creation of soundtracks, the use of original scoring, and voiceovers.
Net Art is an interdisciplinary field with roots in a number of other practices -- conceptual art, performance art, video art, video games, poetry, and mail art, to name a few. We will study works of art on the internet and the practices of making and presenting art that precede them. Alongside works of art and art criticism, we will read works about the nature of the Internet as a medium. Key concepts include: transmission, narration/narrative, presence, interactivity, identity, instrument, gaming, digital vs. analog, medium and mediation.
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in cinema and media studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
In iconic films selected from contemporary global cinema, we will examine how the invention of new cinematic language is used to evoke poignant insight into human experience, and potentially influence our perceptions of reality. Modules organized by genre will consist of screenings, supplemented by guest filmmaker(s), seminar discussions, readings, research and student creative projects.
Media Studies Encounters 1, offered during Fall Semester, gives students a program of events, including speakers, films, presentations, performances, outings, and various other activities designed to introduce a widely varied set of media practices and theories in an informal setting. Discussions will also be held during weeks in which events are not scheduled. Some ongoing writing is required, but because the course is only for one credit, it will only meet for eight sessions at various points throughout the semester.
Media Studies Encounters 2, offered during Spring Semester, gives students a program of events, including speakers, films, presentations, performances, outings, and various other activities designed to introduce a widely varied set of media practices and theories in an informal setting. Discussions will also be held during weeks in which events are not scheduled. Some ongoing writing is required, but because the course is only for one credit, it will only meet for eight sessions at various points throughout the semester.
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in performance and performance studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
This course acquaints students with the history of electronics in music/audio art, gives them some measure of technical competence with current tools in analog and digital audio, and presents them with exercises that will promote original, creative work.
Do we know black music when we hear it? When we hear it as part of narrative (ie: in film, opera, or commercials), how does black music function symbolically? What challenges does sound pose to the accepted wisdom in semiotics? In addition to listening to music by black performers and composers, we will be reading critical works about music across fields such as musicology, film theory, black studies, and literature.
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in music and sound studies in a concentrated way. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes. <html> <body> <a href=\"http://tinyurl.com/jm9g3ww\" target=\"new\">Detailed descriptions for Special Topics Courses</a> </body> </html>
This course develops critical frameworks for interpreting and creating artists' books; that is, artworks in which the book is a medium. We will study such books alongside histories of the field, theoretical writings, and critical commentaries. These studies will inform our endeavors to create, catalogue, and/or critique artists? books in which visual, verbal, and material elements are interwoven. Advanced students from various fields are encouraged to use and expand their own disciplinary perspectives. Visits to collections around New York City will supplement Pratt's resources.
This course focuses on the fundamentals of narrative theory and practice, with an emphasis on how to employ strong narrative elements in visual work, especially animation and film, and on translating theory into practice. As a starting point, the course examines traditional stories and their underlying structures, looking closely at ancient mythologies from various world cultures and the common narrative elements they share, while comparing visual representations that correspond to these elements. The course advances to less traditional narrative structures (i.e. nonlinear, antiheroic, sensory, etc.), the more complex and often abstract visual representations these structures have evoked, and the narrative theories that engage them.
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in literary studies in an intensive graduate seminar setting. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
This course explores the way intertwined concepts of race, gender, and sexuality are produced and contested through live performance, film, video, recording, and various internet incarna(ons. The circula(on of images, ideas, memes, music, and iconography will be examined in historical perspec(ve. These media will be considered not only as forma(ons through which dominant cultures reinforce oppressive systems and structures of feeling, but also as forma(ons through which racialized, gendered,and sexualized subjects contest these ideas.
This course offers an overview of the political economy of labor in the contemporary fashion industry. We trace the roots and routes of fashion's global commodity chains emphasizing especially their cultural and economic contours. In other words, this course focuses on the structural factors that condition global fashion production and consumption. These include but are not limited to trade and labor policies, capitalism's racial and colonial logics, and the global scale of gender oppression. While issues of social representation are no doubt important in relation to fashion, they're not the concerns of this course. This semester, we will approach fashion not as tools for making and performing identity but as a system of unequal institutional arrangements of labor, trade, and rights that are designed to produce highly asymmetrical social, economic, and environmental outcomes.
Science fiction disorients us, unsettling our common sense notions of selfhood, nature, and progress; it can destabilize what we think we know about being human and about life itself. This course examines science fiction literature, film, and other media through the rubric of science studies, with three overlapping areas of exploration: biology, technology, and broader planetary ecologies. Though the focus of the course will be fiction, film, and media, we will use theories coming out of science studies and science fiction studies to analyze the course materials.
This course examines the ways critics have applied psychoanalytic theory to the study of film and the moving image. Starting with early cinema and the work of classic psychoanalytic theorists including Freud and Klein, the course will move to more contemporary films, as well as more contemporary theorists, including feminist, queer, and anti-racist theorists who use psychoanalytic methods. In the process, students will learn how to read films as social symptoms of the culture and time-period in which they were produced.
This course will focus on analyzing how contemporary artists and those that write about their work, engage with the problems and possibilities of representing history. Students will investigate the various ways contemporary artists attempt to engage with and represent history. When do artists look to the past and for what artistic, critical, and political purposes? What does artwork that engages history tell us about how history can be thought, represented, imagined? What does contemporary art tell us about the relationships among history, images, and visual culture?
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in literary and cultural theory in an intensive graduate seminar setting. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
This course is designed to enable students to explore special topics in cultural studies in an intensive graduate seminar setting. See HMS website for descriptions of topics being offered in a given semester. Students will learn contemporary theories and methods via an in-depth exploration of the topic at hand. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
This course formalizes the structure of advising in the first year of the M.A. program, essential individualized support given the interdisciplinary and multi-practice nature of Media Studies. Through meetings with a faculty advisor, students explore and define research areas that will serve as the basis of the thesis exams and the summer research plan.
This course is designed to enable students to explore particular special topics in cinema/media studies in a intensive graduate seminar setting. May be repeated for credit as topic changes.
This course formalizes the structure of advising in the second year of the M.A. program, essential individualized support given the interdisciplinary and multi-practice nature of Media Studies. Through a minimum of four meetings with a faculty advisor, students develop a research question as well as the steps and schedule for completing the thesis. The course provides individually-tailored guidance, feedback, and encouragement to students as they undertake work on their thesis.
This course explores a variety of approaches to art-making prac<ces through lectures, conversations, readings, gallery visits, class presenta<ons, studio work sessions, and crea<ve projects. The aim is to develop students' produc<on and conceptual skills and to offer students a hands-on approach to media. Students learn to produce digital images, video, public projects, social media projects, net art, and curated exhibitions.
This course functions as a workshop in which students explore different methodologies and practices in Media Studies in the context of a specific theme, quesJon, or problem. Each student undertakes a semester-long creative research project that puts critical thinking into practice. Students identify the skills and techniques they need to develop further, and hone their own particular theoretical and artitic approaches. Students are expected to offer critiques of each other's work and to help each other generate ideas. Guest speakers share their expertise and explain their diverse approaches to research. The term culminates with students.
This course introduces students to the logics of mediation in their varied forms, including print, visual (photography, cinema, video), audio, technological, and social forms of media.
This course will build on the work of Mediologies I, introducing students to methods of interpreting a variety of media objects/artifacts ? books, photographs, films, everyday objects, video games, web-sites, sounds/music, and other specific artifacts of media process ? while situating these objects in relation to critical, social, historical, and cultural contexts.
Today, everyone has a \"hot take\"-a piece of commentary that responds quickly to the latest political, cultural, or social event. It competes for public attention in a 24-hour news cycle where journalists, bloggers, and other commentators (amateur and professional) are vying for the public's increasingly divided attention. Because of this, \"hot takes\" are often disparaged (sometimes deservedly) for substituting a personal opinion and shallow moralizing for thoughtful, deliberate criticism. This course focuses on \"the cool take\"-commentary that is timely but not hastily produced, a strong individual perspective based on research, data, and revision. In this course, students will learn to identify what constitutes compelling cultural criticism, and employ those same standards while producing their own essays-a piece of writing that puts an exhibition, concert, television episode/series, theatrical production, fashion collection, food trend, or some other cultural production in greater historical, social, political, and/or cultural context.
This course will work to help students prepare for the production of a final project or thesis. The class will be run as a workshop for student work, facilitated by a faculty member. Studentswill engage with readings on the topic of producing a final project or thesis; examine relevant critical texts as well as workshop the process of selecting a thesis advisor; assemble an annotated bibliography, a precis and literature review; prepare outlines and preliminary or preparatory statements of purpose, and begin the work at hand. Instructor and peers will respond to work in progress and help the student reach the point at which they can take the project or thesis to fruition during the class semester, or in the following semester.
This course is for students who have taken the Media Studies Final Project/Thesis Workshop and are in the process of producing a final project/thesis.
This course functions as a workshop that prepares the student for the production of a final project or thesis. Students read relevant critical texts and assemble an annotated bibliography, an abstract, a literature review, an outline, and preliminary statements of purpose. Faculty and peers respond to the student's work and help the student bring their individual work to a point that will enable them to complete it the following semester.
As the Internet and social media pervade our daily lives and social relationships, it is crucial that we understand what norms and value are embedded within the technologies we engage with every day. This course understands the Internet as something more than just a means with which to communicate and share information. As students will learn, it is as much a technological form as it is a set of social, cultural economic, and technological relationships. In the course, we will examine how race, gender, and difference more broadly are embedded in the design, operations, and accessibility of the Internet.
Through film, dramatic texts, performance, visual art, and theory, this course will explore the legacies of colonialism, as well as the sites of exclusion and exploitation created by global capital today. We will ask how aesthetic tools may challenge binary systems of value (first World/Third World, developed/underdeveloped, center/periphery) and allow for the emergence of art and politics of \"borderlands\" and \"in-between worlds.\" We will begin by delving into the discourses, film and performance works of prominent artists (circa 1960s-1960s) of independent nations of Asia and Africa to understand the distinguishing characteristics of postcolonial aesthetic praxis (canonical counter-discourses, non-linear temporality, carnival logics, and various \"languages\" of resistance-hybridity, folklore, silence, rhythm etc.) We will also study the relationships between art and memory following years of sustained political violence and dictatorship in Latin American. Then we will turn our attention to more recent works of performance and theory from within the US/North America engaging Black feminist theory/The Movement for Black Lives and indigenous resurgence. Course materials includes reading and artworks by such global, interdisciplinary scholars and artists as Trinh T. Minh-ha, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Amir Baradaran Solanas, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Manjula Padmanabhan, Zanele Muholi, amongst others.
This course examines how a wide range of technologies form early film lighting technologies to cosmetics to algorithms shape the ways bodies are visualized and represented. The focus on the intertwined relationships of bodies and visual technologies will enable students to understand the social, cultural, and political implications of technological designs and operations.
This graduate course explores ways in which a range of poetic and critical writing can recreate and investigate innovative and rigorous modes of photography. Writing and photography are at a point of potential interchangeability, where both are tools for utilitarian communication and poetic forms. This course will enact the historic and contemporary overlap between writing and photography in methodology and effect. Class time be will be split between seminar style discussions, at time led by graduate students, on extensive weekly readings and workshops on writing exercises in poetry and critical essays.
In this conceptual art-and-writing course, students will design, carry out, and document a \"cultural expedition\" designed to recuperate cultural lineages, dimensions of experience, and kinds of knowledge that are at risk of being lost. We will explore how poetics can expand our notions of sustainability to include cultural recovery and reanimation and we will learn to use specific writing and investigative (action-based) procedures, such as sustained liking practices, note-taking and commonplace books, audio recording and transcription, archive assembly and investigation, and site-specific research and performance. Be ready to step out of the classroom and into a more flexible, open, and versatile way of looking at writing, at the past, and at how we can, out of that past, construct a more diverse and desired world.
This course is a one credit, graduate-level writing workshop designed to teach artist how to write through and about artistic practice. Through a series of readings and exercises, students are provided with creative approaches to meet writing required of them in school and more generally. Students will read and write about visual art, design, dance, money, news and politics, science, poetry. They will also write first person essays and collaborative texts about their own practice of making. Students will complete weekly assignments and cooperatively review work in class. For a final assignment, students will prepare a writing portfolio that includes a revised artists statement, reading journals and essay that makes textual citation to the course reader and outside texts. Students will be given the opportunity and support to publish their writing portfolios as an artist's book.
This course allows Media Studies MA Students to work as interns in venues relevant to their studies and career paths, and for the internship to appear on their transcripts. The proposed assignment and a specific program of hours and supervision have to be approved by the internship Coordinator.
This course allows Media Studies MA students to work, for academic credit, as interns in venues relevant to their studies and career paths. The proposed assignment and a specific program of hours and supervision have to be approved by the internship Coordinator.
This course allows Media Studies MA students to work, for academic credit, as interns in venues relevant to their studies and career paths. The proposed assignment and a specific program of hours and supervision have to be approved by the Internship Coordinator.
This course allows Media Studies MA students to work, for academic credit, as interns in venues relevant to their studies and career paths. The proposed assignment and a specific program of hours and supervision have to be approved by the Internship Coordinator.
This course allows Media Studies MA students to work, for academic credit, as interns in venues relevant to their studies and career paths. The proposed assignment and a specific program of hours and supervision have to be approved by the Internship Coordinator.
This course allows Media Studies MA students to work, for academic credit, as interns in venues relevant to their studies and career paths. The proposed assignment and a specific program of hours and supervision have to be approved by the Internship Coordinator.