Starting from the desire to complicate an understanding of politics as simply and exclusively a matter of states and governments, organization and administration, ‘cultural resistance’ will be approached from the perspective of groups struggling for social justice and social transformation through their engagement with the media and other communication practices. How do diverse groups and sub-cultures express their social experience when it is contradicted by the dominant ways in which social experience is represented in culture and through the media? One of the main points will be to investigate how, in advanced capitalist societies, social and political struggle necessarily happens through an engagement with dominant culture and media forms rather than in spite of them; the course will therefore concentrate primarily on those cultural practices that are not apparently political in content and aim but that ultimately can and are used in politically productive ways. Emphasis will be placed on popular and mass culture artifacts and on the ways in which ‘style’ is used by ‘sub-cultures’ and other social identities.

“When I hear the word culture I reach for my revolver” (attributed to Joseph Goebbels)

Bertolt Brecht, on the other hand, understood cultural practice not as a mirror reflecting reality but as a hammer with which to shape it. This ‘Special Topics in Media Studies’ course wishes to analyze the ways in which diverse cultural practices have been used or understood as political weapons, as attempts to intervene in the historical world. It further wishes to introduce students to a number of approaches –both theoretical and practical, through readings of source texts and analysis of specific case studies—which have investigated the possibility of cultural practice being used as a tool of conflict, dissent, affirmation of identity and resistance.

Students will be assessed on the basis of a midterm and a final exam (each worth 25% of the final grade); a final research paper (25%); a class presentation (10%); attendance and participation (15%).

Course Schedule:

Week 1&2

Introduction: Culture, Politics, Dissent & Resistance

Going Underground & Counterinformation

    -Alternative Media & Pirate Radio

Week 3&4

Theory: Gramsci, Foucault, Hall

Cultural Resistance in the Cinema

    -Third Cinema

Week 5 - 7

Subcultures: Theory and Practices

The Meaning of Style

Case Studies: Hardcore Punk, Heavy Metal, Riot Grrrl, Industrial Culture, Rave Culture

Week 8&9

Cultural Resistance in the Global Context

Week 10

The Meaning of ‘White’

Week 11 - 13

Cooptation, Digital Media, Social Networking and Dissent

Producing the Unmarketable

Week 14

Review Sessions/Discussion of Papers