Professor Charlene Makley
Office: 312 Vollum
Phone: 771-1112, ext. 7461
email: makleyc@reed.edu

The meteoric rise of new forms of digital data and social media in the past 20 years has generated, on the one hand, fantasies of utopic intimacy (the immediacy promised in a new "global village"), and on the other, moral panics about unprecedented estrangement (the hyper-mediation of virtual worlds and corporate or government "big data"). In this course, we challenge this dichotomy of intimacy/immediacy versus estrangement/mediation by taking an anthropological approach to the question of human communication. Drawing on interdisciplinary debates in philosophy, linguistic anthropology, and media studies, we develop tools for understanding all communication as both mediated and material, grounded in embodied practices and technological infrastructures and situated in historical events. This in turn will allow us to grasp how circulations of media forms and commodities participate in the creation of types of persons and publics across multiple scales of time and space. Bringing those theoretical and methodological debates into dialogue with ethnographic studies and other forms of media, we ask: how do people sense and interpret themselves, others and their worlds? What is the boundary between the human and nonhuman in a digital age? What roles do states or transregional capitalisms play in the mediation of valued and devalued persons and publics? What are the possibilities for communication amidst great gaps in access to valued forms of media? Prerequisite: Anthropology 201 or 211. This course counts toward the Department of Anthropology's Linguistic Anthropology concentration. This course counts toward the Film and Media Studies minor.

Learning Outcomes

After taking this course, students should be able to:

  • Grasp and describe key debates in western philosophy, media studies and linguistic anthropology about the nature of "media" and its relationship to contested understandings of types of persons and publics.
  • Grasp and describe the anthropological paradigm shift of "media" as an all-pervasive process of semiotic and material mediation that troubles the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman.
  • Contextualize mediation processes in transregional histories and capitalist political economies in their own writings and commentaries.
  • Express and apply these approaches and debates in a multimodal final project in which they make media about mediation.

Distribution Requirements:
This course can be used to fulfill one of your Group II "History and Social Science" distribution requirements. It accomplishes the following learning outcomes for the group:

  • Evaluate data and/or sources
  • Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other
  • Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.