This page was created by Patty Ahn.
Course Info
Location: MCC 127 / Studio 139
Time: Thursdays, 9:30am - 12:20pm
Instructor: Professor Professor Ahn
Email: pahn@ucsd.edu
Office: MCC 246
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 3-4pm and by appt.
Course Description
This course guides students through a historical and practice-based analysis of the critical role media has played within contemporary racial justice struggles in the U.S. Each week, we examine the different production tools, formal strategies, and distribution/exhibition platforms employed by a specific campaign or movement, paying especially close attention to the rich matrix of queer, transgender and women of color-led struggles that has emerged in the last decade. While we use course readings and weekly discussions to help us historicize these different creative practices and political struggles, weekly lab workshops and take-home assignments allow us to add an experiential dimension to our analysis by putting these concepts and tools into practice. By the end of the quarter, students ideally will have developed a more robust analytical and technical framework for understanding how profoundly stories shape our social and political realities, and the creative tools to bring them closer to their own activist/organizing commitments and work.
Students will work in clusters of 2-4 people to produce a final course project that employs a combination of production techniques, audiovisual forms and exhibition strategies to amplify, document or tell a short narrative a social justice movement covered in class or of their own choosing. For instance, they might could produce a web-based collective storytelling project; stage and document a direct action or public protest; install a physical photo exhibition in a public space; shoot and edit a call-to-action video; shoot and edit a short documentary (2-3 min. max) about one particular angle of a social just movement or campaign.
Projects should demonstrate a thoughtful engagement with and application of course concepts and must be developed in consultation with the professor. Moreover, since the range of final projects will be too diverse to implement a unified criteria for evaluation, grades will be contract-based and each group will establish a reasonable set of deliverables, standards and expectations wth the professor.
