In the past two decades, social media has taken hold of people’s imagination and now profoundly shapes our lived experience and understandings of the real. This class combines theory and practice: 1) We will read anthropological texts to study the complex worlds and ways in which social media is produced, circulated, and consumed. 2) Students will learn how to conduct anthropological fieldwork and will conduct semester-long research projects into media worlds of their choice. This course brings anthropology’s cross-cultural perspective and attention to the production of mediated, everyday realities. By placing media cultures in comparative perspective, students will make the strange familiar and the familiar strange, enabling critical thinking about media use and its ramifications.
