Communications and Media - Senior

Course # MDIA 4082

Credits 6

TBA

Course # MDIA 4191

Credits 6

Prerequisites and/or Corequisites: Documentary and Scriptwriting, Media Production TV

Course Description

This course explores advanced journalism and media storytelling practices. It provides students with an opportunity to develop a production project aligned with contemporary industry methods. The project demonstrates a professional identity built on innovation in conceptualization and media articulation. Students practice the skills required to plan and pitch production proposals. By identifying and connecting with audiences, students draw on audience metrics to create relevant and engaging content and style. Students take advantage of ongoing technological changes in media. Efforts should be made by students to place these developments and reflections within the context of Central Asia. This course builds on the skills and capabilities students have gained throughout their studies in theory and production courses.

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon the completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Deliver an effective story pitch to employ strong verbal, written, and analytical skills to the degree expected of a senior-level college student.
• Produce a technically well-packages short documentary, short film and podcast that shows students’ ability to combine research, narration, and audio-visual technical skills.
• Conduct in-depth interviews and fieldwork to connect with and relate to various stakeholders.
• Present facts and opinion through research and interviews to correctly interpret the opinions and values on the topic presented.
• Work with a team and locals on delivering stories and voices of the local community.

Course Assessments and Grading

Course # MDIA 4080

Credits 6

Prerequisites and/or Corequisites: Audiences for Communications and Media;

Narrative Studies; Print/Radio/TV Production 

Course Description

The course examines a range of social science research methods and approaches with emphasis on their application to the context of media and communications, and discusses research as means of social inquiry.   It focuses on research design; data collection, qualitative and quantitative data analysis, the critical appraisal and evaluation of primary and secondary research and understanding of ethics from communication and media research perspective. Creative research methods are also examined.

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon the completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Analyse creative research methods and creativity in research
• Explore and apply appropriate research methods to design research projects
• Explain the role of research within various forms of communication practice
• Explain the ethical implications of research practices and the external environment within which social research is conducted
• Define the key research and research-interpretation skills for work in public communications, advocacy, development, creative industries and media
• Explain how research informs professional communications practice

Course Assessments and Grading

Course # MDIA 4083

Credits 6

Prerequisites and/or Corequisites: None (Recommended Science Communication)

Course Description

This course engages in the critical analysis of many and varied environmental discourses connecting the local with the global.  Students study a range of visual and written texts to learn how environmental communication is used by different actors in society. The role of communication is studied at the intersections of other key issues such as biodiversity, sustainable development, and climate change.  By evaluating and creating different media texts students gain an understanding of how media in various social and political contexts shape environmental communication discourses in the public sphere. Using holistic and systems thinking, students design environmental communication campaigns undergirded by the sustainable development framework that places community concerns at the centre.

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon the completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Examine the ways in which different political, cultural, economic and geographical contexts shape environmental communication discourses in the public sphere with a focus on the Central Asian region.
• Evaluate a range of texts and assess their effectiveness on the intended audience.
• Examine how visual texts act as cultural prism that shape our understanding of nature.
• Discuss the role of media in reporting key environmental issues in different societies while connecting the local with the global.
• Design communication responses to engage a variety of audiences about environmental issues.

Course Assessments and Grading 

Course # MDIA 3071

Credits 6

Prerequisites and/or Corequisites: None

Course Description

This practical, studio-based course introduces students to the theories and practices of visual communication through hands-on production across a wide range of media. The semester opens with a photo-dérive — a guided, exploratory walk through Naryn in which students photograph freely and without a fixed plan — before building a shared visual vocabulary through semiotics, collage, and autoethnography, a method for examining personal and cultural identity through one's own experience (students begin with a short autoethnographic collage about home or a favourite food. A virtual museum visit and two documentary film screenings provide shared visual references throughout the semester. The course then moves into documentary photography, video, and an exploration of local textile pattern as a visual language, with students keeping an ongoing phone-based visual journal as a documentation tool across every phase. All assignments are rooted in the Naryn region: pastoral life, the seasonal jailoo migration, craft traditions, and students' own families and communities. The course closes with a public, multi-media exhibition — combining video, photography, collage, drawing, and textile-inspired work — built around each student's individually produced visual communication campaign.

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon the completion of the course, students will be able to:

Identify and analyse how visual messages encode explicit and implicit cultural, social, and political meaning.

Apply core principles of visual composition across collage, drawing, photographic, video, and textile-based media.

Use autoethnographic and dérive-based methods to examine personal and cultural identity through visual work.

Produce a documentary photo essay and a short video piece that responsibly represent people and communities in Naryn.

Evaluate the ethics of representation in documentary and campaign-based visual work, including informed consent and the avoidance of stereotyping.

Design and produce a coherent, multi-platform visual communication campaign addressing a real social or cultural issue.

Present a body of multi-media work (video, photo, collage, drawing, textile) in a public exhibition format.

Course Assessments and Grading

Course # HUSS 3126E

Credits 6

Prerequisites and/or Corequisites: None

Course Description

The unprecedented changes brought by technological development often referred to as digitalization is shaping society, culture, and human identity in today’s digital world. Humans are becoming hybrids, communities are emerging online, many people live in virtual reality, and the digital world has altered social norms and created new communication and values. This transformation required anthropologists to use relevant approaches to study the current digital phenomena. Thus, the course invites students to explore how digitalization shapes human subjectivity and social relationships between individuals, groups, organizations, and communities. The course introduces students to the new theoretical framework for the study of digital phenomena and provides ground for the study of digital culture which is a controversial point of many current debates on digitalization and its impact on society. Thus, the goal is to use anthropological approaches to the study of historical overview of technological development, digital societies with emerging and changing nature of community, their culture and societies.

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon the completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Explain and apply key concepts and approaches in digital anthropology to understand how digital technologies are embedded in cultural and social life.
• Analyze the social, cultural, and ethical consequences of digital technologies, including social media, artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and emerging forms of digital economic activity.
• Design and conduct small-scale digital ethnographic research using appropriate qualitative methods to investigate online communities, practices, interactions, and forms of digital culture.
• Critically examine how digital technologies reflect, reproduce, or challenge existing relations of power and inequality, with particular attention to gender, class, identity, and different social and cultural contexts.

Course Assessments and Grading