Introduction to Religion, Media, and Culture (172-0-21)
Instructors
Sarah McFarland Taylor
847 4914361
Crowe hall, 4-144
Meeting Info
555 Clark B01: Tues, Thurs 2:00PM - 3:20PM
Overview of class
This course offers undergraduates an introduction to studying the phenomena of religion in relationship to dynamics of media, society, and culture. The course content highlights a variety of themes, issues, figures, and narratives, while examining diverse religious practices, productions, communities, representations and identities. In this course, we dive into one of today's most exciting and rapidly growing areas of scholarship - the intriguing intersections and complex entanglements of religion and media in popular culture. Drawing from a diverse array of interdisciplinary sources, we will explore what media studies and communication theories have to offer the study of religion, and reciprocally how religious studies scholarship might enrich media studies. Our primary sources are drawn from such areas as religious television, film, and radio, digital gaming worlds, billboards, advertisements and media campaigns, popular music, comedy, streaming video, social media, memes, and even tattoos, body art, and graffiti. We will look at such areas as: how religion gets mediated; the religious dimensions of transmedia storytelling and media world-building; religion as communication; online group identity formation and religious identity construction; media representation of religions; the blurred boundaries between the so-called "sacred and the secular" in the study of religion and media; and controversies in overlapping religious worlds and media worlds vis-à-vis the authorized and unauthorized circulation of content. Of particular interest in this course will be the impact of digital culture on the media-religion interface. Students will be asked to research and analyze a primary source of their choice and then to make their own media to communicate their original analysis and research findings. This course will involve your own creative mediamaking. Please note format: This course is a mixture of lecture and in-class participatory discussion. The professor asks provocative questions throughout class to actively engage students in the material and to invite them into sharing their points of view.
Registration Requirements
No prerequisites required.
Learning Objectives
Course Learning Goals:
- To gain insights into the production of media and its moral implications.
- To gain an understanding of how religious authority works, and how it can affect (both negatively and positively) environmental messaging
- To think about what it means to live in the Anthropocene
- To recognize and identify the political dimensions of who and what does and does not become the subject of media attention
- To gain the opportunity for "hands on" media making and media messaging, tactics, and strategies
- To develop analytical tools for identifying and evaluating media interventions
- To develop cognizance and discernment of "making a difference" versus "making a true difference"
- To gain a literacy in the environmental humanities, particularly analysis of ecomedia
Teaching Method
Evaluation Method
Students will complete a midterm directed media project and will select a creative mediamaking project of their own choosing for their final (podcast, video, website, etc.)
Class Materials (Required)
All materials will be available online.
Class Attributes
Ethics & Values Distro Area
Associated Classes
DIS - Kresge Centennial Hall 2-339: Fri 9:00AM - 9:50AM
DIS - Kresge Centennial Hall 2-440: Fri 12:00PM - 12:50PM
DIS - Kresge Centennial Hall 2-440: Fri 1:00PM - 1:50PM