ANTH 3034 - Visual and Media Anthropology

This course is about ethical visual representations of culture and cultural difference. It looks at a wide variety of visual media (including art, photography, film, video, and digital technologies) to explore the ways in which these shape both the perception, and the experience, of socio-cultural change. Throughout the course, an emphasis is placed on the inherent power of images: Their ability to shape our own cultural experiences, to cast cultural 'others' in particular ways, and to act as a mode of resisting other people's stereotypes. A particular focus is placed on the production and circulation of visual narratives which, when paired with written narratives, mediate our cultural ‘contact zones’. It is in these moments of contact - in postcolonial encounters, in ethnographic research, and in the algorithmic mediations of cyberspace - that people construct ideas about themselves and others.