Students in this course chart media and data as agents of social inequality and cultural ideology, and learn how people subvert them. We excavate the assumptions that frame representations of reality and difference in documentary film, track the global circulation of mass media, see indigenous filmmakers as cultural activists, and explore the datafication of organic life and analogue culture. To make the most of our online setting, we adopt tools of media-making and data visualization to probe our objects of study from the inside. From there, we learn to critique them as human constructions and to produce new counter narratives and images.
