Culture, Media, Technology: Tensions between the Local and the Global in Atlanta and Beyond

• Co-taught by Professors Narin Hassan (LMC) and Anna Stenport (ML)
• Tuesday/Thursday 12-1:15 PM 
• CR 91805 for ML4813

This new collaboratively taught course historicizes and theorizes the relationship of various forms of media to our notions of “the local” and “the global.” We will trace how travel accounts, literary texts, film representations, political discourses, visual images, and digital spaces all produce and circulate notions of home, displacement, and cultural identity. We will also consider how scientific, industrial, and technological advancements shape our concepts and visualizations of space, mobility, and globalization. The course will examine various geographical and cultural spaces, focusing upon constructions of “the Orient,” “the Arctic,” and our own environment—the city of Atlanta. We will study these geographical, cultural, and imaginative terms to trace how the histories and representations of foreign and local spaces construct our notions of identity and difference, and our conceptions of space, culture, and environment. 

This course is open to undergraduate and graduate students and gives students the opportunity to work with a collaborative team of faculty from the School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC) and the School of Modern Languages (ML). Along with the two lead instructors, the course will feature guest speakers from both departments. The course will fulfill the modern language requirement for LMC majors. It fulfills humanities credit for all undergraduate and graduate students. Course requirements include: active participation/a discussion leader session, one midterm written exam, one final oral presentation, a final research based project. The final project will ask students to combine theory and practice to develop an analytical project on some aspect of Atlanta and its place as a growing and evolving global city.