Goucher College 2021-2022 Undergraduate Catalogue 
    
    Mar 28, 2024  
Goucher College 2021-2022 Undergraduate Catalogue PLEASE NOTE: This is an archived catalog. Programs are subject to change each academic year.

CPEA 208 - Media and the Audience: Constructing and Deconstructing Meaning (4 Cr.)

(GCR Arts area)


How does media - whether a movie, television series, play, or book - interact with and impact its audience? A common assumption is that audiences are cultural dupes mindlessly consuming media messages, but we will challenge that notion by studying how audiences negotiate and make meaning from media content. In this course, we will discuss the role media plays in the everyday lives of ordinary people while also critically analyzing the industrial and economic decisions behind the production and distribution of that content. We will consider the power relations involved in mass media production and how societal inequality may be reproduced and exacerbated by defining the audience in particular ways. Students will break down and interrogate how the structures of media production uphold and reinforce the hegemonic systems already at work in society. 

Following Sullivan’s (2013) model, we will consider how audiences function as objects, institutional constructions, active users of media, and producers. Working individually, students will use self-reflection to explore their own personal experiences of being part of an audience and connect this self-analysis to larger arguments about the media-audience relationship. In groups, students will work together to study the media consumption behaviors of others and extract ideology from such audience actions to make sense of the full impact of media on its consumers. Students are limited to one CPE course per semester. Morris.