Visual Life of Popular Culture

Prerequisite: One 200-level COMM course This course explores the origins and development of popular and visual culture, focusing on a variety of different visual and popular media (such as photographs, films, graphic design, cyber culture and high art). In particular, this course examines the ways in which visual and popular culture create and communicate identity, as well a how people use these forms of communication to understand the world around them. Students will investigate how ethnicity, race, gender, class, age, religion and sexuality both shape and are shaped by visual and popular culture. Offered either semester.