Academics
Summer 2019

Summer 2019

This summer, learn how to critically analyze and help shape developments in new media. Digital media profoundly shape our lives: social media, apps, software and networked devices have transformed almost every area of work and play. The Berkeley Center for New Media Summer Certificate provides students with skills and knowledge that are essential for a career in tech, media, and related fields. This summer, think critically about how digital media impact our culture, from how media relate to the representation of race, gender, and identity, to how new technologies impact democracy worldwide.

NWMEDIA R1B 4 units

CANCELED: Mediating Blackness in African American Children’s Literature

Summer Session A | MWF 9AM — 12:30 PM | 109 Dwinelle Hall
Lashon Daley

Students will develop critical reading and writing skills while analyzing African American children’s literature, exploring how text and illustrations are used to enact race and gender.

Digital Aesthetics

Summer Session C | MWF 12:30 — 2:59 PM |
Lida Zeitlin Wu

Is there such a thing as a digital "look?" In this course, we will consider the relationship between art/aesthetics and media/technology, paying particular attention to their points of intersection. A wide range of media objects (from film to satellite technologies) will open up a larger conversation about visual representation.

NWMEDIA 90-001, 4 units

CANCELED: blk + wimmin + cyborg: Black Feminist Ethics and the Digital

Summer Session D | MTWR 10 AM — 12:30 PM | 263 Dwinelle Hall
Malika Imhotep

How does digital technology impact the way we see black women?

How does digital technology impact the ways black women see themselves?

This course approaches these questions through critical engagements with literary and popular representations of the black woman as a cyborg, an entity who is both human and machine. While Donna Haraway has argued that the cyborg is a figure without an origin story, this course sets out to trouble that notion by paying close attention to the ways ‘feminist cyborg theory’ intersects with the concerns of Black Studies. Pulling from a range of media texts from the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler to the unapologetically vulgar videos of Lil Kim, this course utilizes black feminist theory and creative production to explore the relationship between the black female body and technology.

Central to this work are questions about the ways new media events like #sayhername and #blackgirlmagic impact the broader terrain of our online world. Foregrounding the work of black women writers, scholars, organizers and artists this course will serve as an introduction to black feminist theory with emphasis on the relationship between the black woman, the body and technology. Students will leave the course having developed a critical lens and tool kit for new media engagement that better tends to the concerns of black feminists.

In this course students will be exposed to (and practice) different forms of writing and analysis responding to theory, literature and various new media texts. Students will be asked to produce at least one piece of public writing for a Medium publication associated with the course.

NWMEDIA 190-001, 4 units

CANCELED: Technology and democracy

Summer Session D | MTWR 12PM — 3 PM | 262 Dwinelle Hall
Abhijeet Paul

This course examines the relationship of technology and democracy through specific international examples, including artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, and ecocinema.