What is media studies? What’s at stake in our ways of reading and engaging media? This seminar will introduce key media studies concepts and a wide range of approaches to studying media. Each week, we will pair theoretical texts with films, videos, and other media objects, taking up themes within media studies—attention and ways of looking, the “culture industry,” simulacra and spectacle, reception theory, mediums and materialities, circulation and “new media,” archives and memory, art and the internet, media infrastructures, A.I., radical and critical media practices, and more. Throughout the course, we will experiment with collaborative methods of watching, reading, and attending to media. Together, we will ask: How do social, political, economic structures interact with and shape media? And how do media objects, formations, and networks respond to and shape culture and institutions? Alongside studying dominant histories of media, culture, and communication, we will look at counter-media practices and critical theoretical approaches.