AP/ANTH 3040 6.00 The Anthropology of Digital Media and Visual Representation

This course is about anthropology and visual representations of culture, and cultural difference. It looks at a wide variety of visual media online, including art, photography, film, and specific digital technologies (such as video games and online museums), to explore the ways in which they shape both the perception of, and the experience of, cultural difference and identity. Throughout the course, an emphasis is placed on the inherent power of digital images, and their ability to shape our own cultural experiences, to cast cultural and ethnic others in particular ways, and to act as a mode for producing and resisting stereotypes.

This course examines a wide range of readings, films, and online videos in an effort to move toward developing a theoretical framework for analyzing and reading visual images. It draws on sources from a variety of media formats that are available online. Of central concern are representations of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and “otherness.” Cultural anthropologists have a vested interest in analyses of visual representations for a variety of reasons, one being that visual images, as cultural productions, are steeped in the values, ideologies, and taken-for-granted beliefs about various cultures. Having said that, they are also produced within a political economy that is affected by class and gender hierarchies, and therefore issues concerning power and social order are central.

Course Director: L. Mannik - lmannik@yorku.ca