Days & Times: Mon 6-8:50pm
Room: 312 Cathedral of Learning
Instructor: Zachary Horton
This course is a pre-approved elective for Fall 2020.

This seminar with explore media theory and practice through the lens of ecology. From the late twentieth century to the present, ecology as a scientific discipline and set of cultural narratives has risen to the forefront of knowledge production as a way to study and understand complex biological systems, their environments, and their internal dynamics. During the same period, media systems have grown exponentially in complexity until they too have begun to exhibit some of the behaviors of ecological systems, including self-organization, feedback, evolution, and emergent properties. The term “media ecology” captures both this new, nonlinear systems approach to understanding media itself as well as the intersection between natural ecosystems, the technological assemblages with which they are intertwined, and the human (and non-human) subjects that are produced molded within these structures. This seminar will explore both media that interface with natural ecosystems as well as works and theory that approach mediation from an ecological and systems theoretical perspective. The secret life of information, contagious media, and the post-natural ecologies of our present and future will challenge us to conceive of Media and Ecology as a single coupled system: the emblem of our contemporary environment and an important frontier in media studies of the present. Graduate students from all disciplines are welcome. Participants may optionally produce creative projects in lieu of a seminar paper, in any medium.