Media Studies
What remains of people is what media can store and communicate.
[M]edia studies [try] to explore … practices that produce meaning….[T]he question of the circulation of meaning almost immediately involves the question of power. Who has the power, in what channels, to circulate which meanings to whom?
“Stop Blaming The Media” read a Huffington Post headline from 2016.
Whilst it cannot be denied that we are almost continuously exposed to a flow of media content in our daily lives, penetrating and saturating our private and public spheres, it also has become somewhat of a platitude to point towards ‘the media’ as this omnipotent, and yet rather abstract culprit.
As Stuart Hall remarked, to investigate the complexities of power within media ecologies is a fundamental task for any media scholar. We look at production practices (who and how?), analyze media texts (what meanings do they produce?) and examine how different audiences (users, spectators) engage with and consume media.
At University College Utrecht, media are explored from a critical, theoretically informed perspective, encompassing the study of visual art and culture (from photography to cinema to gifs), media archaeology, critical data studies, to mediated documentation of ‘reality’.
Media studies is firmly grounded in society and culture, and consequently a multidisciplinary field of inquiry. Imbued by philosophy, history, literature studies, art history, linguistics, anthropology, and sociology, Media Studies at University College Utrecht provides the analytical and theoretical tools for understanding both the forms and conditions of specific media and their embedding in the diverse personal and institutional settings of our lives.
Contact person
- Email: n.koll@uu.nl