Specialists in this subdiscipline study the ways in which various forms of media, including motion pictures, social media and other electronic forms of information dissemination influence individual and social behaviors.
Our research specialization in “Experimental Media” offers courses that 1) examine the inscription of human and non-human practices in old and new media; 2) engage the emergent fields of “cyber” and “digital” anthropology; and 3) problematize terms and concepts routinely deployed in studies of media worlds—platform, social media, hologram, algorithm, remediation, curation, animation. Our faculty engage a range of fieldwork modes and media forms, from experimental ethnographic film on the financial crash of the Thai baht and the Asian monetary crisis to theater experiments around the “refugee crisis” in Southern Europe to intensive participant-observation among contemporary curators and artists in Mexico City. We offer several courses, including ANT 135: Media Anthropology, its thematically specific companion ANT 136: Ethnographic Film, and graduate seminars addressing the theoretical and empirical implications of fieldwork research in emergent media assemblages, visual cultures, and social media. Students will also gain an inter-disciplinary understanding of media worlds by engaging debates in adjacent disciplines, from Cinema & New Media studies to Science & Technology Studies.