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Home 2013-2014 Undergraduate College Catalog Course Offerings Communication Studies Courses COMM 3048: Media Audiences: Fans & Beyond

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COMM 3048: Media Audiences: Fans & Beyond

This seminar examines audiences – the experience of reading, viewing, using, listening to, and consuming media. We begin with a survey of earlier approaches to audience studies and an overview of three contemporary approaches to studying audiences (theoretical, historical, and ethnographic). We consider audiences in relation to such topics as identities (race, sex, age), fandom, taste hierarchies, pleasure, stars, and graphic violence/explicit sex. We examine qualitative methodological approaches associated with (or inspired by) the cultural studies tradition and case studies about diverse audiences. We also examine the difficulty of assessing what it is that people think and feel – consciously or unconsciously – about what they read, listen to, and see. Old media such as print (popular fiction, comics, and magazines), film, and television as well as new media such as the internet and video games will be considered. Students design and conduct their own audience study as the basis of a required research paper. Prerequisite: COMM1001 (or instructor permission) with histories of cinema/broadcasting useful.

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