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Media studies is an intercollegiate major offered jointly by Claremont
McKenna, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer, Pomona and Scripps Colleges.
Media studies is an interdisciplinary field that explores the histories,
technologies
and social and cultural contexts of a range of contemporary media forms,
including film, video, television, print, the Internet and other electronic
means of communication. the Intercollegiate Media Studies Program presents
students with an integrated approach to media production and the critical
study of the media, seeking to understand the present state of media
practices through an examination of their historical and technological
development, an analysis of their genres and a rigorous investigation of the
theoretical approaches that have been brought both to the creative practices
of media producers and the critical practices used by contemporary scholars.
Production is a key element of the media studies major, but the mode of
production
studied at the Claremont Colleges is not oriented toward traditional
narrative film or
television, or toward commercial models of new media; rather, this major
stresses
“independent” narrative forms, documentary, video and digital art, and
community-based and activist media. Media Studies also understands critical
scholarship as a form of media practice, seeking to confront not only the
ways that the media construct the contemporary cultural environment, but
also the ways in which we as producers and consumers are all constituted by
the same cultural formations that we seek to challenge. Above all, the major
seeks to explore the media from a perspective that eliminates the traditional
boundaries between disciplines and between media theory and media
production, thus illuminating new ways of seeing, thinking, and
communicating in the world.
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