graduate courses
at UT Dallas
ATCM 6381 - Media, Culture, and Economy: The Work of Care in Digital Cultures
This course examines the history of and interplay among economic logics and media technologies and industries. This semester focuses specifically on the infrastructural, material, and embodied dimensions of work in contemporary digital cultures. This class draws on diverse fields—including media studies, science and technology studies, feminist and queer theory, critical race and ethnic studies, disability and crip theory, and ecocriticism—to examine the spatiotemporal (literal) place of work and the ideological and cultural (metaphoric) place of work in digital cultures.
ATCM 7340 - Advanced Studies in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication: Advanced Digital Media Studies
This course focuses on readings in the field of digital media studies by scaffolding critical study of representative texts. Framing thematics and questions will guide students through asynchronous reading and engagement with assigned materials to better understand the study of digital media and digital culture.
ATCM 6380 - Histories of Emerging Media: Technologies of Sex and Sexuality
This class examines how historic and emerging technologies shape and are shaped by our understandings of sex practice, sexual identities, sexual desires, and sex discourses as well as how social constructions of sex and sexuality are themselves technologies. Taking an intersectional approach, this course investigates technologies of sex and sexuality as co-constituted with cultural constructions of gender, race, class, ability, age, and other dimensions of social identity and difference.
ATCM 7331 - Research Methodology in Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication
This course guides students through a variety of research methodologies appropriate for advanced interdisciplinary research in arts, technology, and emerging communication. Students will develop and refine their own individual research methodologies and programs in the process, attending to the particular challenges and opportunities that interdisciplinary work brings in relation to established and emerging fields.
ATCM 6381 - Media, Culture, and Economy: The Work of Care in Digital Cultures
This course examines the history of and interplay among economic logics and media technologies and industries. To do so, the course specifically investigates care as a cultural practice, form of knowledge, and disposition in contemporary digital cultures. Readings, projects, and media will explore different theorizations of care and/as work, the monetization and commodification of care, as well as the transformative potential and constraints of care.
ATCM 6378 - Tactical Media
This course provides an introduction to tactical media as simultaneously an interventionist art practice, media practice, and activist practice, from its emergence in the 1990s and tracing along its ever-evolving contours to the present. Students will explore the possibilities of tactical media activism in the era of ubiquitous computing, social media profiles, platform capitalism, bio- and wearable technologies, and autonomous devices.
ATCM 6357 - Virtual Worlds and Communities: Queer Theory and Game Studies
This course investigates virtual worlds and communities as practices, relations, and arrangements that are in the midst of becoming—that is, coming into being. Central to the course’s conceptualization of virtuality and worldmaking are insights from queer theory (as queerness offers potential for thinking possibility, sideways, and otherwise to normativity, convention, and socially sanctioned reality) as well as studies of games and play (as spatial and temporal practices of generating and regulating virtuality).
ATCM 6342 - Experimental Games Studio
Experimental Games Studio is a critical production-oriented course interested in exploring how games and toys can be both the platform/medium for and the topic of conceptual, experimental, and politically-engaged art practices. The ultimate aim is for students to create their own game-related experimental art projects, which can include performance art, speculative design, culture jamming, critical modding, and other practices.
ATCM 6336 - Critical Game Studies (formerly ATEC 6342: Game Studies)
Covering both the history of the development of play and game studies as an identifiable academic field as well as contemporary debates regarding the material, semiotic, and socioeconomic entanglements of play and games, this seminar prepares students to produce original academic research that intervenes in the field of play and game studies.
ATEC 6344 - History and Culture of Interactive Media: Social Technologies and Games
This course investigates the material and immaterial technologies, rules, and processes that shape social relations in contemporary digital culture. Through readings from a range of fields, including play and game studies, sociology, history, science and technology studies, and media studies, students will explore how games are social and material technologies as well as how sociality is structured in ways like and unlike games.