undergraduate courses
at UT Dallas
ATCM 2325 - Introduction to Ethnic Studies
This course serves as an introduction to ethnic studies, with an emphasis on the field's core theories of race, racialization, and social difference. Students will examine how "race" structures and shapes culture and society in the United States historically and in the present.
HONS 3199.HN5: Collegium V Honors Reading: Toy Cultures
This Collegium V Honors Reading Course investigates toys as historically and culturally situated technologies of play that negotiate and contest dominant and normative cultural identities, meanings, and relations. Thinking broadly, the course will explore toys of various kinds and in various contexts in order to consider how toys operate as social mediators of meaning and value, including in constructing and shaping conceptions of childhood and adulthood, of work and play, and of the past and the future.
HONS 3199.HN5 - Collegium V Honors Readings: Camp, Kitsch, Cuteness
This course investigates how aesthetic and political practices of camp, kitsch, and cuteness negotiate and contest dominant and normative cultural identities, meanings, and relations, particularly in terms of gender, race, sexuality, class, and other dimensions of social identity and difference. Particular attention will be paid to the emergence and transformation of camp, kitsch, and cuteness as recognizable aesthetic frames following the modern rise of industrial mass production, consumerism and advertising, and the advent of digital culture.
ATCM 2321 - Reading Media Critically
This writing-intensive course explores how to think and write critically about media and society. Throughout the semester, students will refine conceptual tools that allows us to explore, critique, and reimagine the culture we produce and consume through the study of media. We will discuss foundational ideas in critical theory and relate these ideas to current social issues and media productions.
HONS 3199.HN5 - Collegium V Honors Readings: Fictional Games
This course investigates how fictional representations of games operate as cultural sites for negotiating contested meanings of work and play, equity and fairness, utopia and dystopia, collaboration and competition, and other social practices and values. By focusing on fictional games in narrative media—such as film, fiction, television, and even games themselves—this course considers ways in which games enable cultures to make sense of themselves, others, and the worlds they inhabit.
ATCM 4320 - Political Economy of Digital Media
This course investigates interrelations among digital media technologies, economic practices, government institutions, and sociopolitical logics. Topics covered include global industries and supply-chains for digital technologies, intellectual property and copyright, labor and leisure in digital culture, environmental and economic impacts of digital technologies, as well as emerging economies and virtual currencies.
ATCM 4334.H10 - Topics in Critical Media Studies: Games and Social Justice (CV Honors)
This course investigates how games are always deeply political—both as artifacts of as well as interventions in existing socioeconomic and cultural systems of uneven power, violence, oppression, care, support, and justice. Students will critically explore the political stakes of representation, participation, and worldmaking through game design, game playing, and gaming cultures.
ATCM 4334 - Topics in Critical Media Studies: Queer and Trans Media Cultures
This course explores how media technologies reinforce, challenge, and negotiate normative understandings and practices of gender and sexuality. In particular, this course provides an introduction to queer and trans theory in and through critical media studies, focusing on media production and consumption as key cultural practices in how we constitute and potentially reimagine gender, sexuality, and the worlds they shape.
HONS 3199.H10 - Collegium V Honors Readings: Queer Gaming Cultures
This Collegium V Honors Reading Course explores how queer indie game design and queer acts of playing negotiate normative understandings and practices of gender and sexuality through gaming. Students will discuss a range of queer games alongside readings in queer game studies to consider how games participate in the constitution and potential reimagination of gender, sexuality, and the worlds they shape.
ATCM 4334 - Topics in Critical Media Studies: Nonfiction Web Series
This class functions as a simulation of professional environments in academics, cultural industries, and non-profits allowing students to collaborate in developing critically informed and socially engaged media projects. Specifically, this offering will have students develop, write, and produce a short-run nonfiction web series, consisting of critically-informed videos. The concept and details for the nonfiction web series will be student-driven in consultation with the instructor.
ATCM 3366 - Game Studies I
This course serves as an introduction to vocabularies, frameworks, and arguments in the field of game studies. This course will centrally investigate how games and play are situated phenomena with material conditions, social conventions, cultural meanings, and historical contexts. Students will explore how concepts, theories, and arguments about games and play enable careful examination and reflection on gameplay experiences, practices, and cultures.
ATCM 4366 - Game Studies II: About and Beside Games
In this class, students will explore how games operate as sites to negotiate work and play, equity and fairness, utopia and dystopia, identity and performance, and creativity and competition, among other social practices and values. Media and cultural texts covered explicitly about games will include films, novels, television shows, academic scholarship, and games themselves.
ATEC 4367 - Game Design II
This course uses a rapid prototyping model, where students develop a digital game prototype addressing both a mechanical requirement and a thematic requirement over the course of a week for consecutive weeks. Upon completing the ten prototypes, students choose of their game prototypes to develop further into their final project. More information about the course, including prototype assignments and student submissions, are available at the course blog: Games Like Hotcakes
at UC Davis
ENL 10C - Literature in English: 1900 to Present
In this class, we explore works in English from the United Kingdom, the United States, Nigeria, India, Singapore, and other spaces of the Anglophone world to construct a broad history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature to consider how changes in spatial scales and scale-making bring people, animals, things, and ideas into contact and conflict with each other.
ENL 3 - Introduction to Literature
This is a first-year lower division composition course instructing students on writing through reading, analysis, and critical engagement with works of literature.