Media, Culture & Communication

100-level:

• Humanities in the World

Course Descriptions

100-level: Humanities in the World
In today’s interconnected global world, the humanities play a crucial role in fostering critical thinking, empathy, and cultural awareness. They help us navigate complex social issues, understand diverse perspectives, and contribute meaningfully to global conversations.

This gateway course introduces you to the methodologies and research skills central to the humanities courses within the Media, Culture, and Communication cluster. You will explore Film and Media, understanding how movies, series, and online content shape our emotions and beliefs. You will learn about Communication, discovering how ideas spread, how people connect, and the implications when they don’t. You will delve into Literature, uncovering how language serves as a tool for imagination, memory, and protest. Additionally, you will examine Heritage, Art, and Museums, investigating how material culture, identity, and meaning are preserved, challenged, and reimagined.

This course will help you make sense of the world through stories, images, and technology, preparing you for upper-level courses in the Media, Culture, and Communication cluster. The course is not about memorizing facts; it is about learning how the humanities can help you ask better questions.

100-level:

• The Art of Rhetorical Communication

200-level:

• Rhetoric in Action
• Style & Meaning
• Communicating the Climate Crisis

300-level:

• Persuasive Communication
• Creative Communication Laboratory

Course Descriptions

100-level: The Art of Rhetorical Communication
Do you want to master the art of persuasion? Do you want to win debates and to move audiences with your own compelling speeches? In this course you will discover how craft messages, use words that stick, influence opinions, inspire action and connect people. From Aristotle to Barack Obama, rhetorical communication has shaped the world and continues to do so. Learn the techniques used by history’s greatest communicators to move audiences, and apply those stylistic techniques to your own writing and speaking

200-level: Rhetoric in Action
Want to make a difference in the Middelburg community? Want to find your voice—and help others find theirs too? In this course you will develop the power of persuasive speaking and share those skills with local primary school children who need strong role model. You will help them build public-speaking skills and empower them with confidence to find their voices. This course turns the theoretical study of rhetorical communication into material action in the real world. This isn’t just a rhetorical communication class—it’s a chance to change lives; the lives of others, and yours.

200-level: Style & Meaning
How do linguistic choices inform meaning and interpretation, in literary texts but also in a wide variety of non-fictional contexts? Students will be introduced to theoretical frameworks that will inform a close reading of texts to address questions about, for example, power dynamics in (fictional) dialogue; obligation and uncertainty in fictional characters, but also in politicians; or different ideological undertones embedded in word choice but also in structural combinations of words.

200-level: Communicating the Climate Crisis
How is the climate crisis communicated and contested? This course treats climate communication as a cultural struggle over meaning. You will analyze texts, films, exhibitions, protest art, slogans, and social media alongside theory and case studies. Rather than simply dismiss arguments, you will learn to dissect how they function in environmental discourse. The class culminates in a project where you enter the debate yourself.

300-level: Persuasive Communication
Sustainability starts with communication. In this course, where the power of ethical persuasion meets climate action, you’ll explore how language can shape the public understanding of climate issues. You will first learn persuasive communication models and frameworks and then apply them in the real world context of the Delta Climate Centre in Zeeland. Here, you will collaborate, as communication consultants, with climate scientists to produce ethical and impactful sustainability messaging foe the public on the themes of water, food and energy sustainability.

300-level: Creative Communication Laboratory
Creative Communication Laboratory explores how meaning is made through creative expression. You will first study and practice poetic forms, then experiment with sonic poetry, performance, and other unconventional forms of creative communication. Along the way, you will engage critically with theoretical texts and produce your own creative work. This course welcomes curiosity and experimentation. No prior experience is required, only a willingness to explore how communication becomes creative labor.

100-level:

• Introduction to Western Art History
• Introduction to World Archaeology

200-level:

• African Art & Heritage
• Greek Archaeology

300-level:

• Curating Modern Art
• Museums, Art Crime & Restitution

Course Descriptions

100-level: Introduction to Western Art History
This course provides an introduction to Western art history, tracing the development of major artistic movements from the late Middle Ages to the present day. Through a close study of key paintings and their makers, students will gain insight into the evolving styles, techniques, and cultural influences that have shaped Western art across the centuries.

100-level: Introduction to World Archaeology​
What sets us apart as humans? From the first modified hand axes to intricate robotics, humans have developed along with and through their ability to make. This course explores the wisdom of ancient craft production from all over the world: to see how making objects made us into modern humans, and how ancient craft solutions can help make our future more sustainable.

200-level: African Art & Heritage
This course examines the artistic, historical, and ethical dimensions of African art. It explores Africa’s artistic traditions, highlighting its distinct forms, meanings, and cultural significance. It considers its influence on Western modernism through artists like Picasso and Matisse and its role in African diaspora art. Additionally, it addresses looting, colonial-era acquisitions and efforts to return artifacts to Africa.

200-level: Greek Archaeology
The invention of democracy in classical Greece changed the nature of community decision-making, perhaps forever. This process is reflected in the material culture of the period. By examining the archaeology of community & democracy in early-democratic Greece, this course goes in search of ancient lessons for the modern world.

300-level:  Curating Modern Art
This course examines key debates on modern art through a carefully selected range of themes and topics. A central focus is the relationship between art and its presentation in museums and exhibitions. By exploring curatorial practices and exhibition strategies, students will gain insight into how art institutions shape public perception and understanding of modern and contemporary art.

300-level: Museums, Art Crime & Restitution
Who stole the Picasso from a yacht in France? How can we stop the plundering of archaeological sites? How did a secret stash of nazi-looted art go undetected until 2014? In this course we investigate world-wide heritage crime, and the legal means to fight it and make amends.

100-level:

• Great Literary Works
• Introduction to Literary Studies

200-level:

• World Myth & Literature
• Life & Travel Writing

300-level:

• Film & Text
• Perspectives on Literary Meaning

Course Descriptions

100-level: Great Literary Works
This course is a chronological overview of literature ranging from the earliest monuments (the epic of Gilgamesh) to post-modernity (Marquez). Within this framework we read literary and critical texts revealing what it means to be human, mortal, female, male, or child, or what it means to be responsible, free, a member of family or other community, to be civilized or barbarian. What makes literature different from anecdote or a propaganda text? We learn to approach literature’s ambiguities and ironies and trace circulation of literary topes and themes across ages.

100-level: Introduction to Literary Studies
What is literature, why do we read it, and how do we interpret it? The course familiarises students with formal properties of a literary work, makes them aware of a constructed character of literary text, and opens discussion of literary value. It is based on a classic division into fiction, poetry and drama supplemented by contemporary non-fiction and rudiments of film narration. In this course we read both well-familiar and off-centre literary forms and genres such as graphic narrative, children’s texts, Harlequin romance or microfiction.

200-level: World Myth & Literature
Myths form the foundations of literature all over the world. From the oldest surviving epic, Gilgamesh, to the Ramayana; from the Greek Theogony to the Norse Edda, myths explain why the world is as it is, and who its flawed heroines and likeable villains are. This course investigates the tricks and treats of mythical storytelling in classic literary texts from all over the world, and connects them to the stories of global cultures nowadays.

200-level: Life and Travel Writing
How do we write about our sense of self? What tropes and models do we apply to build and represent our identity? And what techniques do we apply to empty our self for therapeutic or ideological reasons? How does our bodily experience prompt us a sense of being male, female or other? What brings memory and imagination together when it comes to representing human experience? In this course we read various texts which reveal the culturally diverse and fluid concepts of the self and which represent experience, memory, identity, agency or autobiographical truth in literary nonfiction.

300-level: Film & Text
Most literary texts and films tell stories. In this course we study complex links between literary and film narratives, departing from a formal analysis of both media. Our further discussions of film adaptation revolve around intertextuality, interpretive strategies, viewer participation and immersion, and other complex dynamics between literary source, screenplay and film. Students complete this course having done research into a topic of their choice such as children’s literature on screen, city in text and film, literary and film Gothic, women’s text and film, Bollywood recycling of Western plots, and many other…

300-level: Perspectives on Literary Meaning
What difference does it make to participate in culture and read literature as a humanist, feminist, Marxist, or representative of a cultural minority? Hoes does psychoanalysis help us make sense of inner conflicts represented in literature? Students complete this course with a research project into a topic of their choice manifesting their ability to apply selected perspectives by e.g., ‘queering Peter Pan’, tracing intersectional feminism in Annie Ernaux’ autobiographical oeuvre, or classism in Édouard Louis’ autofiction…

100-level:

• Introduction to Film & Media
• Media Archeology

200-level:

• Media & the Environment
• From T.V. to TikTok

300-level:

• Media & Race
• The Documentary

Course Descriptions

100-level: Introduction to Film & Media
This course introduces you to film and media as systems of meaning and cultural production. You will examine how images, narratives, and technologies shape perception, identity, and power. Topics include filmic storytelling, representation, national genres, and film’s role in global culture. Through readings, examples, and analysis, you will develop tools to engage critically with film and media in cultural and academic contexts.

100-level: Media Archeology
Introduction to Media Archaeology explores how media technologies shaped knowledge before the arrival of digital culture. You will study cassette tapes, typewriters, and early printing as material objects that carry meaning. Through readings, discussions, and hands-on experiments, you will examine how media have weight, texture, and decay. Activities may include recording silence, analyzing cassette hiss, or researching the Walkman. No technical background is required.

200-level: Media & the Environment
This course examines how environmental concerns are represented through visual culture. You will explore the Anthropocene, animal representation, deep time, biocentrism, contested ideas of nature, and indigenous and postcolonial media. We analyze how media shape environmental understanding and sustainability discourse. You may write a paper or create a media project as the final project. Through readings, discussions, and practice, you will develop tools to analyze and produce environmental media.

200-level: From T.V. to TikTok
“Boys Beware!” warns the title of a 1950’s televised commercial. Of what and whom and why wonders the audience. “Nothing about us without us,” demands dis/abled people on TikTok. “Be our smoke signals” implores a Lakota Matriarch in person. How, questions the class. Media provides the answers. It teaches us to fear, pity, avoid, admire, respect, and how to be good allies.

300-level:  Media & Race
Whose stories are remembered and whose are erased? What do the stories un/told teach us about power, privilege, and resistance? How do cultural expressions including Afrofuturism (i.e., Black Panther) address systemic racism while envisioning just futures? These questions steer this course. Addressing them reveals links between past and present that students explore in final podcasts grounded in research and fueled by passion.

300-level:  The Documentary
In this course, students will be introduced to the development of the documentary form. Students will A) produce a theoretical paper dealing with a problem and 2) deal with the problem in a short documentary film, video, or piece of media. The aims of the course are to foster an understanding of documentary as a diverse form, with a range of styles and genres, to root this diversity in its various historical and social contexts, and to introduce you to analytical tools appropriate for study of documentaries.