Firstbridge courses are offered to degree seeking freshmen and registration is done via webform in pre-arrival checklist.
Professor(s)
Notes
What makes up the stuff of memory? How and why have humans created tools, techniques and technologies that provide historical and lived continuity? How do institutions and designed spaces, such as museums, memorials, and monuments contribute to our lived sense of history and time? This FirstBridge combines Psychology and Global Communications Studies in order to explore the human practice and art of making memories. From Paleolithic cave paintings to contemporary museums and digital photography, from the earliest vocalizations and songs to Adobe Audition, from archaic scratches of signs and ancient libraries to modern screens and servers, from co-narratives in childhood to national memories, we will study the co-evolution of media technologies and the possibilities of knowing, understanding, remembering. How are speech, inscription, writing, narrative, and storytelling fundamental to the manifold ways of understanding self, world and time?
CM1099 Memory Lab is a lab-based exploration of the evolution of human communication technologies and practices in parallel with social, cultural, political and psychodynamic developments. We will study the nature of communication in different times, places and cultures, retracing the rise of oral and literate cultures, the development of writing, printing, imaging and recording and the emergence of transmission technologies and digital media. How have emergent technologies and forms of mediation contributed to human communication and to our conception of self and civil society? How have communication and media forms expanded human capacities to build, shape, change and know not only our worlds, but also to know ourselves? From communications and cultural studies perspectives, students will work in a ‘memory lab’ in order to work with and create ‘tools of memory.’ We will trace the historical, cultural and technological evolutions of intensely creative ‘mediated places’ from Paleolithic caves in the South of France to digital
Learning Outcomes
- Information Literacy: Students will comprehend how information is produced and valued in order to discover, evaluate, use, and create information and knowledge effectively and ethically. In FirstBridge, students will demonstrate the conversational nature of scholarship, and recognize their potential role and responsibilities as contributors to that conversation. For each discipline taught in FirstBridge, students will identify reference works, journals, databases and/or major works in history, in order to start effective research in the field (FB LO1)
- Life at University: Students will acquire the study skills, time management, and interpersonal skills needed to meet the demands of university-level academic work at a Liberal Arts College individually or as a team. Students will value the multiple meanings of place through experiential learning at AUP and beyond in the Parisian or global context (FB LO2)
- Understand the role of symbol in the construction and communication of memory and visual
- Acquire awareness of communications and media history and their relationship to the development of personal and social memory
- Acquire a critical awareness of the social, political and cultural roles and impacts media can have in the social practices of making collective memory
- Develop an understanding, from media artifacts, select readings, lectures and in-class discussions, of the way in which the history of human mediated communication has been studied, including how the main phases of media emergence and, in particular, how the role of technologies in shaping communication and memory have been theorized
- Aesthetic Inquiry and Creative Expression: Students will engage with artistic or creative objects (e.g., visual art, theatrical works, film) in different media and from a range of cultural traditions (CCI LO2)
- Exploring and Engaging Difference: Students will think critically about cultural and social difference; they will identify and understand power structures that determine hierarchies and inequalities that can relate to race, ethnicity, gender, nationhood, religion, or class (CCI LO3)
Syllabus
Schedule
| Day | Start Time | End Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
Monday | 13:45 | 15:05 | C-102 |
Thursday | 13:45 | 15:05 | C-102 |