Looking for a Second 7-week Honors Course?

Looking for an additional one-credit Honors course? Consider this fall's second-seven week one-credit course:

HNRS 295H-001: Nature Media with Dr. Scott Selberg
Monday & Wednesday 3:00-3:50 pm

This course explores the history, theories, and generic conventions of nature or wildlife media. We will begin by studying the broad historical role of nature in American political and social life and its relationship with modernity. We will focus our inquiry on nature’s mediation in the 20th and early 21st centuries, examining key moments in the history of nature photography, television, and film. What is the role of this kind of media in constructing common sense ideas about nature’s aesthetics, values, or even what nature is? How does nature media help construct ideologies, politics, or practices of nature?

We will continue the course by exploring the genre’s relationship with documentary aesthetics and technologies, and we will learn how nature has been a key figure in other genres such as horror or westerns. Because we will look mostly at American popular culture, the course will focus on the genre’s relationship with American politics; how does the nature film intersect with gender, race, ethnicity, disability and social values like family and faith? What are its historical relationships with environmental activism, and how have the conventions of that activism changed along with changes in the media? By the end of the course, students can expect to develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing the genre and its role in civic, popular, and scientific culture.