Critical Media Practice
Secondary PhD Field in Critical Media Practice
The Graduate School in Arts and Sciences offers a Secondary Field degree in Critical Media Practice (CMP) for PhD students at Harvard who wish to integrate media production into their academic work. The CMP Secondary Field reflects changing patterns of knowledge production, and in particular that knowledge is increasingly incorporated into novel multi-media configurations in which written language plays only a part. Audiovisual media have a different relationship to, and reveal different dimensions of, the world from exclusively verbal sign systems. They are also inherently interdisciplinary, and frequently engage a broader public than the academy alone. Students interested in making original interpretive projects in image, sound, and/or emerging hypermedia technologies in conjunction with their written scholarship may wish to pursue the CMP Secondary Field. It offers training in production and postproduction in different media formats and genres, including documentary and ethnographic film and video; hypermedia, internet, and database projects; approaches to working with audio, including phonography, exhibition, and music composition; video and multimedia installation; and cognate genres.
Admission
Admission into the Critical Media Practice Secondary Field is by application, which must be submitted to the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. of the Film Study Center. Applications may be submitted twice a year, in the Spring semester (deadline, March 1) and the Fall semester (deadline, October 1). An admissions committee will meet, and the Directors of Graduate Studies in CMP will communicate with all applicants before the end of the semester in which they apply.
Requirements
Students must take four of the following courses, of which at least 2 (but up to 4) must be drawn from the Core. They must complete all 4 courses with grades of B+ or above. Additionally, CMP students produce a “capstone” media project in conjunction with their doctoral dissertation.
Core: Students must take at least 2 of the following courses:
ANTH 2835r
Sensory Ethnography 1: Image/Sound/Culture
ANTH 2836r
Sensory Ethnography 2: Living Documentary
EALC 200
The Uses and Meaning of the New Arts of Presentation
GSD 3418/ANTH 2837/VES 162
Media Archaeology of Place
HISTSCI 252
Filming Science
HISTSCI 290
Critical Images, Object, Media
VES 350r
Critical Media Practice
Any VES Film/Video Production class
Electives:
Up to 2 of the required 4 courses may be drawn from the following list, so long as, and explicitly with the instructor’s approval, the student submits an original work of media in partial satisfaction of the course requirements. Elective course offerings vary from year to year, and will be updated on the CMP website. Current electives include:
AAAS 182 R&B, Soul and Funk
ANTH 2635 Image/Media/Publics
ANTH 2830 Creative Ethnography
ANTH 2688 The Frankfurt School, Film, and Popular Culture
EALC 205 Approaches to the Comparative History of Medicine and the Body
ES 20 How to Create Things and Have Them Matter
GSD 4351 Architecture and Film
GSD 3496 The Moment of the Monument
GSD 4424 Fifteen Things
GSD 4426 The Spectacle Factory
GSD 4353 Imagining the City: Literature, Film, and the Arts
HISTSCI 126 The Matter of Fact: Physics in the Modern Age
MUSIC Electroacoustic Composition
MUSIC 201b Current Methods in Ethnomusicology
MUSIC 209 Seminars in Ethnomusicology
MUSIC 167 Introduction to Electroacoustic Music
VES 285x Visual Fabrics
Capstone:
Building on their training in their course work, students produce a media project that complements their doctoral dissertation. As with the PhD in Media Anthropology offered by the Department of Anthropology (http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~anthro/grad_media.htm), it may consist of a video, a film, a sound work, a series of photographs, a work of hypermedia, or an exhibition or performance in which digital media play a key role. A faculty committee of 2 will be appointed by the CMP DGS to evaluate the project. One member will be drawn from the CMP Faculty Advisory Committee, and one from the student’s dissertation committee. One copy (or, in the case of capstone projects involving site-specific exhibition or performance, documentation) of this project must be formally submitted in conjunction with the dissertation, and another copy archived with the Film Study Center.
Record-Keeping
GSAS students admitted to the CMP Secondary Field must provide a transcript of their course work at the end of each semester in which they fulfill any of the curricular requirements of the CMP degree to the Office Manager, Film Study Center. In addition, once a student has satisfied all requirements of the degree, s/he must submit to the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , Film Study Center evidence of their successful participation in four appropriate graduate courses as well as a copy of their capstone project. Once they obtain the approval of the DGS they and the registrar will receive certification of successful completion of CMP secondary field requirements.
Technical Support and Resources
Technical support for the CMP capstone project is provided by the Film Study Center, the Sensory Ethnography Lab, and FAS Media and Technology Services, all of which maintain an inventory of audio, video, and hypermedia production and post-production equipment. Additionally, two locations on campus offer computer workstations with basic video and audio software, which are open to all Harvard students, and which CMP students may also use when editing their capstone projects. The Harvard-MIT Data Center, with two rooms in CGIS South, includes three Mac Pro workstations with Final Cut Studio and Logic Pro software installed. In Lamont Library, the MTS Multimedia Lab has both PC and Mac-based video editing stations equipped with hardware such as DV and VHS decks, and audio stations which, in addition to postproduction editing, also allow digitization of analog sources such as cassette and LP.
Contact Information
Film Study Center ( web; phone: 617-495-9704)
Harvard University
24 Quincy St.
Cambridge MA 02138
CMP Directors of Graduate Studies and Faculty Advisory Committee
Peter Galison (History of Science) and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (Anthropology and Visual & Environmental Studies) serve as Directors of Graduate Studies for the CMP Secondary Field.
The Faculty Advisory Committee of CMP consists of:
Lucien Castaing-Taylor John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences; Director, Film Study Center; Director, Sensory Ethnography Lab
David Edwards, Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Biomedical Engineering
Howard Gardner, John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Graduate School of Education
Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor
Ernst Karel, Lecturer on Anthropology; Associate Director, Film Study Center; Manager, Sensory Ethnography Lab
Robin Kelsey, Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography, Director, Harvard University Committee on the Arts
Shigehisa Kuriyama, Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History; Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Martha Minow, Dean of the Faculty of Law
Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African-American Music
Robb Moss, Rudolf Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking, Department of Visual and Environmental Studies
Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean of Graduate School of Design, Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design
Jeffrey Schnapp, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures; Faculty Director, metaLAB (at) Harvard
Hans Tutschku Fanny P. Mason Professor of Music and Director of the Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition