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Media Studies

Media Studies refers to the broad range of interdisciplinary subjects focusing on media culture and production.

About

Welcome to the Media Studies subject guide for Indiana University Bloomington

We're glad you're here. This guide contains information pertaining to the field of media studies. Here you'll find featured content, helpful resources and services for scholarsinstructional support informationresearch & writing tips, new titles, and recommended resources for media studies scholars. You will also find a list of campus & community resources relevant to film and media. For a description of what you'll find in each section of this guide, just hover over each item in the navigation menu on the left-hand side of this page; if you're using a mobile device, you'll also find a summary on each page.

The subject specialist and collection manager for this area is nicholae cline. If you would like to contact them, please use the profile box located on the left-hand side of this page. If you would like to request a purchase for our collections, you can use this form.

To learn more about who we are and the services we offer, including links to key general library services, take a look at the About Us page of this guide.

 


About Media Studies

Media Studies refers to the broad range of interdisciplinary subjects focusing on media culture and production. This may include media theory; game studies & design; communication & culture; telecommunications & communication science; media production, design, & aesthetics; mass media & popular culture; film & cinema studies, including the history & culture thereof; identity & representation; policy, copyright, and other legal frameworks; media ecology; journalism and the news, public relations and advertising, among many others. This subject area may also maintain commitments to sociocultural concerns relevant to information technology, such as the surveillance economy, social media, and other forms of technologically mediated interactions.

Media studies may and often does intersect with other fields, including philosophy, literary & social theory, art history & criticism, and cultural studies, et al.

This guide comprises resources and information relevant to students within the IU Media School, as well as those engaging with media, generally, in their research. Scholars of media often find themselves working with and across a variety frameworks, both regional and global; formats, both analog (filmvideocassettes/DVDs) and digital; and styles, from radio programming to movies, from television to video games, and beyond.

To learn more about the IU Media School, please visit their website.

Featured | Black Histories & Futures Month

In recognition and celebration of Black History Month this February, we have curated a selection of books, films, podcasts, and music that celebrate the voices, writing, lives, and history of Black people in America. This collection loosely centers around Blackness in media—aiming to highlight Black music, pop culture, television, and performance. In these selections you will find Black creators discussing the impact of media misrepresentation on Black masculinity, connections between Black music and culinary traditionsrest as a form of resistance, the history of Black performance in America, Black feminist sound, and ekphrastic Black & queer futures alongside a variety of other topics. We hope that you can utilize this collection alongside additional IU Library resources to recognize and celebrate the work of Black intellectuals, writers, poets, chefs, directors, and creators this February. 

Our collection is only a small sampling of texts. See below for additional reading lists:

About the Playlist

In addition to the resources we've gathered in this feature, we've also curated a sampling of music by black artists, across time and genre. To learn more about the deep and varied contributions of black musicians to the development of this medium, take a look at some of the resources we used to make this and other related playlists in the Sounds of Black History Month feature.

Note: To enjoy the playlist in full, click on the white Spotify icon in the upper-right corner of the playlist, and press the "like" (♡) button in the application to save.

Next Steps

National recognition months are a great opportunity to celebrate and participate in events and learning that honor the history of marginalized communities. We recognize, however, that these months, and the creation of resource guides, is only one small step in celebrating and recognizing the contributions of marginalized communities across America. We also recognize that reading books, engaging with films, and listening to music by Black creators is only one aspect of supporting Black communities. To engage more fully, consider supporting local Black-owned businesses, learning about the history and experiences of Black people in Bloomington and at IU, and supporting institutions at IU the are dedicated to Black students. Please see our feature on Local Black History for resources specific to Bloomington, Indiana. 

In particular, we would like to highlight the Celebrating Black Cinema series hosted by the Black Film Center & Archive, the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, and the City of Bloomington. See the full list of events on the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Calendar.

To explore more programming at IU, see below:

While Black History Month, as a formulation, often emphasizes history and the present (and thus maintains a retrospective focus), we acknowledge that there are many Black futures that we can dream, cultivate, and grow together. While we have highlighted a number of resources that imagine a different world, in the (or "a") future we hope to shift our focus to looking forward, with new features and resources that highlight what is possible.

If you'd like to engage more deeply with Black History Month through library resources, the IU Libraries Arts & Humanities department has created a number of resources and features to provide more holistic coverage of Black history:

For more poetry, explore the following curated lists:

Feature Films


Documentary Films


Episodes Highlighting Black Voices

Featured | The Sounds of Black History Month

In recognition and celebration of Black History Month in February, we have created a series of curated playlists designed to celebrate the voices, innovations, and influence of black artists and musicians across music history. 

The first in our series of playlists, titled “Masterpiece,” explores a variety of genres and musical movements traditionally recognized as being driven by black artistry and innovation, genres that provide a space for the voices of black artists to be heard and celebrated. This playlist focuses on key figures in pop, jazz, soul, funk, r&b, and hip hop, spanning from the mid-20th century to the present day.

In addition to this more general playlist, we also created three other playlists that offer deep dives into genres where black voices and influence are often obscured or overlooked: including rock music, celebrating black pioneers in punk, metal, and other rock music movements; folk and country, where black contributions to the evolution of folk and country music into popular culture is centered; and electronic, where we highlight key black contributors to the evolution of electronic music in all its many sub-genres.

Provided in tandem with these playlists are library and freely available resources to aid in the further exploration and celebration of black contributions to contemporary popular music and culture. 

Resources for Further Exploration

Beyond the Playlist

As with many of these national commemorations, one month is never enough time to fully honor and celebrate the history and culture of marginalized communities, let alone heal the legacies (and ongoing reality) of harm they've experienced. We recognize that there is much more to be done, that racism and anti-blackness can't be eliminated simply through the creation of resource guides, and that the work of realizing justice won't soon be over. But nevertheless, we keep trying, contributing how we can and building upon the efforts of those who came before us, and we continue to learn from and with one another.

If you'd like to engage more deeply with Black History Month, the IU Libraries Arts & Humanities department has created a number of interrelated resources and features to provide more holistic coverage of this remembering. You'll find those, below:

And for all things Black culture, you can never go wrong with the resources, services, and collections of the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Library.

For the other three playlists in our Black History Month feature we will focus on the voices and innovations of black artists in genres where they are often overlooked, or excluded. To start, we present here a curated list of Rock musicians and bands from the genre’s inception to the present day. Here, we illustrate and outline a handful of the black artists who drove the genre forward, keeping it fresh into the new decade, from rock, to punk, to metal, and back again.

Playlist Resources & Further Reading 

Continuing in our celebration of contributions and innovations by black artists to genres wherein their voices are often forgotten or overlooked, we present a curated playlist of black songs that have influenced and driven the sounds of folk and country music for over a hundred years.

Playlist Resources & Further Reading

Classical music in particular has long been dominated by the contributions of white men, despite the breadth and artistry of black composers from as early as the 19th century. In this playlist, we highlight compositions from across musical time to showcase the many ways black artists have explored and challenged the conventions of classical music.

Playlist Resources & Further Reading

Our final playlist in our Black History Month series explores the contributions and innovations made by black musicians in the rapidly evolving electronic music genre. While much debate exists over the true beginnings of music made entirely with electronic instruments, one thing that is certain is black artists have been at the forefront of exploring the capabilities of electronic compositions, pushing the types of music that can be created entirely with synthetic instruments to new heights with each decade.

Playlist Resources & Further Reading

Recent Additions

cover art for book, image links to catalog record for title

Critical Race Media Literacy

This volume offers deeper exploration and advancement of critical race media literacy, a concept which fuses the genres of media literacy and critical media literacy with critical race theory to bring a new and salient frame to the discussion of media literacy across all levels of education in today’s globalized, race-based, and media-saturated climate. Bridging the gap in research that has not addressed the ways in which media is a conduit of racial dialogue and ideology, the book brings together a diverse group of scholars that explore their perspectives on critical race media literacy as it is experienced from the interface and consumption of a variety of media texts and social phenomena. Topics addressed include news literacy, children’s literature, Black political movements, media protests, and ethnic rock—Critical Race Media Literacy addresses these topics within existing media literacy contexts to enhance media literacy scholarship and educational pedagogy. This book will provide a timely and important resource not only for scholars and students of media literacy and media education but also for educators working in diverse learning settings.

cover art for book, image links to catalog record for title

American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality Television

Far more than a building of brick and mortar, the prison relies upon gruesome stories circulated as commercial media to legitimize its institutional reproduction. Perhaps no medium has done more in recent years to both produce and intervene in such stories than television. This unapologetically interdisciplinary work presents a series of investigations into some of the most influential and innovative treatments of American mass incarceration to hit our screens in recent decades. Looking beyond celebratory accolades, Lee A. Flamand argues that we cannot understand the eagerness of influential programs such as OZ, The Wire, Orange Is the New Black, 13th,and Queen Sugarto integrate the sensibilities of prison ethnography, urban sociology, identity politics activism, and even Black feminist theory into their narrative structures without understanding how such critical postures relate to the cultural aspirations and commercial goals of a quickly evolving TV industry and the most deeply ingrained continuities of American storytelling practices.

All Media Studies Guides