Certificate Program in Culture and Media

The Departments of Anthropology and Cinema Studies offer a joint course of study, integrated with graduate work in either of those departments, leading to the Advanced Certificate in Culture and Media. Core faculty are Professor Faye Ginsburg, director of the Program in Culture and Media; Assistant Professors Tejaswini Ganti and Noelle Stout of the Department of Anthropology; and Professor Robert P. Stam and Associate Professor Jonathan Kahana of the Department of Cinema Studies.

The certificate program, open to students who are enrolled in the Ph.D. program in anthropology specializing in the sociocultural track, provides a focused course of graduate studies integrating production with theory and research. Training in this program will enable students to pursue the following:

1. Production of work in state-of-the-art digital video based on their own research, resulting in a half-hour documentary.
2. Ethnographic research into the uses and meanings of media in a range of communities and cultures, from radio to low-format video, from digitally streamed work to cinema industries. Students from the program have been doing Ph.D. research on the development of media in diverse settings, from the development of indigenous media in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Paraguay, to the free software movement in France, to the circulation of religious media in Northern Nigeria, to the use of media in linking the Tibetan diaspora.
3. Teaching the history, theory, and production of ethnographic documentary and related issues in cinema and media studies.
4. A career in media requiring an understanding of anthropology, such as specialized programming and distribution of ethnographic film and video, community-based documentary production, management of ethnographic film/video libraries and archives, or work in digital media.

The program’s philosophy takes a broad approach to the relationships between culture and media in a number of domains including a critical approach to ethnographic film’s significance for the fields of anthropology and cinema/ media studies; problems in representation of cultures through media; the development of media in indigenous, diaspora, and non-Western communities; the emerging social and cultural formations shaped by new media practices; and the political economy shaping the production, distribution, and consumption of media worldwide.


CURRICULUM

The program requires approximately one additional semester beyond the M.A. degree and consists of an original project and eight courses, two of which may be counted toward the M.A. degree, two toward the Ph.D. Courses include seminars that critically address the history and theory of ethnographic film and issues in culture and media, production courses in film and/or video in the film school, cultural theory and the documentary, and electives on topics such as multiculturalism and the media or  Bollywood cinema. Students may not take courses in the culture and media program unless they are pursuing an M.A. or a Ph.D. in cinema studies or a Ph.D. in anthropology at NYU. Students with prior training in media may be able to substitute other courses from the extensive curriculum offered in cinema studies, anthropology, or media production—including other forms such as photography and new media.


INTERNSHIPS

The program also arranges supervised internships for course credit, tailored to individual research and professional interests. Students work in a variety of programming and production positions for institutions such as the Margaret Mead Film Festival, the Museum of the American Indian, the Asia Society, and the Jewish Museum.

The program works closely with the Center for Media, Culture, and History.