Courses in the FIG:
UGST 109 FIG Seminar
TIME | BUILDING | CRN | 1 Credit
Frames of Mind: Disability and the Media invites you to rethink how ability, mental health, and identity are portrayed — and misrepresented — across mass media.
You'll build critical media literacy skills while exploring how film, journalism, advertising, and pop culture shape public understanding of disability and mental health. We’ll connect ideas from Introduction to Disability Studies and Making Sense of Media through small group discussions, guest speakers, and short media screenings.
No prior background in disability studies or media analysis is needed — just a curiosity about the world around you and a willingness to engage with new perspectives! This FIG is open to all majors and welcomes students interested in advocacy, storytelling, media studies, social justice, healthcare, and education.
Throughout the term, we’ll reflect on representation, stigma, storytelling, and the possibilities for social change — sharpening both your critical thinking and your sense of community at UO.
JCOM 201 Making Sense of Media
Social Science (>2)| TIME | BUILDING | CRN | 4 Credits
Nearly every facet of human life today—work, play, study, relationships, and more—involves media. This course examines how this came to be, why it matters that media are so thoroughly infused in our lives individually and collectively, and how we can become more thoughtful and engaged media consumers and creators. Making sense of media means grappling with the social, cultural, economic, interpersonal, and political implications of this current moment: one in which people have increasingly expansive and near-instantaneous access to an abundance of information—social media, entertainment, games, news, and more—in a way that is unprecedented in the history of communication technologies. Media consumption has been transformed, but so has media production: People can create and disseminate their own content, receive and share files, and closely monitor the activities of friends and others. At the same time, networked communication platforms have forged new relationships between institutions and individuals and between social movements, states, and corporations. Over the course of the term, we will explore some key transformations in media over the past century, paying close attention to the interplay of meaning and power and the way media contributes to both shaping our identities and facilitating self-expression. We will also explore the rise and development of media professions, and examine some of the central tensions in the media world today: How can we tell whom or what to trust via media? What does verification look like in a world of fakes and misinformation? And how can we avoid being fooled by the use of numbers, data, and visualizations? In all, this course will equip students with a foundation in media literacy for the 21st century.
ENG 240 Introduction to Disability Studies
Arts & Letters (>1)| >US | TIME | BUILDING | CRN | 4 Credits
ENG 240 Introduction to Disability Studies serves as a core course for the Disability Studies Minor and an elective for the English major. The course also satisfies General Education requirements for the Arts and Letters Group and the Identity, Pluralism, and Tolerance category of the Multicultural Requirement. Students will gain familiarity with key concepts and essential texts in the field of disability studies and apply these concepts to literary texts, performances, and the culture around us. Upholding the disability rights movement’s principle of “nothing about us without us,” students learn about disability from the art forms and scholarship of the people who experience it. To show the variety of disability experiences, ENG 240 includes work by people from diverse races and cultures and a spectrum of physical, sensory, psychological, and intellectual disabilities, neurodiversity, and chronic illnesses. The course takes an intersectional approach, analyzing the new dimensions that come into focus when we consider more than one form of difference at a time. ENG 240 acquaints students with key moments in disability history and considers their impact on the present day, especially their cultural impact: How do oppressed communities respond creatively to barriers and remake the past through art? How does disability history reappear in popular culture and stereotypes?