Media Studies classes for exchange students

Environmental messages permeate everyday life—from climate news and environmental activism to debates over waste, energy, and policy. This media theory course introduces students to the major theoretical frameworks that shape the study of environmental communication. We will trace the development of the field and examine how it intersects with related areas such as crisis communication, science and health communication, political communication, and gender studies. Through these lenses, the course explores how environmental issues are communicated and contested across interpersonal and organizational settings, legacy and social media, and within the broader public sphere. Students will learn analytical tools for critically examining how media and communication practices shape environmental knowledge, power relations and political action.

This course explores how media can be strategically used to influence public policy and drive systemic change. Blending theory with practical exercises, students will examine how advocates, activists, and social movements leverage media to shape public opinion and influence decision-makers. Through academic texts, case studies, and hands-on projects, the course investigates: The definition and strategies of media advocacy; how media is used in policy and social change efforts; the role of journalism in advocacy and its limitations; the impact (both positive and negative) of media coverage; and comparative perspectives from U.S. and global contexts. Students will critically analyze real-world campaigns and design their own media advocacy initiatives. Ideal for those interested in public policy, communications, and activism, the course highlights how various actors—governments, NGOs, corporations, and others—use media alongside tools like legislation, litigation, and lobbying to effect change.

The mainstreaming of far-right movements in recent decades can be partly attributed to their strategic use of digital platforms. Political communication increasingly takes place online, where the fast-paced nature of digital communication has provided particularly fertile ground for far-right normalization. Memes have become a central format for this kind of messaging, combining text and (affective) visuals, while disguising political narratives behind humour and irony in ways that resist easy interpretations. This layered, often deliberately ambiguous nature poses methodological challenges, calling for flexible approaches when studying such content. In this seminar, we will focus on quantitative methods of (multimodal) content analysis and practice these with case studies under the broader theme of far-right meme culture and online political communication. Given the nature of the material, questions of research ethics and researcher wellbeing will be actively addressed throughout. Over the course of the semester, students will develop and conduct their own quantitative study (in small groups), applying the methodological tools covered in the seminar; and the resulting findings will be submitted as a final paper.

This seminar is designed to familiarize participants with the process of creating an explainer video by working through the individual stages of production. Participants will develop and produce their own explainer video based on a topic assigned during the seminar. In collaboration with the seminar instructor, each step of the process will be developed, from researching a topic, writing the script and creating the storyboard to completing the final video. The explainer videos will be produced in small groups.

Everyone can animate! This is an introductory course which includes learning different types of animation such as flipbook, stop motion, and motion graphics. The course is based on understanding the 12 basic principles of animation, by the Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life. The main objective of the course is to find the type of animation you enjoy making, through class exercises, games, and experimentation.