4 courses with the subject MDS, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
MDS 4600The Rhetoric of Social Media
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits Drawing upon the reading, writing, speaking, and research skills developed in the Liberal Arts and Sciences Foundation and Intermediate Courses, in this intensive seminar students will turn a rhetorical eye towards the ever-evolving world of social media. While our personal uses of various social media platforms will be up for discussion, this course asks students to take a deeper look at the structures of power involved in everything from memes used to brighten someone’s day to large campaigns and avenues for cultural and social change. Through course readings, in-class discussion, and both primary and secondary research, students will critique the rhetorical functions and effectiveness of various issues in social media. We will review key terms from Babson’s foundational writing courses (see especially discourse communities, audience, conventions, ethics, circulation), deepen our understanding of how such terms developed, and make connections amongst what we’re seeing around us today (think: from Aristotle to Ariana Grande). In order to achieve a deeper understanding of the rhetoric of social media, this course will be split into fo units: (1) Social Media Histories; (2) Social Media Discourse Communities; (3) Social Media and [Fake] News; and (4) and Social Media Futures. Each unit will challenge students both analytically and creatively.
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits To interview means literally to see (view) each other (inter). As media from paintings to pixels have emerged and proliferated over the past decades & centuries, so too have the means by which we see/read/hear one another, giving rise to a whole range of transmedia interview genres: news interviews, celebrity interviews, athlete interviews, political interviews, press conferences, podcasts, talk shows, and storytelling interview methods like documentaries, mockumentaries, reality TV, etc. These stand shoulder-to-shoulder with more time-test interview genres, like surveys, polls, focus groups, job interviews, police interviews, court testimony, and so on. In this class, which merges media studies, genre studies, and professional communication, we will uncover what is essential to each of these interview genres and to them all by experiencing the many roles of the ‘interverse:’ we will participate as observers--readers, watchers, listeners--but also meanwhile as doers—interviewers, interviewees, microphone positioners, camera operators, stenographers, question designers, video editors, and so on. What we will find is that a conversation always involves more than speaking & listening, and that seeing and being seen often create pathways to new futures. Arts Courses (HSS, LTA, CSP) Credits 4 Babson College Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
4 Advanced Liberal Arts Credits Wilderness is disappearing faster than ever due to humans’ radical transformation of the earth. Yet, consumer cultures have developed an ever so strong desire for the wild. In the industries that sell “Wildness”, media have played a large role in telling it, showing it, measuring it, and manufacturing it. This course focuses on the ideologies, discourses, and technologies that mediate between contemporary consumers and the disappearing Wildness. We will explore a variety of cultural phenomena including the usage of smart phones, selfie sticks, and Go Pros in ecotourism, backpacking cultures, and outdoor adventure sports industries, the appropriation of drones and GPS-tracking devices by environmentalists, wildlife poachers, and virtual/augmented reality game designers, the trending of the “wild food” diet and the NGO campaigns protesting it, as well as the adoption of sound recordings of wild landscapes as new age music therapies. This course incorporates a multicultural and “multinatural” view to look at technology’s role in representing, mediating, and recreating nature. We also address difficult ethical questions such as: How to maintain a proper distance with the Wild? Should we tame it, save it and thereby annihilating it? Or should we leave it on its own terms, and thereby letting it live or die?
