Minor Meditations: Methods in Analysis

EAFM 210 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This methods seminar begins from a provocation: the most analytically decisive operations in media often occur in details that seem too minor to matter—subtitle lag, aspect ratios, interface behaviors, gestures held too long. Students learn to build portable concepts from such details through a structured protocol: identify what "misfits" its apparent context, interpret what that misfit does, form a concept, and test it collaboratively on maximally different objects. The method treats detail as where bodies, technologies, and infrastructures converge, offering a way to work across persistent impasses in media studies—infrastructure versus text, platform analysis versus close reading, area studies expertise versus media theory. Readings engage a range of media studies scholarship and philosophical texts, but the emphasis is practical and metacognitive: making analytical practice explicit and portable. Students work on media objects central to their own research; generative failures are valued as much as successes. Open to graduate students across programs. Enrollment capped at 12; brief application required. Intensive collaborative work is required