Matthew Schneider-Mayerson

Dissertation research for PhD candidates. Repeatable for Credit.

This course joins the ongoing effort to make sense of how humans have reshaped the planet and its ecosystems. It does so by focusing on how a key concept, the Anthropocene, has journeyed from the geological sciences to a wide array of disciplines and audiences. We’ll explore how historians, critics, philosophers, journalists, scientists, activists, poets, novelists, filmmakers, and others are finding new ways to talk about how we got here and how we might contend with the possible futures that await us. We’ll hone new skills for reading, writing, and thinking about changing environments. And together we’ll imagine the kind of communities we might create in response to a warming world.

In the Critical Media Lab, students advance the critical study of media and politics as part of research teams under the direction of a rotating roster of instructors of record. Students and the instructor work together to research a media problem and to produce and disseminate new scholarship, for instance in the form of articles, podcasts, or video. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the empirical study of how representations of climate change affect audience perceptions and how media genres adapt to new constellations of activist discourse. *Students wish to repeat the class for credit should do so with a different instructor and on a different topic.* Repeatable for Credit.

Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) research at Rice. Undergraduate students spend at least 3 hours per week engaged in research on a VIP team for each semester hour of credit, in addition to other requirements. Instructor permission required. Prior to enrollment, students must secure a position on a VIP team. Repeatable for Credit.