Course Offerings by term

Taught as a directed study, this course enables senior students to assemble as a whole their own work for the Journalism Major in order to reflect, to evaluate, and to critique its coherence.

Topics vary by semester

This course examines the evolution of critical advertising and brand analysis with a particular emphasis on learning how people come to identify with and believe in brands. It includes an analysis of how brands work as systems for producing differences between themselves by creating imaginary possible worlds associated with brands. Students learn tools of semiotic and linguistic analysis in analyzing brands and how they relate to each other. Each student completes a communications audit of a brand examining all aspects of its communicative strategies from package design to employee behavior, clothing, architecture, and shop design. The course will also examine how branding now has extended beyond consumer brands to such areas as NGOs and politics (political parties as brands and politicians as brands).

This course aims for a critical practice of fashion communication. It relies on the principle of “learning by doing”: learning how to communicate fashion through writing, photography, film, digital and new media, exhibition curation, styling and performances. Training multi-skilled, innovative and critical fashion communicators of the twenty-first century but also professionals interested in questions of global fashion communication is the objective in response to the heterogenous and transitory professional field of fashion. Together, we will investigate the new conventions and challenges, processes and practices of twenty-first century media through lectures and workshops, presentations and projects, and the direct involvement with AUP ASM. The class will experientially explore different ways of communication fashion through writing (journalistic, academic, commercial, advertorial, informational), visual (photography, drawing, film, video, and television), material (styling and curating fashion- performative: fashion performance, dance), digital (digital media such as blogs and Instagram accounts, video, virtual reality, online fashion resources, virtual and 3D fashion shows).

At the end of the class, each student will have achieved a multimedia project on a specific topic of their choice made of a text, a film, a podcast, a photo... Each class will be part of the overall project.