Course Offerings

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.

Topics for these intensive, practical modules change every semester. May be taken twice for credit.

The course focuses on place branding and its role in destination marketing, civil society development, public and political diplomacy and social and environmental sustainability. Topics include: travel and globalization; branding and competitive identity; heritage, memory and ecological tourism; mediated travel involving photography, mobile phones, social media; media and cinema inspired travel; food cultures; and the drive to experience and communicate "other spaces."