Fall Semester, 2009: Visual Media, Technology & Health (PH 770)

I'm playing around with the title of this blog as I gear up for another semester of teaching the graduate course, "Visual Media, Technology & Health (PH 770)" at Hunter.

In the class, we see a lot of health-related documentaries, read a lot of critiques of those documentaries, and contemplate how documentaries are converging in interesting ways with new media, particularly when it comes to health and health campaigns.

Here's the course description:

Visual media – TV, documentary films, and YouTube - affect how we think about health, public health, illness and the body.


The Internet, once primarily a text-only medium, is increasingly a visual medium where people go to seek out TV shows, documentary films and shorter videos created especially for the web. And, content created specifically for television and movie theaters today typically includes a web-based component that allows interaction with audiences of various kinds. The overlap and coming together of different forms of media is what scholar Henry Jenkins as referred to as “convergence culture.” A significant portion of this visual content in this convergence culture deals with individual and public health, illness and the body.


Visual messages are increasingly the format of choice for communicating message about health. For example, when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Institute of Drug Addiction (NIDA), wanted to get out a public health message that drug addiction is “a brain disease” they partnered with cable-television company HBO (and a dozen or so documentary filmmakers) to create the “Addiction,” (HBO, 2007). The launch of the documentary television series also included a push for viewers to log on to the companion website to access addiction services.


This course will explore a set of questions related to these new trends, including: What does this convergence culture mean for public health messaging in the 21st century? What do the particular kinds of visual images suggest about the social meanings of health, illness and the body? How are political contestations about ‘science’ and ‘truth’ engaged through visual media, particularly on the web? What are the possibilities for social transformation (or retrenchment) using Internet technology and visual images? What constitutes an ‘audience’ in the Internet age? And, how might researchers who seek to evaluate such interventions design effective evaluations?


In this course, students will watch and learn to critically evaluate health-focused documentary films through a series of related peer-reviewed articles. Students will also meet a number of people who work in the field(s) of documentary film, human rights and health that will speak about how visual media and technology influences their approach to their work. And, students will get basic hands-on experience in creating their own visual media. At the end of this course, each student will have a completed a short, health-related video and uploaded it to YouTube.

 I started out the semester distributing Flip cameras to all the students and I'll create a YouTube channel for the class to upload their works in progress there.   I'll post links here to that channel as it begins to be populated with content.