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Media Studies is both an interdisciplinary department at Â鶹ӰÊÓ and an intercollegiate program at The Claremont Colleges. The Media Studies Major brings together not only a wide range of different skills and methodologies but also different college cultures and values, resulting in an equal variation in learning goals within different areas of our curriculum. Despite different paths that students may follow to complete the major, however, we expect all Media Studies majors to:

1. Gain knowledge of the historical development of media forms—including but not limited to film, video, television, Internet, and digital text, and the parallel development of critical approaches to studying these media.
2. Explore the interactions of mediated communication with the structures of society and the self.
3. Analyze the historical, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts within which a mediated text is produced, distributed, and read, including the institutional, industrial, and national or regional conditions of its production and reception.
4. Analyze mediated texts with attention to the technological specificity of their medium, to their formal and generic construction, and to the broader intermedial movement of texts and ideas.
5. Understand and analyze the relationship between critical theory and media texts, practices, and industries and critical theory.
6. Conduct original research by finding, reading, and assessing appropriate sources for the support of an idea, and place their own analyses into conversation with a field of work.
7. Write creatively, analytically, interpretatively, and argumentatively in a range of mediated formats, including the traditional academic essay, as well as more contemporary visual and networked forms, demonstrating an understanding of the rhetorical features specific to the medium.
8. Develop an awareness of media studies as an emerging discipline, with attention to the history of the field, but with an equal sense of the ways that the field is continuing to grow and develop.