Media and Cultural Studies is a dynamic, newly-formed department at UCR bringing together a diverse group of faculty and students engaged in the critical analysis and related production of media and culture.

We aim to study how political economy and dominant ideologies condition the production and distribution, circulation and contestation, reception and appropriation of media and cultural texts.

Our students critically engage in major debates about social and environmental justice within both global and local contexts. They also learn through practicing creative interventions in media ecologies, for example, creative, documentary, and ethnographic video; photography; multimedia and digital production; and journalism. Media literacies are essential for the making of engaged global citizens, capable of moving flexibly between the applied and the critical, the professional and the scholarly, the empirical and the theoretical.