This course offers students a rigorous exploration of media theories and histories from a global, comparative perspective. It examines how media systems, texts, and technologies have constructed, circulated, and contested images of "the East" and "the West" - and the power relations embedded in those constructions. The course is grounded in global media theory and cross-cultural representation studies, interrogating how binary frameworks of East/West, Self/Other, and centre/periphery have shaped media representation, circulation, and reception across diverse cultural, political, and geographical contexts.

Topics that students will engage critically may include, but are not limited to:  global media flows, media convergence, and the politics of cultural representation; the relationship between media technologies, culture, and geopolitical imagination; creative social movements and their transnational circulation; local, national, regional, and global media cultures beyond the East-West divide; Orientalist and Occidentalist discourses in film, television, and digital media; and audience study across unequal cultural landscapes. Key thinkers such as Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Richard Dyer, Xiaomei Chen, and Henry Jenkins, among others, serve as intellectual anchors for broader global conversations about power, identity, and representation.

Through weekly readings, in-class lectures and screenings, group discussions and presentations, and individual written assignments, students will develop the analytical vocabulary and critical sensibility necessary to situate their own scholarly work within larger global media histories and theoretical frameworks. The course also addresses pressing contemporary issues-including media sovereignty, the global creative cultural industry, and the persistence and transformation of identity politics in digital economy-encouraging students to connect historical analysis with current debates. By the end of the course, students will be equipped to think comparatively, critically, and creatively about media's role in shaping-and being shaped by-global power structures, cultural imaginaries, and the modern world.