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Overview
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Teaching Film, Television, and New Media
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Public Film Programs
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Laboratories for Teaching & Research
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Production
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Conversation & Collaboration
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Advisory Board
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Affiliated Faculty |
The
Center’s mission is based on the philosophy that film,
television, and new media are best studied in the context
of a rigorous and broad-based liberal arts and sciences
education. Although UCSB faculty conduct field-transforming
research and are among the leading specialists in their
fields, what separates our program from schools that focus
on pre-professional training is an approach that grounds
students in the liberal arts and sciences.
From our Film
& Media Studies Department, students gain an
understanding of the history, theory, and practice of
film, from the arts of story-telling and visual representation
to their contemporary manifestations and technologies.
From our
Communication
Department, students learn about the uses, social
effects and contexts of mass media and new media, as
well as the methodologies used to analyze them with
rigor. The Center also brings together faculty and
students from a wide variety of departments including Women's
Studies, Black
Studies, Sociology,
Political
Science, English,
Art
Studio, Media
Arts and Technology, Dramatic
Art, Spanish
and Portuguese, Computer
Science, Psychology,
Law
and Society, Education,
Bren
School of Environmental Science & Management and Environmental
Studies.
We take our mission as a public research university very
seriously: the Center will serve as a bridge between the
university and the industries and society that it studies.
The Pollock Film Theater will provide a space in which
the community can enter the university and take advantage
of the Center’s special public programming.
We hope that we are preparing leaders for the future,
but our real focus is on preparing students to be citizens
in the 21st century. In the Information Age, in which
conventional forms of communication are changing, in which
media and entertainment and new “knowledge industries”
are changing the ways in which we interact and even know
the world, literacy is more important than ever.
This is a moment when we need to draw upon the inquiry,
knowledge, and understanding represented by the liberal
arts. This can help us to make sense of the past, come
to terms with the present, and shape the future. We need
citizens with skills of critical analysis, knowledge of
the histories and fictions that define both self and other
in the modern world, and a vision of the world before
us. Global challenges, as well as our increasing cultural
diversity at home, necessitate the knowledge of the past
and the comparative methods of interpretation that the
humanities and social sciences can teach us.
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