In 1919, The New School opened its doors to all "intelligent men and women" committed to studying the "grave social, political, economic, and educational problems of the day." The university's historical commitment to the arts and progressive education, combined with its activist mission, draws students and faculty who are committed to social change and the creative means to incite it. Media are tools for change, and the MA program in Media Studies offers many courses that examine how media have been employed in building communities, promoting reform, and creating awareness of today's grave problems, and courses that prepare students to create transformative media.

The curriculum in media management is designed to teach students to tackle the challenges posed by new and emerging media technologies and evolving corporate structures. Students are trained in key areas of communication and convergence in the 21st century. Courses address industry perspectives, media management and leadership, media economics, information technologies, competitive strategies, and corporate responsibility. Students can take individual courses in this focus area, or they can complete 12 credits and a synthesis paper and receive a graduate Certificate in Media Management in addition to the master's degree. Students who complete the certificate curriculum gain in-depth experience analyzing and writing case studies and leading and participating in group projects. They are mentored by the program's distinguished faculty members and build networks with their peers.

In recent decades, scholars and practitioners of urban studies, art history, architecture, urban planning, sociology, and anthropology have paid greater attention to the role of media in planning and designing urban areas and the impact of media on cityscapes and city dweller experiences. At the same time, scholars of media and communication studies have taken more interest in urban communication. This convergence of interests between media studies and design, between the university and urban contexts, makes The New School an ideal place and now an ideal time to investigate the relationship of urban studies and media studies and how these fields interact with the city itself. In Media and the Urban Environment focus area, students and faculty together explore how

• media and the urban environment interact
• media represent the city
• urban spaces "mediate" their functions and identities
• people communicate and use and make media within the city's spaces
• media technologies inform the design of space
• media connect cities and the people in them
• media contribute to the imaging and re-imaging, the sounding and resounding, the mapping and navigating that lead to the betterment of cities.

This focus area incorporates existing courses and new service-learning initiatives and draws on the resources of the other divisions of The New School and the resources of New York City as our urban laboratory.

New York is a global city, and The New School is a global university. The media we create are disseminated around the world, and the media we consume reach us from the far corners of the earth. Therefore, Media Studies emphasizes internationalism as part of its program. Partnering with the university's graduate program in International Affairs, the program offers a selection of courses on international media. Each semester, several courses of the Milano School's graduate program in International Affairs are cross-listed in Media Studies. Students are also encouraged to look at other related International Affairs courses and those of the university's other graduate programs as well.

The New School's history of social and political engagement and New York's inexhaustible supply of people, places, and events to document make the Media Studies program an ideal place to study documentary media. Students focusing in Documentary Studies explore the art and history of the documentary and investigate and help shape its evolving forms. In media methods and media practice courses, students create their own documentaries in a variety of formats—audio, video, web-based, and multi-format.

In the contemporary media landscape, film as an idea and practice has entered into complex "hybrid" relations with other media forms. The School of Media Studies offers students a critical and creative ways of approaching this topic. Seminars and workshops explore subjects and themes related to film history and aesthetics, and others offer a more interdisciplinary approach. For students who wish to focus on issues specific to the theory and practice of filmmaking, the program offers this sequence of five courses (15 credits). In the first three classes, students engage with the conceptual and expressive parameters of film through a mixture of seminars on aesthetics and hands-on experiments in labs and workshops. In the final two courses, students take practical and theoretical knowledge and skills a step further, developing a 15 to 20-minute final project to be shot on 16mm film or digital video. This project may, with permission and supervision of an adviser, be submitted as part of the student's thesis project.

One might say that Sound Studies is in the DNA of The New School and its radical pedagogy: Hanns Eisler, Aaron Copland, and John Cage were members of our faculty, and The New School auditorium (since named the John L. Tishman Auditorium) was a prototype of the modern acoustics of Radio City Music Hall. Whether in music or in conjunctions with dance, architecture, and film, various engagements with sound have been informed by the critical and socially engaged thinking of The New School. Given the university's rich history of sound scholarship and production and its location in New York City (home to a vibrant music scene and the many of the world's largest media companies as well as to a polluted acoustic ecology, the plague of most metropolitan areas), The New School is favorably situated to engender progressive, interdisciplinary research, teaching, and practice in the field of acoustic environments. MA students who focus their program on Sound Studies and Acoustic Environments take six courses: Fundamentals of Sound Studies, two audio production courses, and three sound seminar electives. Through this complement of courses, students realize in praxis and through cross-divisional collaboration the radical ideals of The New School's founders.

Media practice cultivates understanding and proficiency with design and production. This curriculum is based on students conceiving real projects, developing individual design approaches, and utilizing the technical tools to create them. The courses present media production formats as tools of communication (means to the end of creating aural and visual messages) rather than promoting the mastery of particular equipment and software as sufficient ends in themselves. Instruction in Media Practice courses frames the necessary technical training within the context of design and production conceptualization and research. It also promotes a cross-platform or comparative approach: students discover how processes and tools translate within and between media formats. In the process, they achieve understanding of and proficiency with the aesthetic and technical capabilities of each production medium, explore the interrelationships and interdependencies between them, and create work from start to finish. Media Project courses provide experiences and challenges that go beyond the Media Practice courses, requiring students who've attained a level of proficiency in a particular format to apply their skills and aesthetics to more complex media messages. Cameras, microphones, audio recorders, and other production tools are provided. Digital image production and all post-production can be done on university digital editing workstations with appropriate current software. In-class listening/viewing, analysis and critique, and assigned readings provide support and context for production work.