Since arriving at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1985, Sut Jhally has taught thousands of undergraduate and graduate students. He has been awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, and the student newspaper voted him “Best Professor.” At the undergraduate level he has mainly taught farge-enrollment courses. The lectures for those courses are available here as streaming video.
These courses can be taken for credit through the University Without Walls program
COMM 287: ADVERTISING AS SOCIAL COMMUNICATION
This course, examines the social, cultural, and economic significance of advertising in advanced consumer societies. The lectures were delivered in the Fall of 2023 and are accessible as streaming video. The course consists of 46 lectures organized into 3 parts.
Course Lectures
COMM 386: RACE, INEQUALITY & REPRESENTATION
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state on innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” (James Baldwin)
This course deals with issues of racial stratification and inequality in the United States, and the ways in which we understand them – the stories we tell ourselves about why the world is organized as it. It deals with both the reality of race as well as the way that reality is represented, and why, as a society, we refuse to seriously address its disastrous consequences. The course comprises 25 lectures and were filmed in Fall 2024.
Course Lectures
COMM 288: GENDER, SEX & REPRESENTATION
This course examin the relationship between commercialized systems of representation and the way that gender and sexuality are thought of and organized in the culture. In particular, we will look to see how commercial imagery impacts upon gender identity and the process of gender socialization. Central to this discussion will be the related issues of sexuality and sexual representation. The lectures were delivered in the Fall of 2022. The course comprises 28 lectures divided into 3 parts.
Course Lectures
COMM 289: MEDIA, PUBLIC RELATIONS & PROPAGANDA
This is a course about politics . Not electoral Politics of Democrats and Republicans, but the politics of how powerful interests can shape the world to reflect their priorities. We will be looking at how media, public relations and propaganda are used to limit the way that we are encouraged to think about the social arrangements we operate within. This is also a course about history, about how we have arrived at the present through a very particular path. The lectures were delivered in the Fall of 2021. The course is comprised of 50 lectures divided into 3 parts.
Course Lectures