Global Education and Field Study
New York - FM200 - Politics, Film, Culture
BLOCK 7 - SPRING 2027
FM200: New York: Politics, Film, and Culture
NEW YORK CITY
An exploration of New York City through a survey of its political history and its representation on film. Excursions include a walking tour of Harlem, a bus tour of Manhattan, a Broadway show, screenings at local theaters, and visits to major museums (Met, Museum of the City of New York, Transit Museum, Tenement Museum), and more.
This course offers an introduction to major topics in the political history of New York City in the modern era, or what we will generally refer to as capitalist modernity. Major advancements in science, technology, transportation, architecture combined with nearly unfettered capitalist growth to build much of the city as we still experience it today. Such “advancements” were built upon the labor, struggle, segregation, and displacement of the city’s majority populations, who were often uncredited for their contributions or blamed as scapegoats for any of the city’s endemic social problems.
We are especially interested in how the city has been imagined throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, often in contradictory or antagonistic ways. The physical landscape of the city and its complex infrastructure cannot be understood separate from such abstract, seemingly immaterial, dimensions of modernist utopianism, capitalist profit motives, ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual oppression/resistance. How the city exists or operates is never wholly separate from how it is imagined, perceived, or interpreted.
Course led by Prof. Scott Krzych
Report an issue -
Last updated: 06/26/2026