The Carsey-Wolf Center for Film, Television, and New Media'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.
