Media serves as a powerful tool for recording, preserving, and interpreting historical events, shaping how societies understand the past. In turn, history provides context that influences media content, helping audiences critically analyze information and societal change.
This module examines how nineteenth-century evolutionary theory was reinterpreted, distorted, and weaponized into Social Darwinism, scientific racism, and eugenics, and how these pseudoscientific ideologies fed into modern racism, propaganda, and mass violence. Students will study the mechanisms by which ideas about human hierarchy were manufactured, legitimized through science and law, popularized through mass media and propaganda, and ultimately translated into policy, exclusion, and violence. The module culminates in a close, comparative study of genocide, with particular and sustained attention to the Genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994.