This course is designed to provide a conceptual tool-kit for comparative media studies within a global context. At a time of unprecedented media convergence, certain critical frameworks through which media has been studied, e. g. “medium,” “form” and “structure,” are in need of re-evaluation. With a particular emphasis on the global south, the course will compare not media per se but theories of what media is and does in different geopolitical contexts. Despite the quotidian criticality of media and mediation in the global south, media is still theorized through frameworks and categories that have emerged in the global north. These frameworks are either applied to apprehend and analyze media events and histories in southern contexts that provide the “raw” material for applying theoretical tools developed elsewhere or else the south is imagined as that domain of experience where theory meets its limits only to reassert its primacy through a focus on the philosophical abstractions that allow media archives or media events to become legible. This course will challenge this geo-political divide between north and south in Media Studies by exploring the various theories of media emanating from the global south, where the phrase “global south” is not only a matter of geography but also applied to disenfranchised spaces and populations within the global north—ghettoes, slums, refugee enclaves, etc. The course will explore, in a historical frame, theoretical concepts that have emerged in the global south—concepts that expand, revise, and repudiate some of the key tenets of northern theory. Topics covered will include media archaeology, infrastructure, ecology and piracy.