What is true crime, and why are we fascinated by tales of murder and detective stories? How might one crime case become a sensational story, a front-page article, a mainstream film, or the cover of a popular magazine, while another is ignored? How does true crime influence the public’s perception of crime and society? This course invites students to analyze true crime as a multiplatform genre and a form of infotainment and to consider the impacts of these sometimes inaccurate, biased, and sensationalized media narratives. Working across different media formats (e.g. movies, TV shows, documentaries, newspapers, artworks, songs, podcasts, and social media), students will study the construction of true crime stories and their influence on the popular imagination, with attention to how aesthetic strategies inform how we think about marginalized identities. We will examine the relationships between art and everyday life by exploring the entanglement of the true crime genre with real-life crime cases, challenging the meaning of “true” in “true crime”. As their final project, students will create a true crime media text, in order to make their own connections between art and social life.