This course focuses on the interaction and pre-eminence that various sectors of Latin American visual media production and culture industries have established from the 1930s to the present: state sponsored and independent media, politically committed social arts; social movements and their alternative media/visual outlets; corporate media; Indigenous media; and new social/citizens’ driven media. The objective is to trace the role they have fulfilled in their respective social and historical periods as they relate to the nation-state and the corporate/private sector. We will also trace the important transformations these media and their industries have experienced from the liberal and neo-colonial era of the early 1900s, the Responsible State initiated in the late 1930s, committed to supporting culture industries as part of a national-popular decolonization project, through the authoritarian and neoliberal eras, characterised by the repressive and neoliberal state and privatised corporate media. In the neoliberal era, information and media representation are managed, controlled and highly concentrated in the hands of few owners. In the twenty-first century, private media have become a clear target of popular movements which continue to find ways of representing themselves through a variety of visual media. Thus, the last part of the course will include movements engaged with social media and study the ways they are influencing new forms of “reporting”, from advocacy to citizens’ journalism. Alliances across these groups in recent years have led to the establishment of New Media Laws, which face new challenges. The focus throughout the course is on who controls visual media production, how information circulates and who has the right to representation, in order to determine what impact state and private media controls have on citizenship and democracy.