Department of Communication (GRAD)

Considers the emergence of modern and contemporary social and cultural theory. Surveys major paradigms of modern and contemporary philosophy.

Admission to graduate program or permission of the department. Considers theory and philosophy in the study of communication. Surveys major paradigms of contemporary social/cultural theory (and their roots in modern philosophy) in relation to examples of communication research and practice. Second of two semesters.

Communication studies graduate students only. An introduction to teaching at the university level for new teaching assistants and graduate students hoping to have teaching-related responsibilities in communication studies. It is designed to encourage us to have intellectually rigorous and personally meaningful conversations about our teaching.

This course is designed for students to start thinking, in a historical and foundational way, about 'the political' as defined by formative thinkers from contrasting philosophical perspectives, as well as from necessarily different social positions within the field of power.

This course focuses on the various ways that the problem of discourse is rendered inside and outside of Communication Studies. It examines the various modes at our disposal for thinking about discourse as a field of articulation: for example in theories of representation, mediation, and meaning making.

This class theorizes the Social by drawing on resources inside and outside of communication studies, thinking through the implicit and explicit investments that communication scholarship has in the concept of the social.

Course introduces graduate students to performance practice as a way of knowing, an aesthetic expression, a form of pedagogy, a method of research, and a means of presenting findings. Students will develop and perform original work that creatively engages various research contexts.

This course will explore through performance the various ways the human body is 'marked' or signified in culture.

Course introduces graduate students to key texts that have informed the emergence of Performance Studies as a mode of inquiry into cultural, social, aesthetic, and political practices.

Explores theoretical, methodological, and practical issues encountered in ethnographic, case study, and field research on communication phenomena in organizations.

Critical examination of key feminist arguments about science and communication scholarship as conventionally defined; exploration of alternative goals, assumptions, and practices for research consistent with feminist theories and methodologies.

Focuses on the theory and practice of interpretive organizational communication research, including organizational phenomena such as culture, metaphor, symbolism, ritual, and narrative.

Focuses on the theory and practice of critical organizational communication research, including organizational phenomena such as power, discourse, and culture.

Graduate standing required. Introduction for graduate students to the current literature and critical perspectives in the areas of media and cultural studies.

This seminar inquires into the range of relationships between media and social life, with a particular emphasis on media's role in movements for social, economic, and/or cultural transformation.

This course offers a sustained analysis of the ways in which the media, audience, and/or public have been variously conceptualized historically, in critical theory.

A detailed analysis of the relationship between government, policy making, corporate and business interests, and various theoretical approaches to their impact on media and culture. Fall.

This class introduces cultural studies through its British 'origins,' especially but not only the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Open University.

Explores the economic, social, ideological, technological, and aesthetic development of film and television as international, transnational, transcultural, and global entities, questioning the viability of the concept of national cinema/media in the 21st century.

Graduate introduction to the study of film, television, and video. This course traces the theoretical and methodological development of media studies.

This seminar recognizes and applies narrative theory in understanding texts, lives, and cultural practice broadly.

Second-year graduate students and/or permission of the instructor. Special problems in performance studies.

A critical survey of the history of rhetoric, focusing on Classical theories of rhetoric from Greece and Rome through the Medieval period.

A critical survey of the history of rhetoric, focusing on theories of rhetoric from the Renaissance through the 19th century.

A critical survey of the history of rhetoric focusing on rhetorical theory from the 20th century to the present.

Addresses conceptual and practical issues in the rhetorical analysis and criticism of visual and material objects, practices, and events.

Seminar is an in-depth analysis of the writings of Kenneth Burke, concentrating on primary source materials.

Considers the history of and developments in the philosophy of communication and culture, as well as the role these concepts have played in western philosophy.

Advanced study of selected topics in research methods. Topics vary.

Investigates the function of rhetorical criticism, the critical method, and a variety of approaches to the performance of rhetorical criticism.

Focuses on practice in writing rhetorical criticism and on mid-range theoretical concepts that inform critical analysis and argument.

This graduate seminar will serve as an advanced introduction to critical studies of modern technological systems. Drawing upon the fields of communication studies, science and technology studies, cultural studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies, seminar participants will investigate the role of technologies in shaping social worlds and producing political orders. Attention will be given to the social construction of technological systems, the politics of mediation and resistance, and the encodings of power relations.

This course is devised to provide graduate students interested in theoretical interdisciplinary work with a sense of prevailing questions and critiques important to CES. CES takes on the more difficult questions of intersectional work, as it thinks through sovereignty and emancipation, identity and ontology, place, space and temporality. Each iteration of the course works itself through new perspectives in the field, challenging students to create new methodologies for their own work.

This course is an advanced seminar in which students may study family communication and produce original research.

This course compares and critically evaluates the work of major feminist scholars in the field of communication. Spring.

A variable topic seminar that permits faculty and graduate students the opportunity to explore significant historical and emerging issues in the field of communication.

This seminar focuses on methods of ethnography and fieldwork ethics. Performance as theory and practice informs methodological inquiries as well as the analysis of specific ethnographic texts and case studies.

This course focuses on performance-related issues in the emergent field of cultural studies.

An advanced graduate seminar, this course will address recent developments and problems in performance theory. It will consider cross- and multidisciplinary approaches to performance as sites for consideration and debate.

This course explores diverse relations among performance and history, including the performance of life histories, the use of spectacle in history, everyday performances of historical protocols, and performance itself as an historical construct.

This course examines social relations, particularly power relations, by focusing on resistance as performance and the performance of resistance arising from the dynamics and conflicts within specific locations of a political economy.

Draped in the political, economic, and domestic histories of western culture our current pedagogies still point out the world that matters to each new generation. We will study these pedagogies from the perspectives of institutions, economies, and human relationships they simultaneously reflect and work to transform.

This course looks at issues of the representation and production of identity, subjectivity, and agency - in various forms - in the practices of media.

Selected problems in media aesthetics. Exact topic to be covered is announced before classes begin.

Graduate standing required. Introduction to the issues, methods, and materials of research in media and cultural studies.

Application of historical research techniques to problems in the mass media. Exact topic is announced before classes begin. May be repeated.

This course will look at special topics in the study of popular culture. Designed for advanced graduate studies, it will consider critical responses to existing scholarship with original research.

This seminar explores critical theories of difference and puts them into dialogue with media representations of difference.

This class explores the impact of some developments in postmodernism - as an interpretive, historical, and philosophical discourse on the possible development of cultural studies.

Examines new communication technologies, their spatial and social diffusion, and how these relate to theories of culture, politics, and technology and the real-world contexts in which technologies are received. May be repeated.

This course will focus on specific topics, issues, or queries of popular culture as these have been or can be studied within cultural studies.

Graduate standing required. This graduate seminar explores theoretical and practical points of contact between feminism, film, and television using psychoanalysis, narrative analysis, ideological analysis, and cultural studies.

This course, designed for advanced graduate students, will explore specialized topics in interpretive, critical, and cultural research in media studies.

Explores how theories of aesthetics have struggled with notions of beauty, value, pleasure, and pain in the human communicative experience.

This course will examine the manner in which Black aesthetic and intellectual expressions and controversies function as public discourse in cultural politics.

Considers place in relation to space and time. Primary concentration on implications of theorizing place as communicative practice rather than communicative context.

Addresses the fundamentally rhetorical character of public memory. Analyzes theoretical presuppositions about memory. Openings for rhetorizing memory.

Special problems in rhetorical and cultural studies. May be repeated.

Permission of the internship coordinator. Individualized practical experience supervised by a faculty advisor and by the departmental coordinator of internships. May be repeated.

Permission of the instructor. Individual research on a problem defined by the graduate student and graduate faculty member in conference. May be repeated.

Individualized practical research.

This course advances graduate students' exposure to academic resources and common norms, practices, and procedures related to academic professionalism in Communication Studies.

Focuses on the development of a master's project or a major paper other than a thesis.

Considers the emergence of modern and contemporary social and cultural theory. Surveys major paradigms of modern and contemporary philosophy.

Admission to graduate program or permission of the department. Considers theory and philosophy in the study of communication. Surveys major paradigms of contemporary social/cultural theory (and their roots in modern philosophy) in relation to examples of communication research and practice. Second of two semesters.

Communication studies graduate students only. An introduction to teaching at the university level for new teaching assistants and graduate students hoping to have teaching-related responsibilities in communication studies. It is designed to encourage us to have intellectually rigorous and personally meaningful conversations about our teaching.

This course is designed for students to start thinking, in a historical and foundational way, about 'the political' as defined by formative thinkers from contrasting philosophical perspectives, as well as from necessarily different social positions within the field of power.

This course focuses on the various ways that the problem of discourse is rendered inside and outside of Communication Studies. It examines the various modes at our disposal for thinking about discourse as a field of articulation: for example in theories of representation, mediation, and meaning making.

This class theorizes the Social by drawing on resources inside and outside of communication studies, thinking through the implicit and explicit investments that communication scholarship has in the concept of the social.

Course introduces graduate students to performance practice as a way of knowing, an aesthetic expression, a form of pedagogy, a method of research, and a means of presenting findings. Students will develop and perform original work that creatively engages various research contexts.

This course will explore through performance the various ways the human body is 'marked' or signified in culture.

Course introduces graduate students to key texts that have informed the emergence of Performance Studies as a mode of inquiry into cultural, social, aesthetic, and political practices.

Explores theoretical, methodological, and practical issues encountered in ethnographic, case study, and field research on communication phenomena in organizations.

Critical examination of key feminist arguments about science and communication scholarship as conventionally defined; exploration of alternative goals, assumptions, and practices for research consistent with feminist theories and methodologies.

Focuses on the theory and practice of interpretive organizational communication research, including organizational phenomena such as culture, metaphor, symbolism, ritual, and narrative.

Focuses on the theory and practice of critical organizational communication research, including organizational phenomena such as power, discourse, and culture.

Graduate standing required. Introduction for graduate students to the current literature and critical perspectives in the areas of media and cultural studies.

This seminar inquires into the range of relationships between media and social life, with a particular emphasis on media's role in movements for social, economic, and/or cultural transformation.

This course offers a sustained analysis of the ways in which the media, audience, and/or public have been variously conceptualized historically, in critical theory.

A detailed analysis of the relationship between government, policy making, corporate and business interests, and various theoretical approaches to their impact on media and culture. Fall.

This class introduces cultural studies through its British 'origins,' especially but not only the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Open University.

Explores the economic, social, ideological, technological, and aesthetic development of film and television as international, transnational, transcultural, and global entities, questioning the viability of the concept of national cinema/media in the 21st century.

Graduate introduction to the study of film, television, and video. This course traces the theoretical and methodological development of media studies.

This seminar recognizes and applies narrative theory in understanding texts, lives, and cultural practice broadly.

Second-year graduate students and/or permission of the instructor. Special problems in performance studies.

A critical survey of the history of rhetoric, focusing on Classical theories of rhetoric from Greece and Rome through the Medieval period.

A critical survey of the history of rhetoric, focusing on theories of rhetoric from the Renaissance through the 19th century.

A critical survey of the history of rhetoric focusing on rhetorical theory from the 20th century to the present.

Addresses conceptual and practical issues in the rhetorical analysis and criticism of visual and material objects, practices, and events.

Seminar is an in-depth analysis of the writings of Kenneth Burke, concentrating on primary source materials.

Considers the history of and developments in the philosophy of communication and culture, as well as the role these concepts have played in western philosophy.

Advanced study of selected topics in research methods. Topics vary.

Investigates the function of rhetorical criticism, the critical method, and a variety of approaches to the performance of rhetorical criticism.

Focuses on practice in writing rhetorical criticism and on mid-range theoretical concepts that inform critical analysis and argument.

This graduate seminar will serve as an advanced introduction to critical studies of modern technological systems. Drawing upon the fields of communication studies, science and technology studies, cultural studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies, seminar participants will investigate the role of technologies in shaping social worlds and producing political orders. Attention will be given to the social construction of technological systems, the politics of mediation and resistance, and the encodings of power relations.

This course is devised to provide graduate students interested in theoretical interdisciplinary work with a sense of prevailing questions and critiques important to CES. CES takes on the more difficult questions of intersectional work, as it thinks through sovereignty and emancipation, identity and ontology, place, space and temporality. Each iteration of the course works itself through new perspectives in the field, challenging students to create new methodologies for their own work.

This course is an advanced seminar in which students may study family communication and produce original research.

This course compares and critically evaluates the work of major feminist scholars in the field of communication. Spring.

A variable topic seminar that permits faculty and graduate students the opportunity to explore significant historical and emerging issues in the field of communication.

This seminar focuses on methods of ethnography and fieldwork ethics. Performance as theory and practice informs methodological inquiries as well as the analysis of specific ethnographic texts and case studies.

This course focuses on performance-related issues in the emergent field of cultural studies.

An advanced graduate seminar, this course will address recent developments and problems in performance theory. It will consider cross- and multidisciplinary approaches to performance as sites for consideration and debate.

This course explores diverse relations among performance and history, including the performance of life histories, the use of spectacle in history, everyday performances of historical protocols, and performance itself as an historical construct.

This course examines social relations, particularly power relations, by focusing on resistance as performance and the performance of resistance arising from the dynamics and conflicts within specific locations of a political economy.

Draped in the political, economic, and domestic histories of western culture our current pedagogies still point out the world that matters to each new generation. We will study these pedagogies from the perspectives of institutions, economies, and human relationships they simultaneously reflect and work to transform.

This course looks at issues of the representation and production of identity, subjectivity, and agency - in various forms - in the practices of media.

Selected problems in media aesthetics. Exact topic to be covered is announced before classes begin.

Graduate standing required. Introduction to the issues, methods, and materials of research in media and cultural studies.

Application of historical research techniques to problems in the mass media. Exact topic is announced before classes begin. May be repeated.

This course will look at special topics in the study of popular culture. Designed for advanced graduate studies, it will consider critical responses to existing scholarship with original research.

This seminar explores critical theories of difference and puts them into dialogue with media representations of difference.

This class explores the impact of some developments in postmodernism - as an interpretive, historical, and philosophical discourse on the possible development of cultural studies.

Examines new communication technologies, their spatial and social diffusion, and how these relate to theories of culture, politics, and technology and the real-world contexts in which technologies are received. May be repeated.

This course will focus on specific topics, issues, or queries of popular culture as these have been or can be studied within cultural studies.

Graduate standing required. This graduate seminar explores theoretical and practical points of contact between feminism, film, and television using psychoanalysis, narrative analysis, ideological analysis, and cultural studies.

This course, designed for advanced graduate students, will explore specialized topics in interpretive, critical, and cultural research in media studies.

Explores how theories of aesthetics have struggled with notions of beauty, value, pleasure, and pain in the human communicative experience.

This course will examine the manner in which Black aesthetic and intellectual expressions and controversies function as public discourse in cultural politics.

Considers place in relation to space and time. Primary concentration on implications of theorizing place as communicative practice rather than communicative context.

Addresses the fundamentally rhetorical character of public memory. Analyzes theoretical presuppositions about memory. Openings for rhetorizing memory.

Special problems in rhetorical and cultural studies. May be repeated.

Permission of the internship coordinator. Individualized practical experience supervised by a faculty advisor and by the departmental coordinator of internships. May be repeated.

Permission of the instructor. Individual research on a problem defined by the graduate student and graduate faculty member in conference. May be repeated.

Individualized practical research.

This course advances graduate students' exposure to academic resources and common norms, practices, and procedures related to academic professionalism in Communication Studies.

Focuses on the development of a master's project or a major paper other than a thesis.