Department of Communication (GRAD)

An introduction to European modern and contemporary philosophy, from the enlightenment to contemporary postmodernism.

Growth in technologies, more frequent travel, and movements of products and people across the borders of nation states change concepts of family and community. Foregrounded by these realities, this course combines theories of family and communication with documentation of lived experience to interrogate family communication patterns in contemporary culture. Honors version available.

This upper level seminar develops a critical perspective on work, labor, and professional life within the global context. Throughout, we will engage in moral and philosophical debates about the status of labor and the meanings of work in our daily lives.

This viewing and research-intensive course examines the history of American narrative film through the screenwriter's experience, using a decade-by-decade approach to examine the political, social, global, psychological, religious, and cultural influences on the art, process, and careers of screenwriters.

Advanced analysis and application of the principles and methods of audio production.

Course provides an overview of theories of visual culture. We apply these theories to better understand contemporary visual media and technologies, along with the everyday media practices they support.

Open only to students in the writing for the screen and stage minor. Conceiving and outlining a feature-length screenplay.

Advanced introduction to foundational work in memory and performance studies, emphasizing theory and practice of various forms of remembering. Honors version available.

Examines how the United States Black experience is constituted in and through performance across a range of cultural contexts including the antebellum South, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Aesthetic, and contemporary urban life.

Examination of communication processes and cultural significance of film, television, and other electronic media. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.

The starting point for this course, chronologically and conceptually, is the emergence of popular media technology. Our purview includes transformative innovations in mediated communication, such as telephony and e-mail, alongside familiar media technologies such as televisions and computers.

A study of the electronic media as a feedback mechanism for community organization and social change. A variety of broadcast and nonbroadcast uses of the media are studied.

This course is about sound and the auditory dimension. In a society dominated by images and spectacle, sound and listening have been remarkably under-appreciated. Sound is physical-the vibration of molecules according to frequencies, pitches, and intensities-and biological-our ability to hear is an evolutionary trait. But sound is also cultural (what qualifies as signal or noise?), technological (how is sound recorded and reproduced?), and historical (how has the soundscape changed and how have we listened differently).

This course examines processes of creating and performing solo work. Students engage a variety of performances: autobiographical, representation of the lives of other/s, and exploration of cultural or political ideas.

Theory and practice of collaborative performance, emphasizing image, intertextual adaptation, site-specific and installation work, avant-garde traditions, and the play of time and space. Honors version available.

This course engages the theory and embodiment of prose fiction, poetry, and other kinds of literary texts, including nonfiction. Students practice adaptation and script preparation, solo/group performance, and performance critique.

A course covering the relationship between communication and political processes and institutions. Topics include media coverage and portrayal of political institutions, elections, actors, and media influence on political beliefs.

Takes up the fundamental assumptions of contemporary memory studies and the centrality of rhetoric to memory. Research focus on how constructions of the past respond to the present and future.

Approaches to the analysis and assessment of rhetorical practice with a focus on how rhetoric reflects and shapes public culture.

People are finding it increasingly difficult to reason with anyone outside their political affiliations. Must that be the case? This course is founded on the belief that democratic participation begins with earnest conversation and, given the right tools, we can do democracy better. The course is committed to the promise of shared reasoning and aims to foster student capacities for robust deliberative practices, rooted in the rhetorical tradition and tackling the most challenging public issues.

Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. A special topics course on a selected aspect of communication studies.

The "dark side" of communication is a metaphor describing the study of disruptive, dysfunctional, distorted, distressing, and destructive aspects of communication. This course explores humanity's darker side that allows us to reject, exclude, stigmatize, exploit, objectify, misguide, lie, and cheat. The course examines various theoretical perspectives and applies them to everyday problems in interpersonal encounters. A sample of topics discussed include: prejudice, stigma, marginalization, bullying, ostracism, resistance, manipulation, conformity, deceit, gossip, rumors, infidelity, and revenge.

This course explores the use of rhetorical criticism as a way to understand how the visual and material are used for symbolic and political purposes. Examples ranging from news images to public art will be studied.

Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. An investigation of psychological aspects of communication, particularly the perceptual and interpretive processes underlying the sending and receiving of messages.

Critical examination of alternative theories of leadership and trends in the study of leadership; focuses on the communicative dimensions of leadership. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.

Course examines the speeches and other texts that announced and embodied the goals and political strategies of multiple branches of three waves of feminist activism in the United States.

Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Provides a critical exploration of organizational communication theory, research, and application, examining the factors involved in the functioning and analysis of complex organizations.

The study of organizational culture operates on a set of assumptions distinct from traditional management perspectives. This course explores the cultural perspective as an alternative approach to understanding organizational communication processes.

A critical examination of the theory, research, and practice of organizational ethics.

Introduces students to approaches for creating performance from screenplays and other texts for electronic media forms, focusing on scripts as literature and the tensions between live and electronically delivered performances.

The course examines the aesthetic and technical elements at work and play in cinematic storytelling. The student is required to complete three projects and will gain hands-on experience in narrative filmmaking.

Students practice the craft of screen adaptation by conceptualizing, outlining, and writing scenes based on material from another medium (both fiction and nonfiction). Work is presented, discussed, and performed in a workshop environment.

Open only to students in the writing for the screen and stage minor. Students will write and workshop a full-length feature film screenplay. Students will learn about the film and television business through a combination of research, in-class discussions, and interactive interviews with industry insiders.

Examines questions about sexuality and how it has changed over time, through various media of visual communication.

Explores through performance contemporary poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and feminist thought by women of color in the United States. Honors version available.

This course combines readings and field work in oral history with the study of performance as a means of interpreting and conveying oral history texts. Honors version available.

Critical examination of the operation of performance as a cultural phenomenon, with an emphasis on meaning, power, and resistance in cultural events, social practices, and media spectacles.

This course introduces students to practices in adapting and directing literary texts for live ensemble performance. Students will create original performance work, engage in collaborative critique, and discuss the development of aesthetic value.

Investigates the theoretical definitions and uses of rhetorical interpretation and action in spoken, written, visual, material practices, discourses, and events.

Analyzes argument in a variety of contexts with an emphasis on public policy and exploring tensions involved in addressing both expert and public audience in the political sphere.

Examines public discourse from the colonial period to the present. Discourses, critical perspectives, and historical periods studied will vary.

Examines American cultural myths about war generally and specifically about the causes of war, enemies, weapons, and warriors, and the way these myths constrain foreign and defense policy, military strategy, and procurement.

The power of the presidency depends in part upon the president's ability to rally public opinion, which depends upon the president's ability to use the "bully pulpit." This course examines the hurdles presidents face and the steps presidents take to shape opinion.

This course will examine how tropes of "race" are symbolically invented and experienced psychologically and emotionally. This course assesses how "race" reflects and shapes cultural politics.

This course will explore the complex ways in which Black aesthetic forms and creative expression function as public discourse.

Permission of the department. Majors only. 3.0 cumulative grade point average and 3.5 communication studies grade point average required. For the communication studies major who wishes to pursue an advanced independent research project under the supervision of a selected instructor. Intensive individual research on a problem designed by instructor and student in conference.

This course is designed to take the completed feature screenplay written in COMM 537 and prepare the re-written final draft for production companies and agencies. It will begin with a complete structural review, character analysis, and dialog polish. A logline, synopsis and one sheet shall be developed. Critical analysis will be given, received, and addressed, resulting in a final screenplay package that is prepared to be submitted to professionals. Students must be in WSS program.

Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Course focuses on how communication is used to build and sustain interpersonal relationships. Forms and functions of communication are examined as a means of testing and defining relationships.

The primary focus of hate speech is on the ways that interactants manipulate hatred to accomplish a variety of social and personal goals. The pursuit of this focus will allow the student to appreciate the operation of hatred in a variety of contexts. Often taught as a service-learning course.

Introduces students to the opportunities, challenges, and rewards of participation within the nonprofit/NGO sector. The course also equips students with the skills needed to design and conduct engaged scholarship.

A workshop in the production of video and/or film nonfiction or documentary projects. The course will focus on narrative, representational, and aesthetic strategies of documentary production.

Explores interactive media through creative projects that include sound, video, and graphic elements. Technical information will serve the broader goal of understanding the aesthetics and critical issues of interactive media.

Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Studio course that explores gaming critically and aesthetically. Practice in game design and production including 3-D worlds and scripting.

Game Studio is a project-based course in the new media track. This course is designed to provide a structured environment, instructor and peer feedback, along with technical and conceptual resources in which to complete a new media project. Students may work individually or on collaborative teams. The class focuses on idea development, design, and experimentation.

Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. This course will explore various specific topics, theories, and methodologies in cultural studies.

Students create documentaries emphasizing the filmmaker's personal perspective and experience: essay, diary, and autobiographical films, and pieces in which the filmmaker performs a role for expressive or political ends. Significant class time is devoted to work-shopping student films.

Historical and theoretical examination of expressions of the documentary idea in different eras and various modes including film, television, and radio. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.

Students use Adobe After-Effects and Adobe Photoshop as their primary image software to create several original animations. Assignments are given weekly, and a substantial final project is expected.

Recommended preparation, several production courses above COMM 230. Course provides a structured environment, instructor and peer feedback, along with production and postproduction resources for completing advanced near-to-graduation media projects. Projects can be narrative, documentary, experimental, or interactive.

Primary subjects will be popular culture and media technology, and guiding questions will be organized around the relationships of each to commerce and/as social change.

This course examines critical and theoretical issues concerning the representation and study of various modes of difference, such as sexuality, race, and gender, in specific media texts. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.

This course allows students to create video productions that play with forms that lie outside of mainstream media.

In this course students learn a wide range of video post production techniques working mostly with the application After Effects.

This course introduces students to critical television studies. The course emphasizes not television or culture as separate entities but instead "Television Culture." The focus of the class is on the interrelationship between television and contemporary culture.

The aim of this course is to provide students who have an interest in film and video production with an understanding of the technical, conceptual, and aesthetic implications of the motion picture soundtrack, with a special emphasis on sound-image relationships. Students who have already developed a basic proficiency in the use of video cameras, audio recorders, and editing software will be asked to cultivate an understanding of and appreciation for the expressive and artistic possibilities.

This projects-based seminar will introduce students to the fundamental optical and technological principles of motion pictures. By using the Maker Space to design and fabricate pinhole cameras, zoetropes, and 16mm film strips, students will gain a deep understanding of the material and technological foundations of the cinema, and the operating principles that are behind not only the classic films of Hollywood's past, but the high-definition digital imaging technologies of the present.

We live in surveillance societies. Just about every element of our lives is affected by surveillance: workplaces and schools, social media sites and mobile phone use, police encounters and security screening. Surveillance practices shape how institutions operate and how people see themselves and others. The goal of this course is to develop a critical awareness of surveillance and its implications for society.

Course provides a workshop setting for the process of creation, dramaturgy, development, analysis, and critique of graduates' and undergraduates' original performance work, focusing on the needs of each project in progress.

Examines race and ethnicity in specific geopolitical contexts as discursive formations, performative identities, and lived realities. Studies disciplinary/political boundaries that are produced and maintained through acts of performance.

Recommended preparation, COMM 160. Relying on critical race theories, colonial and postcolonial theories, and theories of performance, this course engages comparative discourses of Black/African diaspora citizenship through the literature, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and cultural performances of people of African descent, particularly in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

This course is a arts-based inquiry into the ways in which performance and theatricality structure contemporary politics, culture, and everyday life, as well as the ways in which artists utilize performance as mode of political engagement.

Required preparation, one performance studies course above COMM 400. Permission of the instructor for students lacking the required preparation. Project-based class where students acquire skills and critical approaches to create collaborative, professional, multimedia works.

History and practice of performance in contemporary social movements. Practical exploration of direct action, guerilla theatre, and performance interventions.

Permission of the instructor for undergraduates. Intended for students from various majors, this course provides a foundation in the history, theory, and practice of developing live, technologically-intensive, multimedia performance works. The course analyzes new media masterworks, addresses techniques of interdisciplinary collaboration, and offers workshops in specific software/technology applications.

Overview of poststructuralist, or "contemporary" film theory. Traces its development, its techniques, fierce critiques lobbed at it since the early 1980s, and its points of continuing importance.

Theories of moving images and imaging technologies--from the primitive to the not-yet-existing--that focus on their multifaceted relations with various registers of time, memory, flux, and futurity.

Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. A special topics course on a selected aspect of communication studies. May be repeated. Honors version available.

Permission of the instructor. Required of all senior honors candidates in cultural studies. First semester of senior honors thesis.

Permission of the instructor. Required of all senior honors candidates in cultural studies. Second semester of senior honors thesis.

Permission of the department. Majors only. Cumulative grade point average must meet University standard. Individual projects designed by students and supervised by a faculty member.

Permission of the department. Majors only. Cumulative grade point average must meet University standard. Individual projects designed by students and supervised by a faculty member.

Recommended preparation, COMM 562 or 841. A bridge course designed to offer graduate students and advanced undergraduates a practicum in fieldwork methods and performance ethnography.

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.