Department of Communication

This course examines the historical and current development of social entrepreneurship as a field of study and practice, with particular attention to successful organizational communication strategies designed to solve community problems.

This course will explore communication models for collective leadership involving youth and adults in vulnerable communities. Partnering with local youth-focused organizations, students will work in teams to research and design community-based change projects.

Examines the historical emergence of work as a defining feature of contemporary life. The course asks, What is a "career"? How have neoliberalism and post-Fordism influenced understandings of work and career? How have changing conceptions of work influenced other aspects of life, including family, leisure, consumption, and self-identity?

In this course students will explore the possibilities of making political performances, or making performances political. We will be particularly concerned with how performance may contribute to processes of social change.

This course examines the question of what characterizes "Blackness" as it manifests through experience, history, and symbol in the United States, as well as the impact of African practices and identities upon blackness in the United States. The course is concerned with what has been termed the "black literary imagination".

Students will be engaged with multimedia, music, dance, and theater performances. We will explore the creative processes and cultural contexts of these performances and will compare the arts as a way of knowing the world to the creative processes of academic scholarship.

This seminar explores how we come to understand what places are and how they are meaningful. We will look at places "rhetorically": how they were designed to persuade those who inhabit them, how we actually experience them, and how we make sense of them in our individual lives.

Qualitative research offers an exciting way to discover the world. In this course, students will gain focused training in qualitative research methods, learn how to analyze qualitative data, design and perform qualitative research studies, and report research findings.

This course provides an applied introduction to food politics by adopting a critical organizational communication lens on our globalized food system. We explore food system labor practices, the role of multinational companies and global commodity chains, the status of hunger and food deserts, the role of food marketing and consumption practices, and the growth of local and sustainable movements devoted to food justice.

This seminar is designed to introduce early-career students to the role that networks play in contemporary global societies. We will examine key ways to think about network societies by taking up the idea of the network in social, political, economic, cultural, and technological terms.

An introduction to the history, culture, and politics of "zines," self-published, small-circulation, noncommercial printed work. In this hands-on course, students will read, discuss, and create a wide variety of zines that explore a multitude of forms and genres. Students will be visited by local zine makers and participate in zine-making workshops; create a collection of their own zines; and participate in the Zine Machine: Durham Printed Matter Festival.

This is a course in learning to think more critically, speak more persuasively, and argue more effectively by focusing on practical skill development in reasoning and debate.

How are surveillance technologies altering social life? This course will explore this question by mapping the complex ways that technologies and societies interact to produce security, fear, control, vulnerability, and/or empowerment.

This seminar takes an historical approach to the relationship between popular culture and technological change. We will explore how artists and other workers (including audiences) in the TV, smart phone, and especially music industries have incorporated new technology into the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural commodities and experiences.

Special topics course. Content will vary each semester. Honors version available.

Addresses the many ways our communication--including language, discourse, performance, and media--reflects, creates, sustains, and transforms prevailing social and cultural practices.

Theory and extensive practice in various types of speaking.

An introduction to communication theory, research, and practice in a variety of interpersonal and organizational contexts. This course examines the role of communication in both personal and professional relationships. Honors version available.

Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Prerequisite for all production courses. Introduces students to basic tools, techniques, and conventions of production in audio, video, and film.

Restricted course. Dramatic writing workshop open only to students in the writing for the screen and stage minor.

An introduction to the critical analysis of film, television, advertising, video, and new media texts, contexts, and audiences. Honors version available.

This class explores the historical, social, political, and cultural significances of popular music as a communicative practice in the United States from 1950 to the present.

An introduction to the design, aesthetics, and analysis of various forms of digital media. Hands-on experience with different modes of creation, including graphics, web-based communication, and social media.

As the introductory course in performance studies, students will explore and experiment with performance as ritual, performance in everyday life, and the performance of literature. Honors version available.

Examines the basic nature and importance of rhetoric and argumentation. Attention is devoted to interpreting the persuasive function of texts and their relation to modern forms of life.

Analysis of issues, use of evidence, reasoning, briefmaking, and refutation. Argumentative speeches and debates on legal cases and on current events. Designed for prospective law students, public policy students, speech teachers, and college debaters.

Introduction to the theory and practice of communication in the small group setting. Topics may include group development, conformity and deviation, gender, problem solving, and power and leadership. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.

Examines multiple relationships among gender, communication and culture. Explores how communication creates gender and shapes relationships and how communication reflects, sustains, and alters cultural views of gender. Honors version available.

The material, processes, and procedures of audio, video, and film production; emphasis on the control of those elements of convention that define form in the appropriate medium. Lecture and laboratory hours.

Historical exploration of the sociocultural import of communication technologies, from the introduction of the telegraph in the mid-1800s through current implications of the Internet and various digital devices.

An introduction to some key connections between American film history and cultural history since 1965, most of which remain backbones of United States film culture to this day.

This course addresses the relationship between performance and power, focusing on topics concerned with the potential for performance to contribute to social change.

Introduces students to performance as a way of studying culture in all of its creative, dynamic forms, including family stories, joking, rituals, and practices of everyday life. The course emphasizes field methods and experiential research. Honors version available.

Introduction to the study and practice of performing literature. Students will create, rehearse, and stage performances that draw on fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and/or memoir. Honors version available.

This course introduces Japanese thoughts and culture through the lens of media cultural studies, and studies socio-cultural issues of Japan through media productions and trends. We will learn about Japan's nationalism and imperialism, gender and family ideologies, post-Bubble economic misery and homelessness, memories of war, feminist and minority struggles, working culture, technology, and post-Fukushima philosophy of survival in film, commercials, print media, news, and TV shows.

Instruction is a path to deep understanding. This ULA is for the student interested in pedagogy and media production. In assisting students currently enrolled in COMM 130 labs, the intern extends and complements the skills they acquired in introductory Media Production classes. Typical tasks include equipment and software instruction, as well as conceptual and aesthetic consultation. ULA model themes: pedagogy, content, and practice.

Examines contemporary theory and practice of influencing others' attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Focuses particularly on analyzing and developing persuasive messages. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.

Introduction to basic paradigms of thinking about cultural difference, encouraging students to examine how these paradigms shape how we think, act, and imagine ourselves/others as members of diverse cultures.

The course explores the historical and theoretical developments in the research and practice of organizational communication. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Honors version available.

An introduction to screenwriting for film and television with strong emphasis on the scene.

Students practice and learn the craft of narrative, short film writing by conceptualizing, outlining, writing, and rewriting three short film scripts. They include one three-minute silent, one five-minute script with dialogue, and one 15-minute script with dialogue.

Students in this class will live the life of a writing staff on a just-picked-up, fictional, one-hour television series. As if on a real series, they will individually and cooperatively create story ideas, treatments, and outlines, as well as write scenes, acts, and entire scripts.

A variety of feature films (both domestic and foreign) are screened in class and analyzed from a storytelling perspective. Emphasis is on the range of possibilities the screenwriter and film director face in the process of managing the audience's emotional involvement in a story.

Priority given to majors. This course instructs students on how to tell stories in a visual manner. How do the words on a page get translated onto a screen and how will the writer collaborate visually with a director? It is designed for writers to better understand how their scripts are interpreted and to improve visual writing.

This seminar-style class invites students to learn about the world through objects. What stories can "things" tell us about the culture, economy, and politics of the societies that produce and consume them? What can we learn about ourselves by studying objects and their histories? Through a range of case studies, students will learn about how the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of things structures and animates the worlds we build and occupy.

This course examines the representations of women in contemporary American film and also considers women as producers of film.

Society, we're told, is increasingly subject to automated decisions rendered by algorithm. What effects do algorithmic classifications have on social, cultural, and economic life? When, how, and why do institutions use algorithms? Are they really more "objective" than human decisions? How are the costs and benefits of algorithmic systems distributed? What does it mean to say we now live in an "algorithmic society"?

Technological systems permeate our lives. They facilitate communication, transportation, commerce, and governance. In order to actualize a more fair, just, and equitable society, it is essential that we hone an awareness of the "political" dimensions of technological systems and work toward the design of better ones. The goal of this course is to foster just such a critical technological literacy.

Introduces students to the history, methods, and central intellectual questions of cultural studies.

This course is a multi-disciplinary analysis of the phenomena of terrorism and political violence, their history, causes, the threat they pose, and what steps the United States can take in response.

This class examines the relationship between society and computer-mediated communication technologies known as "social media," including Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and more. It aims to break down the mythologies of social media and develop methods of analysis and critical understanding. Drawing from communication, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, students will understand social media's role within a larger social context.

This course examines the theory and practice of argument and deliberation in communication studies, drawing from resources in rhetorical studies, informal logic, and argumentation. Intended for pre-law, public policy and other students interested in argumentation.

Explores the discourse of dissident voices in American society, particularly as they speak about grievances pertaining to race, gender, the environment; focuses on rhetorical strategies that initiate and sustain social movements.

Examines recurrent themes in the rhetoric of significant Southerners and important campaigns. Considers both the rhetoric of the establishment and the rhetoric of change.

Explores rhetorical means of citizen influence of practices affecting our natural and human environment; also, study of communication processes and dilemmas of redress of environmental grievances in communities and workplace.

A workshop to study and create non-fiction films about the environment. The course examines aesthetic, narrative, and representational strategies with an eye to how these films can contribute to critical conversations about our species' impact on the natural world. Special attention will be paid to questions of environmental justice and the disproportionate effects of environmental hazards on communities of color and low-income communities. Previously offered as COMM 622.

In this theory-practice course focusing on religion, performance, and South Asian studies we will analyze the nature of embodied knowledge, aesthetic theory, and the creative power of dance performance in the Indian context. The course also includes a practical component involving embodied experience with Indian classical dance forms.

This course offers an introduction to the history and practice of East Asian martial arts. We will explore the social, political, and cultural contexts of the martial arts, from the classical period to the present. Integral to this course is a practical component involving embodied experience with martial arts training.

A special topics course on a selected aspect of communication studies.

Permission of the department. Majors only. 2.5 cumulative grade point average required. Individualized study closely supervised by a faculty advisor and by the departmental coordinator of internships. Cannot count toward the COMM major.

Permission of the department. Majors only. 3.0 cumulative grade point average and 3.5 communication studies grade point average required. For communication studies majors who wish to pursue independent research projects or reading programs under the supervision of a selected instructor. Intensive individual research on a problem designed by instructor and student in conference.

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.