Communication Studies Course Offerings

CS240C Toward Freedom
Crosslisted with KS240A (taking both CS240C and KS240A would be considered repeating).

This Black Studies course highlights Black voices and their cultural expressions to not only think through how the histories of slavery and colonialism inform structures of racial capitalism, but more importantly, to center how the Black imagination offers moments of rupture and possibility. This course considers how freedom is conceptualized and practiced by people of African descent who are located throughout the Americas by exploring questions such as, how is freedom defined, obtained, and/or bestowed? How does one grapple with present-day calls for freedom despite living in an era of post-emancipation? And what is the relationship between Black Studies and societal understandings of freedom? Students in Toward Freedom are routinely encouraged to think critically about the various ways that their own lived-experiences intersect with these discourses which include themes such as, Black Art and Artists, Storytelling, Black feminism and womanism, Freedom Dreams, Allyship, Black joy, and world-building. Together, we will study a range of Black intellectual/creative practices that offer capacious implications for our ability to think, dream, and re/build the world.

CS240D Doing Cultural Studies
Crosslisted with KS240B (taking both CS240D and KS240B would be considered repeating).

This course aims to engage cultural studies as a practice of everyday life. Together we explore different approaches to encountering lived experience, narrative and storytelling, production and consumption, place and space, time and memory, representation, and relations of power. Students will have the opportunity to explore a variety of methods and case studies, including but not limited to culture jamming, auto-ethnography, textual analysis, oral history, fieldwork, archival research, and digital humanities.

CS340A Shopping and Consumerism
This course engages shopping as a social practice that mediates our relations with each other and the world. Students will be introduced to media and communications theories, histories of consumerism and contemporary case studies that explore the meanings and effects of the “stuff” of consumerism, including its logistics, infrastructures, platforms, intimacies, discourses, and cultures.

CS340B Waste Media & Mediations
How can waste be regarded as media, and what work do waste mediations accomplish? This course defines waste broadly to include electronic waste, material waste, resource waste, waste byproducts, and bodily waste. What are the materialities, movement, and mediations of waste?

CS340C Social Media & Politics
The relationship of social media to the processes of politics in a democracy have been increasingly highlighted in recent developments in the USA, Canada and globally. This course will engage in examining the ways in which social media – platforms, owners, participants, moderation (or not) – work to enable or dis-enable the more effective functioning of democratic politics.

CS340G Advanced Nonverbal Communication
Cat memes on the Internet, pet ownership, animals in sports, animal as spies, animals as food, furry subculture, visits to the zoo and anthropomorphized animal characters in movies are commonplace. This advanced course on nonverbal communication examines these topics and others to interpret human and non-human animal interactions and controversies in contemporary contexts. How do humans use and represent nonverbal communication such as emotions, touch and vocalics to distinguish ourselves from non-human animals? How and when do humans use nonverbal communication such as apparel, gesture and scent to re-wild as less human? How and when do humans use claims to empathy and sentience to hunt, farm, kill and display non-human animals, or to argue that some humans are less than human, or to posit that some non-human animals are like human kin whose personhood should be recognized in law?

CS340W The Trans Agenda
Crosslisted with WS301N (taking both CS340W and WS301N would be considered repeating).

In this course, we will explore contemporary representations of transgender and gender diverse or gender non-conformity in politics, media and popular culture. Although there will be some coverage of the history of gender diversity, the primary focus will be on trans people & gender non-conformity at different and difficult moments in the 20th and 21st centuries, including some key points in the growth in transgender representation – historical, political and cultural – in society via politics, media and film.

CS340X Performance Cultures
Crosslisted with KS340L (taking both CS340X and KS340L would be considered repeating).

Performance often describes a specialized domain of aesthetic activity related to the performing arts: we know, for example, that actors, dancers, and musicians perform. But performance also illuminates a wide range of other cultural behaviors and activities: religious clerics “perform” ceremonies, business administrators conduct “performance evaluations,” legislation “acts” upon us as citizens, and as individuals we perform things like our gender, class, nationality, and ethnicity every day through small and often unconscious acts.

This course takes a broad-spectrum approach to the performance concept in order to introduce students to performance as a key concept within culture and communication studies. Throughout the course, we will investigate what performance is, what performance does, and what it means to use performance as a paradigm to analyze culture (“performance as”). We will explore such topics as role-play, ritual, performativity, performative utterances, and state pageantry. The course will be organized in three discrete units: Performance in Everyday Life, Gender and Performance, and Performance and Power. There will be a summative assignment at the end of each unit and a capstone final project.

CS340Y Lifestyle Mobilities
Lifestyle mobilities are characterized by existential mobility, or a desire to give meaning to one’s existence by combining travel, leisure, and work. Lifestyle mobilities have grown in recent years to include digital nomadism, van life, maritime liveaboards, lifestyle rock climbing, world schooling, wwoofing, and other forms. Drawing primarily from Critical Mobility Studies and from Tourism Studies, this course introduces lifestyle mobilities and interprets reasons for its exponential growth. We will also consider possible future challenges and innovations for lifestyle mobilities in an era of precarious employment, mobile work, cheap travel, environmental crisis, migrant crisis, housing shortages, and backlash against overtourism and short-term rental accommodations.

CS340Z Being Black in Diaspora
Crosslisted with KS340M (taking both CS340Z and KS340M would be considered repeating).

This course complicates understandings of place and space by thinking through and with various Black and African Studies perspectives to discuss what it means to be Black in diaspora. By considering the ongoing legacies of slavery and colonialism, we will prioritize Black perspectives that are attentive to Black life in ways that illuminate both the overlapping and nuanced experiences of Black people globally. We will also decentre North American experiences, particularly those of African Americans, by prioritizing Black/African cultural expressions emerging out of Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle Passage. This course will allow students to think about the dynamic implications of neocolonialism and Black resistance worldwide.

CS400D Political Economy of Art and Architecture
Art and architecture are usually perceived as purely cultural activities with little connection to economic, political, or social issues. This course will challenge this apolitical construction of cultural production through a discussion of critical art history, spatial politics, the political role of museums, globalization, gentrification, sustainable architecture and urban planning, and cultural resistance. Course requirements include a field project focusing on a specific museum, artist, architect, cultural group, urban area, or architectural development.

CS400F Surveillance, Education, AI
AI-driven surveillance technologies have significantly transformed the student experience at North American universities, impacting everything from learning materials to assignments and exams. This seminar examines the rapid integration of artificial intelligence into higher education through the critical lens of surveillance capitalism and platform studies. As universities increasingly adopt commercial AI tools, they face fundamental questions about technological sovereignty, academic freedom, and the future of public education. The course challenges prevailing narratives about AI's inevitability in education, examining how current adoption patterns reinforce Big Tech dominance while presenting opportunities for resistance and alternative development. Students will analyze how AI platforms extract value from educational interactions, explore the tension between corporate control and institutional autonomy, and develop tools for understanding and potentially transforming the relationship between higher education and corporate technology platforms.

CS400G The 1930s
The 1930s were a period of enormous political, economic and social strife, while also existing as a period of vast potential – sometimes realized, sometimes not -- for positive change. Communication and culture were found at the centre of these conflicts and this course will examine such phenomena as the meteoric rise of radio as a social force, the consolidation of enormous cultural power in Hollywood, as well as innovations in art, design, music, architecture, among other areas. These (and other) phenomena of communication and culture took place in the context of the Great Depression and the rise of fascism (and political responses to fascism). In general, we are looking at a period in which the world saw the rapid rise and consolidation of vast power in the hands of influential new media and in a context of geopolitical chaos. Sound familiar? Course reading will include both contemporary scholarship and primary texts from the 1930s themselves.

CS400I Testimony and Witnessing
As a communicative practice, the genre of “testimony” seems to be everywhere these days: from Tik Tok to the courtroom, narrated as memoir and documentary, engaged as public history and state propaganda. On the flip side of testimony is the practice of “witnessing”: how one listens to, receives, makes sense of, and responds to testimonial narratives. This course considers the dynamics of testimony and witnessing as a problem for communication studies: what does it mean to speak on behalf of experience? What are the ethical demands of witnessing? If testimony and witnessing are acts of responsibility in the face of social and political injustice, particularly histories of trauma and conflict, how do these communicative acts approach experience, make sense of the past, and mitigate justice? Together we explore the “work” of testimony and witnessing through case studies that consider the dynamics of testimony and witnessing as a form of collective memory that holds potential for justice, healing, and reconciliation. Special attention will be given to the stories and silences of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims of violence, as well as the role that testimonies may play, for example, as narratives of political resistance, as propaganda, or as evidence in legal tribunals. Finally, we address how testimony is deployed in the context of institutionalized searches for truth and justice and in struggles for resistance against forms of state sponsored violence such as genocide and carceral punishments. Students will have the opportunity to develop their own practice of witnessing through engagement with creative pedagogies.

CS400T Risk Communication
We live in a world we have come to understand as increasingly “risky,” from the food and water we consume, the viruses and bacteria we encounter, the technologies on which we increasingly depend, and to the global political scene that seems more and more volatile. In the words of Ulrich Beck, we live in what might best be characterized as a Risk Society in which the concept of risk permeates our everyday lives. In this senior seminar, we will explore how health, environmental, economic, social, and technological risks are represented and the role communication plays in their management. We will address the ways that information (and misinformation) about risk works as a tool of governance, and how we as individuals come to understand, negotiate, and assess risk as a fixture in our daily lives. This seminar will hinge on working through case studies that address a variety of topical risk issues, including the role of communication practices in producing our ideas about risk and the response to, say, viral pandemics, Superbugs, climate change, nuclear meltdowns, economic crises, lab-grown meat, Artificial Intelligence, or even unidentified aerial phenomena (AUPs, formerly UFOs).

CS400w Ambient Media and Control
We increasingly live in environments in which, borrowing from Theodor Adorno, the noncommunicable is communicated in both unobtrusive and yet ubiquitous ways. In 1917, Erik Satie composed five short pieces collected together as ‘musique d'ameublement’ or furnishing music. For Satie, the introduction of radio afforded people the opportunity to go about their daily activities in spaces increasingly being filled with ‘unheeded’ music. As Darius Milhuad later explained, it is music that is ‘heard, but not listened to.’ Building on this, in 1978, Brian Eno characterized the musical genre he labelled, ambient, as being ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’. In both cases, we are talking about a form of mediation that is present in the background but still has the potential to affect us. On the surface, ambient media would seem then to be a matter of the exercise of control over one’s environment. Such a perspective though overlooks how they are implicated in new forms of social control, operating through environmental modulation rather than direct domination of the individual. In this seminar we will be examining the ways in which ambient media are productive of atmospheres increasingly implicated both in forms of self-care but also in affective forms of control.

CS400y Self-tracking
Whether in the form of Fitbits, Oura rings, Apple and Garmin watches, or their many companion apps, we are increasingly encouraged to track more and more of our daily lives. With the recent rise of sleep tracking, self-tracking has become a 24/7 practice. But to what end? What does it mean and what is at stake in quantifying an increasing array of our day-to-day activities? How do our practices of self-tracking intersect with our lived, embodied experiences? Why do we self-track?

This course addresses historical and contemporary practices of self-tracking from weight scales and height tables to wearables and smart watches. We will examine the socio-cultural aspects of self-tracking as tied to larger conceptions of fitness, wellness, and health. We will ‘learn-by-doing’ in this class, meaning that we will complement course readings by doing and examining our own self-tracking.

Note: you do not need experience with self-tracking to take this class.

2025/26 Course Offerings

Proposed Special Topics Descriptions

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Communication Studies Course Offerings

2025/26 Course Offerings

Proposed Special Topics Descriptions

CS240: Special Topics

CS340: Special Topics

CS400: Senior Seminar in Communication Studies

CS411: Advanced Studies in Media and Communication History

CS412: Advanced Studies in Media and Cultural Theory

CS413: Advanced Studies in Visual Communication

CS414: Advanced Studies in Global Communication

CS415: Advanced Studies in Cultural and Creative Industries

CS416: Advanced Studies in Digital Studies and Social Media

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