Communication Studies Course Offerings

The course integrates communication concepts from the humanities, social sciences and media components of the communication studies specialization. Special attention is given to contemporary issues as they affect individuals and society

CS400B Communication as Remix

This course explores remix in the context of communication studies. We will examine the political, economic, social and cultural implications of remix culture, looking at remix practices in various forms of cultural production including popular music, visual arts and fan culture. Although many of the creative and cultural practices now associated with remix culture have been around for a long time, remix culture is often thought to be a contemporary phenomenon, rooted in new media and digital technologies. While we will look at remix in its digital contexts, we will also explore the historicity of remix practice and will work towards a critical definition of remix, grounding this definition in the theoretical frameworks of communication studies. 

CS400C Remaking Work in the Digital Age

From reports of “robots at the gate” to stories of influencers who spin followers into fortunes, the current popular discourse on “the future of work” skews to either dread or exuberance. In this seminar, we will develop a more nuanced assessment of transformations in the world of work. We will explore how, why, with what impact, and to whose benefit work is being remade in a digital age. In addition to looking at specific occupations in digital media industries, the course positions “the digital” as a milieu in which a wide range of labour is performed. While we will focus on the contemporary context, we will remain attentive to historical continuities on the landscape of labour, particularly with respect to economic power and social inequalities. Guided by research in the political economy of communication, medium theory, and cultural studies, the course will survey such topics as: online microwork; the gig economy; the quantified self; the digital assembly line; the blurring of work and play; aspirational labour; the workaday rigours of satisfying the internet economy’s insatiable demand for content; and the job search in a culture of compulsory visibility and connectivity. Approaching the remaking of work in a digital age as a contested social process, the seminar will also address collective efforts to craft alternative futures of work, including union organizing in digital journalism, policy proposals to protect gig work, and the platform co-operatives movement.

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 group field project focussing on a specific museum, artist, architect, cultural group, or architectural development.

CS400J Postcard Mobilities

How and why do residual media persist? This course defines and explores residual media by focussing on the continued significance of postcards. In the early twentieth century, postcards were dominant media. Millions of postcards were produced and consumed. Today, postcards are old media, but they are not dead. Postcards are still circulated as contemporary souvenirs and as collectable artefacts. How and why do postcards persists in our digital era? Starting with the provocative premise that postcards persist because they are mobile media, we will discuss, for example, how vintage tourist postcards function as historical and nostalgic documents of place, such as New York City; how propaganda postcards mediate power, politics and patriotism, especially during times of war; how prayer postcards media religious knowledge, belonging and exclusion; and how spectacular postcards of human zoos mediate imperialism, race and speciesism. We will compare postcards, letters and emails with attention to their mobile forms and epistolary styles. We will consider why individuals, libraries, and museums collect postcards and how such collections extend postcard materialities into today’s dominant and emergent media forms, including digital archives for research or merchandising. Assignments will include an exploratory “snapshot” of a postcard archive or collection, an original postcard creation using paper, pixels, textile, 3D printer or other technologies, and an original research paper.

CS400K Governing the Student: Linking Pedagogy & Precarity

This seminar will invite students to critically reflect upon their own experiences as learning subjects in higher education. Since the 1990s, participation in post-secondary education has dramatically expanded globally but particularly so in the OECD countries. With the rapid growth in enrolments has come an increased sense that education should be more student-centred. However, such professions of student-centrism are frequently formulated within a framework that increasingly understands tertiary education to be an individual responsibility and governed by market logics. Accordingly, this interest in student-centred pedagogy needs to be contextualized within a broader program of instilling new norms of conduct that incite students to know themselves as entrepreneurs. As such, this seminar will invite critical self-reflection upon the ways in which our experiences of ‘student empowerment’ might actually normalize and habituate us to lives characterized by increasing employment and economic insecurity.

CS400L Making as Communications

Making as communication investigates making and maker culture as modes and systems of communication respectively. Instead of writing a final paper, students will make a project using technologies that can be bought from Adafruit, MakerShed, or similar places. The project will emphasize what they've learned in communication studies and in this class. The project will also have a professional ekphrasis which describes the relationships of the project to communication studies and this class.

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 (1992), we live in what might best be characterized as an emerging “Risk Society.” Whole industries are concerned with the production of knowledges about the risks we confront, while others, primarily the news media, have the task of communicating information concerning risk to the so-called “general public.” In this senior seminar, we will explore the production and dissemination of “knowledges” about risk in what has come to be known as “risk communication.” We will look to the ways that individuals and their behaviours come to be problematized in the production of knowledges around risk as well as the social, political, and cultural implications of such problematization. We will address questions regarding the ways that “information” about risk both feeds out of and informs social and cultural norms, and how we as individuals negotiate and assess risk in our daily lives. Working through case studies that may range from BSE or Mad Cow Disease and HIV/AIDS, the threat of the atomic bomb and the Cold War, the “War on Terrorism,” and to genetically modified foods and the Walkerton water crisis, we will address not only the ways that “information” is produced and communicated but also the strategies we use to respond to or resist information about the risks we face on individual, community, and global level.

CS400V TBA

CS400X TBA

CS400Y Work and Culture in Tech Ecologies

This fourth year seminar will explore the cultures of work, production and technological innovation within regional tech industry ecosystems, focusing primarily on the ecosystems of the Waterloo Region and Toronto. Our approach will be multi-disciplinary, drawing upon theoretical frameworks and empirical research from cultural and media studies, sociology, anthropology, public policy studies, regional cultural and economic geography, and science and technology studies. Our approach will be comparative as well, seeking situate the development and dynamics of Canadian tech ecosystems in relation to those of Silicon Valley, Boston, Berlin and Tel Aviv.

An examination of the current literature and debates in the subfield of media and communication history. Topics may include media and communication historiography, media archaeology, and periods and thinkers in media and communication history.

CS411E TBA

An examination of the current literature and debates in the subfield of media and cultural theory. Topics may include discourse analysis, performative theories, gender and representation, rhetorical analyses, new media technologies, theories of meaning and politics of language.

CS412D No Future: What Lies Ahead

Fredric Jameson said, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Seeds of Time, 1994). Indeed, the horizon of our imagined futures appears particularly low at the moment, and our gaze increasingly turns toward the past. This course examines how we imagine the near-future in popular culture. We look at how our future imaginary is shaped by current trends, including automation, climate catastrophe, social media, the internet of things, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic production of knowledge.

CS412E Language, Politics, and Right-Wing Populism

This course introduces students to the critical scholarship on right-wing populist political communication. While right-wing populism is, by necessity, an imprecise term, it will be used to reference a wide range of political actors that build support through the ability to capitalize upon the failed promises of normalized economic politics and offer resolutions in the form of appeals to hyper-conformist identities and the rejection of ‘impracticable’ cosmopolitan ideals. The currency of these political actors has been made possible in part through the increasing mediatization of political discourse and what Ruth Wodak has termed the ‘fictionalization of politics’ characterized by ‘the blurring of boundaries in politics between the real and the fictional, the informative and the entertaining’. Accordingly, we will examine the ways in which traditional and new genres of political communication are articulated so as to represent social, cultural, and intellectual diversity as economically and culturally disastrous.

An examination of current literature and debates in the subfield of visual communication. Topics may include semiotic and social semiotic approaches to the visual, scientific imaging, lens-based media, information display and design, art, architecture and cultural production.

CS413E Strictly Criminal: Criminals, Crime and Ideology in Contemporary Media

An examination of the prevalence and purposes of the character of the criminal and the presentation of crime in contemporary media. In this course, we will evaluate criminal characters and plotlines in films, television shows, video games, music, news and documentary presentations, comic art, and social media. The purpose will be to analyze the utility of the character of ‘the criminal’ in perpetuating moralistic myths and in legitimizing social and political structures. There will also be time to evaluate and discuss some of the more nihilistic narratives that have gained popularity in the past few decades – the Grand Theft Auto videogame series, the Deadly Class graphic novels, and films like Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly would quick list of possible examples

An examination of current literature and debates in the subfield of global communication studies. Topics may include globalization, intercultural communication and cultural citizenship, political economy and policy, identities and media representation, and non-Western media.

CS414C Global Sounds

In this course we will examine how sound and music are linked to cultural, ethnic and geographic identities that are, in turn, linked to technological, global, cultural, and economic shifts. Although our exploration will be undergirded by theories of sound, sound production, and the histories of sound technologies, we will focus on the ways in which popular music (as one facet of sound) constitutes notions of authenticity, belonging, and hybridity; how music consumption and production are influenced by politics and practices of global exchange; and the ways in which popular music structures meaning and generates representation in diverse geographies. How popular music and associated sound technologies are implicated in spatial relationships (as, for example, linked to particular geographical sites) as well as the movements of people, products, and cultures across space.

An examination of current literature and debates in the subfield of cultural and creative industries. Themes may include labour, policy, the specificity of the cultural commodity, geography, distribution/production processes and networks.

CS415D TBA

An examination of current literature and debates in the subfield of contemporary digital and social media. Topics for study may include digital networks and communicative power, the internet and the emergence of social media platforms, broadcast vs. social media, media convergence, and “big data.”

CS416D from Smartphone to Smartcity

This course examines the emergence of the smartphone, the smarthome, and the smartcity. It explores how these relatively recent phenomena have become ubiquitous, and the significant role they now play in the global social order. Areas of focus will include: the history, political economy, and geography of smart products, as well as their impact on society.