Communication Studies Course Offerings

CS240B Introduction to Mobility Studies
All the world is on the move, including digital nomads, international students, vanlifers, commuters, trends, tourists, long-haul truckers, smartphones, and shipping containers. How can we differentiate, research, and interpret the significance of such wide-ranging movement in our times? This course introduces Mobility Studies, first by considering its founding manifesto, “the new mobilities paradigm,” which defines mobility as movement plus meaning plus power. We will then discuss key concepts, methods, and theories in Mobility Studies with attention to case studies drawn from areas that may include, but are not limited to, automobilities, tourist mobilities, protest mobilities, homeless mobilities, outer space mobilities, and cargomobilities. Case studies will help us to interpret “the politics of mobility” through building understanding of how mobility is a resource that is differently accessed in specific periods, places, and contexts.

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.

CS340t Gender Based Analysis
Crosslisted with WS301L (taking both CS340t and WS301L would be considered repeating).

Learning how to do gender-based analyses of a wide range of policies, programs, media and communication in this course, will equip students with vital skills for monitoring and evaluation of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). Students will be exposed to a range of methods to further expand their toolkit for critically examining and countering gender and intersecting forms of discrimination.

CS340v Media and Environment
Ocean acidification. Wildfire evacuation notices. Rising sea levels. Species extinction. As the planet warms, it is difficult to avoid confronting these environmental conditions across legacy or traditional and new or social media. The environment, it seems, has a new place in media, just as it does in our lived reality. Yet, the relationship between environment and media is nothing new—nor is it merely representational. In seventeenth-century English, for instance, medium and, in turn, media, denoted environment, whether physical or social. In contemporary media studies, this longer history of environment and media has influenced a material turn in the field that addresses their entanglement, prioritizing the material as a site of and basis for analysis, often framed as an infrastructural or elemental turn. To better understand the relationship between media and environment, this course takes the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire—as critical anchors to achieve two overlapping theoretical and pragmatic aims: to 1) introduce students to contemporary materialist environmental media and communication studies and to 2) deepen students’ knowledge of the current state of the environment, including how it is represented and culturally understood across media. Assignments will be both critical and creative in nature.

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.

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.

CS400e New Writing Technologies
Promising ease of use but also the freedom to create anything and make it beautiful, predesigned, template-driven creative tools have become central to contemporary digital communication. Websites such as Canva, Lucidchart, Visme, and Wix offer users online tools for making professional-looking designs that users can then shared or print as their own creations. Writing applications such as Word and PowerPoint offer built-in templates and design tools to make documents and presentations more visually persuasive but also cohere with organizational branding. These semiotic technologies are indicative of new emergent forms of writing endemic to digital culture. Not simply evidence of a more image-based form of communication, semiotic resources such as composition, movement, colour, and texture become increasingly the tools of multiple modes of expression. This seminar will critically explore the consequences of ‘templatized’ communication and the new forms of writing and cohesion associated with it. Following from Richard Sennet, we can ask if it “is a friendly tool or an enemy replacing work of the human hand?” While some might want to focus on how these semiotic technologies ‘empower’ the individual user, we shall instead examine how template design is derived through a process of technologization (Fairclough) but also serves as the impetus for new forms of codification (Cameron) in communication.

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.

CS400h Ferment in the Field
"What is Communication Studies, anyway? In this course, we will take the field of Communication Studies as our object of study, encouraging students to think reflexively about its formation and practices. As you near the completion of your degree, you’ll have the opportunity to reflect on your experiences of the discipline.
Inspired by influential issues of the Journal of Communication – “Ferment(s) in the Field” (1983, 2018) – the course begins by revisiting key conceptions of communication and intellectual maps of the field. We will go on to explore origin stories of Communication Studies and consider what these stories omit. Next, we will cover examples of “turns” in research focus, such as mediatization, labour, and infrastructure, and shifts in institutional research sites. We will also address recent critical interventions in the field, including around de-Westernization, #CommunicationSoWhite, and climate crisis, and we will ask how the material in this course is implicated in these reckonings.
Given its vast topic, this course is inevitably selective in what it covers. Through readings, discussions, and activities, this seminar will highlight the ongoing need for critical assessment, debate, and reorientation to sustain a vibrant field of Communication Studies.

CS400u Digital Media & Aural Cultures
This course explores the development of digitally-based technologies of sound production, distribution, reception, and archiving, and how the socio-technical affordances of these new sound technologies fostered the emergence of new cultural practices of sociality and community, particularly in the fields of popular music and radio. Specific attention will be paid to the convergence of radio and the internet over the past thirty years, and how this convergence has been manifested in the development of new platforms for distribution and circulation of sound creations, such as iTunes, Spotify, Bandcamp, Soundcloud, and Mixcloud, as well as new aural practices of radio such as podcasting.

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.

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.

CS411h Histories of Censorship
This course examines censorship from a historical perspective, underlining the fact that censorship has been around us for as long as free human expression. Course themes may include but are not limited to: restrictions of public gatherings, book bans, postal service surveillance, film studio Codes and restrictions, and artistic freedom legal cases and controversies. A wide survey of topics or a focus on a particular time period may be offered.

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.

CS412j Horror
In this course, we study the phenomena of horror in art and culture—that is, representations that are designed to produce the emotion of horror. (We do not consider real-life horror, such as that which we experience at a horrifying event). We will examine horror as a cultural phenomenon in various media including literature, film, visual culture, television, and music. Students will gain an understanding of the nature of horror and the cultural sociology of the artifacts of horror through philosophical and theoretical reflection.

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.

CS413h Beyond Multiculturalism

This course centers the register of the visual to facilitate critical conversations about race, racism, and multiculturalism in Canadian contexts. Using Black Canadian studies scholarship which draws from Black feminist and womanist, queer affirming, and anti-capitalist lenses, this course highlights the everyday realities of Black Canadian communities in the past and present. Using site-based engagements with place/space, archives, newspapers, visual art, documentary film and photography, this course critiques the extent to which Canadian multiculturalism maintains the overlapping systems of oppression that stifle Black freedom in Canada everyday.

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.

CS414g Global Trendmakers
This course examines how digital “trends” are understood as social and political formations that transcend regional and international boundaries. Focusing on a broad range of culture industries such as fashion, television, music, fan fiction, travel vlogging and sport, the course considers how digital platforms enable the globalization of trends as cultural actors in the transnational public sphere.

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.

CS415g Investigating Influencers
This course critically examines the cultural figure, market role, and socio-technical practices of the social media influencer in the context of cultural and creative industries. Course themes may include but are not limited to: cultural intermediaries; self-branding; the authenticity ideal; micro-celebrity; work routines; algorithmic control; brand partnerships; advertising and consumer protection regulations; and the ongoing formalization of influencer work.

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.”

CS416g Critical AI Studies
This course offers an in-depth exploration of the recent emergence of generative AI in relation to the media. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, it situates generative AI within the broader history of artificial intelligence, automation, and algorithmic practice. Key topics of study include: the political economy of AI, safety and regulation frameworks, algorithmic bias, military applications, public reception and media hype, labour implications and the future of work, Canadian law in a global context, among others. In addition to theoretical insights, the course provides practical understanding of generative AI technologies. Students will gain hands-on experience with various AI tools, enhancing their comprehension of these technologies’ implications. Students will learn basic coding skills enabling them to build their own chatbots and AI agents using Python in Mac OS, Windows, and Linux environments. No prior coding knowledge is required.

CS416h Platform Capitalism & City
Many cities worldwide have embraced Smart City strategies, using new technologies to monitor traffic, urban transit, power grids, and even waste disposal in attempt to bolster economic growth. Sponsored by large corporations such as Google and IBM, Smart City strategies promise new investment, better services, and a superior quality of life. At the same time, they have been harshly criticized for their constant surveillance of citizens and derided as money-making schemes for the companies involved. Using various case studies, this course will compare Smart City strategies to other neo-liberal urban initiatives such as the Creative City, exploring issues such as privacy and surveillance, the tendency to address urban social problems with technological solutions, and the corporate strategies of platform capitalism.