Communication Studies Course Offerings

CS240A Sport on Screen
Sport comprises an array of human activities from individual leisure and play to multi-billion-dollar industries. Because of this variety, it is unsurprising that it should intersect so frequently and in so many ways with screen-based media. This course investigates aspects of the sport-screen nexus through examinations of, among other topics, representations of class, race, gender, and nation in screen-based media from videogames to television, social media to film, including documentary, experimental, animation, and drama.

CS240B Introduction to Mobility Studies
Description TBA

CS340h Digital Intimacies
Provides a survey of some of the key issues facing scholars, society, communities, cultures and individuals surrounding the crucial conjunction of intimacy and digital culture. The course examines different theoretical and topical approaches to critical intimacies—taken broadly to mean close connections that matter, and upon which people build their lives and experiences—an emerging field of inquiry coming out of the intersection of queer theory with broader, intersecting politics. In taking “digital intimacies” as its main topic, this course will address both digital sexualities (including topics such as sexual subcultures over the Internet, cybersex, sexting, the online pornography industry, and virtual spaces created for sex—from MUDs and MOOs to Second Life); as well as broader forms of intimacy in digital spaces (such as the politics of friending, hashtag publics, avatars, texting practices among tweens, digital divides, video game relationships and connections, and the politics of virtual communities). Concepts and frameworks such as intimacy, queer theory, hybridity, imagined communities, cyborg identities, the posthuman, virtuality and affect theory will be explored along side and through considering the concrete issues above.

CS340q Culture Wars from PC to Woke
‘Culture wars’ refers to ideological struggles over issues seen as beyond structural or political-economic components: e.g. abortion, sexuality, multiculturalism. Some recent manifestations include: ‘The 1619 Project’; the anti-‘Critical Race Theory’ campaign; residential schools and ‘cultural genocide’’; ‘Cultural Marxism’; and the anti-trans agenda. These areas of controversy are fundamentally a war over differing cultural values, beliefs, attitudes etc: i.e. ideological worldviews. We will examine definitions of key terms, including ‘political correctness’, ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, before turning to a brief historical trajectory followed by an examination of the institutional and organizational support for ‘culture warriors’ before focusing on these contemporary examples.

CS340t Gender Based Analysis
Description TBA

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.

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 focusing 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.

CS400r Racial Icons
An “icon” evokes quasi-religious feelings. Not merely passing celebrity figures, but symbolic lightning rods for public adoration, emulation, identification, disidentification and disdain, celebrity icons are enduring objects of cultural “veneration” and “denigration” (Fleetwood 2015). This is doubly-true for the racial icon, whose iconicity is multiplied by the iconic status of race itself.
This course takes the racial icon as its primary figure of investigation. In so doing, it argues that celebrity is always already raced and gendered, so much as race and gender cohere with ideas about publicity, privacy, and the self-possessed vs. commoditized self. Drawing on scholarship across celebrity studies, audience studies, critical race theory, gender studies, visual cultural studies, and performance studies, we will investigate the racial icon as both object and subject of cultural representation and debate. Figures and topics to be discussed include the diva, the dandy, the ingenue, the Blues Woman, the Race Man, tropical women, mascots and racial kitsch, and glamour. Individual celebrities to be discussed through both scholarly, archival, and creative texts might include Saartjie Baartman, Afong Moy, Pauline Johnson, Josephine Baker, Carmen Miranda, Paul Robeson, Bruce Lee, Selena Quintanilla, and Grace Jones. 

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, pandemics, Superbugs, climate change, nuclear meltdowns, economic crises, lab-grown meat, or even 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.

CS400x Indigenous Futurisms
Description TBA

CS400y Self-tracking
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CS400z Public Advocacy
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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.

CS411g Decolonizing Media Studies
What does it mean to “decolonize” media studies? Conversely, what is colonial about media studies? This course takes its name and inspiration from the Summer 2018 “In Focus” dossier section of Cinema Journal, edited by members of the Decolonize Media Collective, Nicholas Mirzoeff and Jack Halberstam. Taking a media history and media archeology approach, this course will investigate media and mediation as forms of power/knowledge that have constructed landscapes, territories, people groups, criminals, “moderns” and “primitives.” We will read historical accounts of “picturing,” from land surveys, to casta portraiture, to museums and World Fairs, to early anthropological photography and film. We will examine the role of sound recordings in producing salvage ethnographies of “vanishing” cultures, civilizations, and primitivized “folks.” We will discuss the long durée of surveillance technologies, from the slave ship, to the passport photograph, to the mug shot. And we will approach race “and/as” media, and privacy/publicity as raced, gendered, and sexualized.
Throughout, we will also examine counter-histories and performances of anti- and de-colonial resistance, often hidden in plain sight. Under this rubric, visual sovereignties, hidden transcripts of resistance, new technologies of the body, and relations across land/human/species divides will emerge. The final assignment will be a a praxis-based class “action” that will materialize and manifest decolonial activism in the present.

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.

CS412i Oil Sands Media
Description TBA

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.

CS414f Global Automobilities
Description TBA

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.

CS415c Work and Cultural Industries
This course critically examines working conditions, employment relationships, socio-economic inequalities, and labour politics in cultural industries and beyond. Guided by recent labour scholarship in political economy and cultural studies, a central theme of the course is precarity, or financial, existential, and social insecurity exacerbated by nonstandard employment arrangements such as short-term contracts, part-time work, internships, freelancing, and self-employment. Topics include the economic significance and political expediency of the creative industries and employment within them; the political-economic context of growth in ‘flexible’ employment; the ambivalence of occupations promising autonomy and self-expression; the politics of internships; the imperative to self-promote in hyper-competitive labour markets; the restructuring of work via networked communication platforms; and collective efforts by media and cultural workers to confront the challenges they face in their jobs, to resist social and economic inequalities in cultural industries, and to improve their livelihoods. A discussion-based class format will provide students with an opportunity to collectively reflect on issues directly relevant to them as they negotiate their own employment futures.

CS415f Cultural Policy in Action
Throughout this Fall 2023 term, the creative and cultural industries will be dealing with the implications of three brand new pieces of Canadian legislation which, taken together, will have gigantic repercussions for these industries. These are: The Online Streaming Act, which became law in May of 2023 and will be undergoing regulatory scrutiny at the CRTC this fall, as well as Bills C-18, the Online News Act, and C-27, the Digital Charter Implementation Act. This course examines the debates about these three pieces of legislation and their huge impact on the cultural industries.

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.”

CS416i Speed, Acceleration & Accident
This course engages questions of speed and the seeming acceleration of everything in our digital worlds, and the accident/s that arise in relation to them. We will engage theoretical descriptions of the speed, acceleration and accident in our digital culture and media. We will also engage criticisms on the topics of speed, acceleration and the accident in our digital lives.

CS416j Algorithmic Cultures
Description TBA