Communication Studies Course Offerings

CS340H Digital Intimacies (Fall 2021)

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.

CS340P Public Advocacy Campaigns (Winter 2022)

Public advocacy campaigns over various political, socio-economic and environmental issues are integral to the health of contemporary democracies and they are a vital part of grassroots movements and civil society organisations seeking to influence public opinion and government policy. This course will begin with the historical development of propaganda and public relations, and the rise of think tanks, before focusing on social movements, civil society organisations and their public advocacy techniques and strategies. The course’s emphasis will be on studying particular campaigns (e.g. aims, messages, tactics) while assessing their influence via news coverage, media frames, public debate and policy changes.

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 (Winter 2022)

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 a Digital Age (Winter 2022)

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 (Fall 2021)

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.

CS400I Music in Society (Fall 2021)

In this seminar, we examine a range of research on music in society. Topics will include music’s social and evolutionary origins, the cognitive aspects of musical experience, music's communicative power, politics and music, and the uses people have for music in everyday life. We will pay special attention to certain genres of popular music including heavy metal and jazz. Course pedagogy is pursued through lectures, class seminar discussion, weekly written exercises, and writing assignments. All of these pedagogical elements are oriented toward the explanation of the key ideas and issues in the course and toward the student’s successful completion of the assessment components.

CS400K Governing the Student: Linking Pedagogy & Precarity (Winter 2022)

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.

CS400P Dark Web (Fall 2021)

The Dark Web exists in popular culture as a nefarious pit of ill-intentioned activities. This class investigates the reality of the dark web, which has both negative and positive aspects. It will introduce the basic technologies of the dark web, discuss its histories; reveal its technical problems/challenges and experiment with its possible uses for social good.

CS400R Racial Icons (Winter 2022)

 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 (Winter 2022)

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.

CS400V Robotic Intimacies (Winter 2022)

This course will explore the growing societal prominence of robots and the emergent field of human–robot communication. While robots have long been a part of human society, especially in relation to areas such as manufacturing, mining, and sea and space exploration, we are seeing an exponential growth of robots being used for other purposes, such as the military and security use of drones and other robot automatons, the use of care robots in the health industry, and the commercial use of robots in the service industry. Robot companions (both animal, humanoid, and other) are proliferating across markets and for use with children, adults, and the elderly. In addition, AI and cyborg experiments are further blurring the lines between biological and synthetic entities. Finally, as we wake daily to headlines about bionic eyes, campaigns against sex robots, racist AI rants, autonomous Google cars, and weaponized sentry bots, we find ourselves inching closer and closer to the science-fictional figurings of how societies where humans and robots co-exist might function—from practical coexistence to utopian/dystopian destinies. We will consider sources from theory to sci-fi to journalism to explore the current state of robotic intimacies in all of these use-cases, addressing related issues such as labour, agency, sexuality, surveillance, imperialism, war, healthcare, ability, and the Singularity, with a dual focus on present discourses and possible futures.

CS400X Markets, Myths and Media (Fall 2021)

This seminar will explore popular representations of the causes and consequences of the financial crisis that began in 2007-08, which includes investigating ‘myths’ about ‘markets’ that circulate and often dominate public discussions of economics in general and the crisis in particular. The different media forms that will be explored include popular journalistic accounts, comics and graphic novels, videos and documentaries. Students do not need any specialist knowledge of economics or markets.

CS400Y Work Culture in Tech Ecologies (Winter 2022)

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.

CS411G Decolonizing Media Studies (Winter 2022)

 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.

CS412E Language, Politics and Right-Wing Populism (Fall 2021)

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.

CS413A Posthuman Subjectivities (Fall 2021)

What does it mean to be human in the age of always-on, wearable, pervasive computing, advanced cybernetics, and social robots? Where does the human end and the machine begin in the context of new biotechnologies? Taking a broad, interdisciplinary approach, this course examines theoretical accounts of (post)human subjectivity in contemporary popular culture, news media, scientific discourse, philosophy, and visual communication, among others.

CS413G Documentary Ethics (Winter 2022)

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 (Fall 2021)

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.

CS414E Global Hollywood (Winter 2022)

Though Hollywood is a place, it can be thought more of as an idea holding together an industry owned by large international corporations, distributed globally, and made in a wide variety of locations far away from Los Angeles. The course looks at the global production of "Hollywood" movies. From the tax incentives, labour policies, and studio complex building that draw pre-production, filming, and post-production activities to different regions worldwide to Hollywood's investment and co-production of movies with partners worldwide, the course will consider who benefits and who loses from these dynamics, and the varying relationships different locations have as sites of Hollywood's production activities.

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.

CS415B Museum Studies (Winter 2022)

This course examines the social, political, and economic role of the museum.  Since the creation of the Louvre as the first bourgeois art museum, states, corporations, and private individuals have used museums as a way to create national identity, discipline and control viewing audiences, enhance social prestige or encourage economic development.  We will critically survey the literature relevant to these issues with a view to expanding our understanding of the role of the museum in contemporary society.

CS415C Work and Cultural Industries (Fall 2021)

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.

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.”

CS416A Smartphones and Us (Winter 2022)

This course examines the emergence of the smartphone and its significance in the age of pervasive computing. It explores how these relatively recent devices 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 smartphone production and consumption as well as the impact of these technologies on their users and society.

CS416F Hashtag Activism (Fall 2021)

This course examines theories, politics and popular culture of hashtag activism within a broad history of digital and social media activism. The Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements, with their hashtags #blacklivesmatter and #metoo, will be examined in the course among other recent examples of hashtag activism. We will also examine criticism regarding the value of hashtag activism, its relationship to “slactivism,” and claims of appropriation by celebrities, politicians, and others.