Communication Studies Course Offerings

CS340qA Culture Wars from PC to Woke (Fall 2022)

‘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.

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.

CS400bA Communication as Remix (Fall 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. 

CS400dA and CS400dB Political Economy of Art and Architecture (Fall 2022)

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. 

CS400gA Gender, Migration and Mobilities (Winter 2023)

This course provides students with an interdisciplinary perspective on the ways in which gender intersects with the experiences, discourses and governance of migration and mobility, with an emphasis on the impacts on women on the move. Students will examine current issues, theories and scholarship pertaining to range of themes such as:  human rights and human security, transnationalism, mobile commons, care economy, mobile technologies and ICTs, borders and bordering practices, social protection, human development and global migration governance.

CS400pA Dark Web (Winter 2023)

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. 

CS400rA Racial Icons (Winter 2023)

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. 

CS400tA Risk Communication (Winter 2023)

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.

CS400uA Digital Media and Aural Cultures (Winter 2023)

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.

CS400vA Robotic Intimacies (Fall 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.

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.

CS411eA History of Pop Music Industry (Winter 2023)

This course looks at the history of the recorded music industry in North America. Beginning with sales of sheet music for home piano players in the 1800s, the course looks at the changes that occurred in the industrialization of popular music once the phonograph was widely adopted and recorded pop music became the norm. This history continues through the age of radio, early television, cable television, and satellite television. After looking at the structure and industrial logics of pop music sales in the 20th century, the course continues to look at changes in the music industry in the digital age from a global perspective.

CS411gA Decolonizing Media Studies (Fall 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.

CS412gA The Rhetoric of Economics (Fall 2022)

This course dispenses with the belief that ‘economics’ is a ‘science’ that can only be explained through ‘mumbo-jumbo’. In fact, it is ‘how’ economics is communicated that makes its ‘rhetoric’ so persuasive. In this course, therefore, we investigate keywords (e.g. human capital, market/place), figures of speech (e.g. metaphor, metonymy) and myths that have been used to persuade people about how the economy ‘should be’ run. As part of our inquiry, we examine how arguments over the economy in the public sphere are structured, including appeals to ‘common sense’ and different ‘myths’ (e.g. ‘American dream’). Students need no background in ‘economics’.

CS412hA Black Popular Culture (Winter 2023)

This course thinks through and with various Black/African diasporic innovations like music, film, and online communities to highlight the complex stakes of being both Black and popular in the West. The various texts explored are used to interrogate the complex processes through which Black communities articulate their presence, survive and thrive in anti-Black racist societies. While positioning Black popular culture as a rich analytical space, the everyday texts we collectively engage will be discussed in relation to themes such as, discourse, power, anti-blackness, temporality, identity, appropriation, aesthetics and political economy/consumption.

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.

CS413hA Beyond Multiculturalism (Winter 2023)

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.

CS413iA Monuments as Media (Fall 2022)

Monuments are a common sight in urban environments despite their function as reminders of something that is supposed to be beyond the ordinary and noteworthy. Clearly, they are a readily recognizable form in the built environment. At the same time though, the currency of monuments suggests that they more than just markers of memory and should also be understood as the materialization of practices of remembering. In this way, monuments do more than record or store a ‘message’. Instead, we will see to explore how they are communicative performances and their very material affordances function to mediate, more often than not, normative ideas about past and present, values, and identities. To do this, we will develop a toolkit for critically describing semiotic materials and the meaning potentials that they afford in relation to their canons of use. We will be learning this affordance-based approach through application, so the acquisition of our toolkit will come through analyzing a number of different monuments in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.

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.

CS414aA Globalization Through the Lens of TV (Fall 2022)

This course examines how the rapidly changing landscape of the global television industry is shaped by neoliberal economic policy and financial deregulation as well as technological innovations from the introduction of cable and satellite television broadcasting to Netflix, internet streaming, and piracy. We will be paying close attention to the rise of global television formats, co-productions and adaptations; the dynamic between global and local realities; and articulations of cultural and political identity in television programming across regional boundaries.

CS414cA Global Sounds (Winter 2023)

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.

CS415cA Work and Cultural Industries (Winter 2023)

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.

CS415eA Investigating Influencers (Fall 2022)

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.”

CS416aA Smartphones and Us (Fall 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.

CS416hA Platform Capitalism and City (Winter 2023)

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.