Communication Studies Course Offerings

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
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.

CS340u Robots as Media
This course examines robots as mediators of cultural values and practices. As machines, it is easy to construe robots as extensions of human purpose but this fails to consider how their participation contributes to shaping the ways in which we think, feel, and act with others. We will begin with a thematic survey of narratives of robots, both real and imagined, and the roboticized futures they describe. However, to look at robots as media means that they do more than signify already existing cultural values and beliefs. As such, in the remainder of the course, we will consider ways in which robots, both hard and soft, remediate our understandings of attention, cognition, labour, care, intimacy, racialization, disability, and, of course, humanness, making them all the more material and durable.

CS400a Remediating Space Exploration

The new space race is on. The first space race began in 1955 and was an extension of the Cold War competition between the United States and the USSR. Now more than 80 countries have a presence in space. The new space race has continuities with the old, such as national prestige and technological domination, but there are also obvious discontinuities such as the increasing involvement of the private sector. Nevertheless, to make the investments necessary for space exploration still depends upon public interest and support. Just as the new space race is a remediation of the old, the way in which the space exploration is communicated through various media, old and new, such as magazines, photography, music, film, television, museums, and, more recently, social media, can also be analyzed as acts of remediation. In this seminar we will explore some of the ways in which space is represented for public consumption, making it, in different ways, an extension of life on earth. Drawing from popular culture, popular science, and public relations, our intention is to reflect upon what the promotion of space science and exploration tells us about who space will really be for.

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.

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, viral panemics, Superbugs, climate change, nuclear meltdowns, economic crises, lab-grown meat, Artificial Intelligence, or even unidentified aerial phenomena (AUPs, formerly 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

First coined by Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon, Indigenous futurism riffs on the tradition of Afrofuturism to describe cultural production that imagines and represents Indigenous futures against and beyond settler colonialism. Settler colonialism’s aim, of course, is to foreclose such Indigenous futures, and Indigenous futurisms disrupt this foreclosure in myriad ways. This Senior Seminar will explore these myriad ways, studying media of Indigenous futurism in two ways. First, we will critically survey Indigenous cultural production ranging from visual art to video games that express elements of Indigenous futurisms. And, second, we will explore how Indigenous de- and anti-colonial movements enact principles of Indigenous futurisms in the present. We will develop frameworks of analysis through weekly theoretical readings and apply these frameworks throughout the course. Students will gain a deeper understanding of Indigenous worldviews and lifeways, historical and ongoing expressions of settler colonialism in what is now called Canada, and, more broadly, how media shape futures. Assignments will be both creative and critical in nature.

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 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

Holding 97% of Canada’s oil, whose proven reserves are the third largest on the planet, Alberta’s oil sands are, to put it lightly, a contentious project. The sands are seen by some as a source of widespread wealth that fuels the Canadian economy. But they have also been described by journalist Chris Turner in The Patch: The People, Pipelines, and Politics of the Oil Sands (2017) as “the first major battleground in a global conflict over the future of energy in the Anthropocene epoch.” This course takes Turner’s observation as a point of departure to investigate how competing representations of the oil sands have culminated in something of an oil culture wars in Canada. Oil culture wars draws attention to how the conflict between those content with the present fossil fuel society and those who seek to move beyond it has moved from boardrooms and streets into an expanded media landscape. In these ways, culture, which includes how we think, feel, and relate to Canadian oil, and the broader media landscape has become a site of struggle over our energy futures. This course examines the contours of the oil culture wars in Canada through an engagement with media campaigns and communications strategies produced and employed by key oil sands stakeholders who support or challenge the oil sands megaproject from its inception in the late 1960s to the present. These stakeholders include government, industry, Indigenous communities and nations, Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations (ENGOs), and civil society. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the political economy and ecology of the oil sands region, the state of environmental, science, and climate change communication today, as well as current debates within environmental media studies and the energy humanities. Assignments will be both creative and critical in nature.

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.

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2023/24 Course Offerings

2023/24 Proposed Special Topics Descriptions

Communication Studies Course Offerings

2023/24 Course Offerings

2023/24 Proposed Special Topics Descriptions

CS240: Special Topics

CS340: Special Topics

CS400: Senior Seminar in Communication Studies

CS411: Advanced Studies in Media and Communication History

CS412: Advanced Studies in Media and Cultural Theory

CS413: Advanced Studies in Visual Communication

CS414: Advanced Studies in Global Communication

CS415: Advanced Studies in Cultural and Creative Industries

CS416: Advanced Studies in Digital Studies and Social Media