Communication Studies Course Offerings

CS340M Critical Studies in Health Communication

Public understandings of what does and does not constitute health and what behaviours promote it are increasingly shaped by communication practices. This course will explore these communication practices, critically assessing the assumptions that underlie them in order to assess how our ideas about health, and attendant ideas about illness or disease, are framed in it and with what affects. We will look to diverse genres of health communication, including public service announcements, direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceutical products, and social marketing campaigns, in order to critically study the ways health is represented and how health messages are constructed. We will also look to current examples of communication in case studies that may include Superbugs and antibiotic resistance, outbreaks and pandemics, the dieting and exercise industries, and recent discussions of the microbiome in health and illness.

CS340n Design as Visual Communication (Summer 2019)

Our world is filled with and shaped by designed objects. The things we do and the beliefs we hold are mediated by conventions in design practice that we in turn visually consume. This course will offer students a toolkit for critically analysing, the visual meanings these objects afford us. Through a series of workshops, culminating in a speculative design project, the role of colour, layout, typography, iconography, shape, materials and other such choices will be explored.

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: Cancelled

CS400C Remaking Work in the Digital Age

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

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.

CS400E Communication and Transportation

In Communication Studies, it is commonly held that communication and transportation are loosely coupled spheres of symbolic action and physical action. Through examining automobilities, this seminar posits that communication and transportation are more tightly coupled than generally stated. We will consider what this tight coupling means for how we define and study communication, communication media and communication practices. Automobilities is the global assemblage of hegemonic car culture. The assemblage is comprised of socio-technical, ideological and phenomenological articulations or, in other words, social and technological infrastructures, normative values and ideas, and personal experiences that connect and sustain the dominance of car culture worldwide. Among the topics we may examine are Fordism, post-Fordism and labour flows in automobile industries; automobilities and nationalism; taxis and police cars as media; CB radios, turntables and other old media in cars; the ideological terrains of roads, road movies and Google maps; flying cars, floating cars and other future car scenarios; subcultures of auto couture, lowriding and car collecting; parking, pollution and post-automobilities in the Anthropocene; driving while passengering in autonomous cars; the Internet of Cars; the affects of car shows and walk-around videos; and the communicative power of road rage and car bombs. We will read critical scholarship from Communication Studies, Transport Studies, Cultural Studies and Mobilities Studies. Assignments will include “traffic reports,” keyword probes and an original research project.

CS400F Moral Panics and Risk Society

In his text Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and the Rockers, Stanley Cohen argues that moral panics are constructed around social conditions, events, or people as a result of the perception of threat to societal values and interests. Primarily concerned with social anxieties focused on youth cultures, Cohen’s classic articulation of moral panic has been expanded and revised in order to address a broader range of social issues and their relation to media. Some have brought moral panic theory into conversation with the notion of “risk society,” arguing that moral panics now overlap with other anxieties around environmental, economic, technological, and medical issues. Others have argued that moral panic theory needs to critically address the consequences of fear mongering by media, politicians, and experts in what has been called the “culture of fear.” This course combines theoretical exploration of the concepts of moral panic and risk society with the study of historical and contemporary case studies related to both “youth at risk” and environmental, economic, technological, and medical risk issues.

CS400G Gender, Migration and Mobilities

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.

CS400H Music, Technology & Effect

How has the shift from analogue to digital culture changed our concept of not only how music is distributed, but also of what music is?  How are the values of today's digital remixes and mash-ups shaped by the practices of Jamaican producers in the 1960s?  How have music technologies both undermined and been exploited by the culture industries, and shaped the political economy of music?  This seminar is framed by Culkin's (1967) observation that "we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us" to explore and apply what Katz (2010) has called "the phonograph effect": the ways technology effects meaning in music production, distribution, and consumption.  Drawing on theoretical lenses from cultural, media and sound studies, students will consider the mediating role of technologies used for recording (phonographs, multitrack tape recorders, DAWs), manipulation (compression, reverb, Auto Tune), composition (instruments, drum machines, smartphones), and listening and distribution (78s, MP3s, radio, the internet) on musical values and practices such as remixing, sampling, plunderphonics, dub plates, turntablism, and file sharing.

CS400I Music and Society

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.

CS400M Cultural Industries in Canada

Canada's cultural industries encompass book, periodical, newspaper and online publishing; radio and television broadcasting; film, television and video production; telecommunications; video game production; the music industry and various work under the umbrella of "new media."  These industries represent a major sector of the Canadian economy and exert profound influence on many aspects of Canadian life and on cultures around the world.  This course examines these cultural industries in Canada.

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 (1992), we live in what might best be characterized as an emerging “Risk Society.” Whole industries are concerned with the production of knowledges about the risks we confront, while others, primarily the news media, have the task of communicating information concerning risk to the so-called “general public.” In this senior seminar, we will explore the production and dissemination of “knowledges” about risk in what has come to be known as “risk communication.” We will look to the ways that individuals and their behaviours come to be problematized in the production of knowledges around risk as well as the social, political, and cultural implications of such problematization. We will address questions regarding the ways that “information” about risk both feeds out of and informs social and cultural norms, and how we as individuals negotiate and assess risk in our daily lives. Working through case studies that may range from BSE or Mad Cow Disease and HIV/AIDS, the threat of the atomic bomb and the Cold War, the “War on Terrorism,” and to genetically modified foods and the Walkerton water crisis, we will address not only the ways that “information” is produced and communicated but also the strategies we use to respond to or resist information about the risks we face on individual, community, and global levels.

• CS400V: Cancelled

CS400W Material Culture as Social Discourse

What can things communicate and how do we communicate through things? This seminar will invite students to consider the role of material culture in communication. Commencing with but quickly departing from the more familiar object-as-text approach, students will be directed through a number of different but overlapping approaches to the meaningfulness of things, including actor-network theory, consumption studies, and posthumanism. Drawing from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology, sociology, cultural and media studies, and linguistics, students will be expected to be open to venturing into areas of study that may require further background reading on their part.

• CS400X: Cancelled

CS400Y Work and Culture in Tech Ecologies

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.

CS411D Here Come the 70's

In some ways a continuation of the turbulent 1960s and in other ways a repudiation of the advances gained, the 1970s was a decade of contradictions. The Vietnam War raged on; there were the Pentagon Papers and Watergate; the FLQ crisis; airplane hijackings and terrorism worldwide. The 70s also brought punk, disco, and Abba; the second golden age of American cinema; the introduction of the video cassette, cable TV, and the first home computer system. This course examines major political, media and cultural events of the 1970s in their unique historical context and their lasting legacy. Not to mention, of course, David Bowie.

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.

CS412C Communities and Communication

This course will examine the existing and created connections between communication and communities in contemporary societies. Focusing on the myriad relationships between talking and listening, and the transition to community building, the course provides an opportunity for students to study communication as a public and community resource.

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

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.

CS413D Communication and the Built Environment

This course examines the visual and spatial politics of the built environment.  Possible topics include urban/architectural design as it relates to race, gender and class, the relationship between space and power, design discourses, the Creative City, city branding, the communicative city, and globalization.

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.

CS414D Media in the Global South

This course examines the conditions of media of the global south from a variety of perspectives.  Specifically it engages questions around the nature of television, radio, the internet and alternative media in the global south in relation to the unique contexts of that geopolitical region.

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.

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

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.

CS416C Comparative Digital Privacies

This course investigates privacy in the digital world from the cultural, social, communication, and policy perspectives.  Taking a comparative approach, privacy related to digital communication is compared across several global regions in an attempt to understand the distinctiveness of privacy in those regions.