Graduate Courses

This team-taught course introduces students to the core concerns, theoretical concepts and research approaches in communication studies. Particular attention will be paid to the areas of research specialization of faculty. This mandatory course is designed to enable students to do the preparatory work necessary to their research projects.

This course will provide students with advanced training in the methods of research employed in the field of communication studies. Students study reactive or interactive research methods (participant observation, experimental designs, surveys and interviewing) and unobtrusive or non-reactive methodological designs (discourse analysis, semiotics, content analysis, and rhetorical and historical approaches). Students are encouraged to develop their major research paper or thesis research proposal as the final assignment for this course.

One of the most exciting developments in media, communication, and cultural studies over the past few decades has been the emergence of “sound studies” has emerged as a distinctive field of scholarly inquiry. This course will explore the contours of this emergent field, as well as the core concepts that orient the bearing of its scholars towards the critical analysis of sound as phenomenon, cultural event, and social practice.  The course will proceed in three parts. The first part of the course will introduce students to some of the key concepts and themes in sound studies. These include the phenomenology of sound, the relationship of sound to noise and silence, the sonic constitution of space and space, and the centrality of sound, aurality, and orality to the perspectives of media ecology and materialist media history/archaeology. The second part of the course delves into the specific histories and genealogies of the primary modern media forms, technologies and communicative practices that have sound and aurality at their core: phonography, telephony, and radio.  The third part of the course examines two case studies of the relationship of sound to social and cultural power: the “low end theory” of the vibrational power of bass and the embodiment of sonic experience.

The course introduces students to discourse analysis as a method of critical inquiry by laying out the processes of doing discourse-focused research. Possible approaches include genealogical/dispositif analysis (Foucauldian), Critical Discourse Analysis, and/or the Essex School of discourse analysis. The course gives students a toolkit for analyzing spoken and written text, images, material artefacts, and music. Organized into four stages, the course: 1) introduces the basic principles of the approach(es); 2) introduces survey data collection methods and choosing appropriate data; 3) provides guidance to doing the actual work of analysis; and 4) assists students in refining their approach and applying it to their own research.

Aesthetic objects such as visual art, performance, installation, dance, and sound aim to provoke an intervention into our ways of knowing and being in relation to ourselves and the wider world. Moving beyond a consideration of art as representation, this course considers the status of the aesthetic as a method: a way of encountering experience and making new knowledge. Drawing on psychoanalytic theories of creativity and aesthetic case studies, the course explores the creative gesture as a method for interpreting the difficult dilemmas of living, while opening the capacity for new forms of thought, experience, and relationality. Together we consider how the material qualities of aesthetic objects reckon with relations of power while sustaining the interpretive potential of unknowability. Students will also explore research-creation as a cultural studies/communication studies methodology.

‘Culture wars’ are ideological struggles over issues seen as outside of political-economic structures: e.g. abortion, sexuality, multiculturalism. These areas of controversy are a war over differing values, beliefs, attitudes etc: i.e. ideological worldviews. We will examine key concepts, including ‘political correctness’, ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, before turning to the origins of culture war discourses in the 1990s. We then examine institutional and organizational support for ‘culture wars’ before focusing on some of the following contemporary examples: ‘The 1619 Project’; anti-‘Critical Race Theory’ campaigns; residential schools and ‘cultural genocide’’; the #MeToo campaign and backlash; ‘Cultural Marxism’; and the anti-trans ideological agenda.