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Graduate Courses
We offer six courses each year. CS600 and CS601 are required courses. You must also register for CS695 or CS699 while working on your MRP or thesis. Please see the academic calendar for more course information.
You are allowed to take up to 1.0 credit from other graduate programs with approval from the graduate coordinator. In the past, Communication Studies master's students have taken graduate courses in programs such as Cultural Analysis and Social Theory, English and Film Studies, and Political Science.
2024/25 Course Offerings
Fall 2024
CS600 Graduate Seminar in Communication Studies (R 8:30-11:20 a.m.)
CS601 Communication Studies Research Methods (W 1-3:50 p.m.)
CS605 Critical Theory (W 8:30-11:20 a.m.)
Winter 2025
CS602 Mobilities (T 8:30-11:20 a.m.)
CS640u Communication and the Senses (W 8:30-11:20 a.m.)
CS640v Black Feminist Thought (R 8:30-11:20 a.m.)
Spring 2025
CS640r/CQ640f Art As Method (Intersession, tentatively, TR 1-3:50 p.m.)
2025/26 Course Offerings
CS600 Graduate Seminar in Communication Studies
CS601 Communication Studies Research Methods
CS640k Sound, Aurality and Power
CS640i Platform Studies
CS640w Mapping Communication Studies
CS640x Decolonizing Feminism
Special Topics Descriptions
This course explores how communication study implicates the human sensorium (sight, smell, taste, touch, sound). We'll proceed across the five senses, discussing at each turn the imperial hierarchy of the senses, the history of the separation of the senses, the body as sensing medium, and the politics of sensing vs. knowing. Along the way, we will fold in discussions on intermedia art, synaesthesia, and “leaky” media (such as haptic film and sonic photographs). Texts to be examined include Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, David Howes’ Empire of the Senses, Dick Higgins’ “Intermedia,” Walter Mignolo and Rolando’s Vazquez’s “Decolonial AestheSis,” and Tina Campt’s Listening to Images. This graduate seminar will combine inquiry into the human sensorium through theory and practice; final projects will have a research creation option.
This course offers an introduction to Black feminist and womanist theories across geography, culture and time. To contextualize Black women’s experiences, class discussions will center Black women’s discourses and highlight how Black feminist thought shapes understandings of race, class, sexuality, and gender throughout the African diaspora. While informed by the histories and legacies of slavery and colonialism, Black Feminist Thought will take up questions of diaspora, nation and being, while challenging heteropatriarchy and other overlapping forms of social oppression.
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.
The ancient media formations attendant upon sound, orality and aurality comprise one of the foundational communicative practices of human sociality and culture. Yet, despite the deep anthropological and historical centrality of sound to the human sensorium and cultural creativity, it has only been in the last twenty years or so that “sound studies” has emerged as a distinctive field within (and alongside) media and communication studies. This course will explore the contours of this exciting 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 study of platforms is on the rise. While platform studies originally emerged from hardware studies as an integrated attempt to study the hardware, software, code, marketing, and use of computational technologies—especially, early on, video game consoles—its use has been broadened to include the study of software platforms, such as social media sites, and the particular affordances they offer for users, including their algorithmic decision making; their terms of service; their background code environments; and their embeddedness in neoliberal capitalism (selling user data, acting as space to display advertisements, etc.). This holistic approach to studying technology encompasses everything from minute details (such as how buttons or LEDs might be configured on a MINITEL console, or XBOX360 game controller; the way that privacy settings are displayed to users on Facebook; the packaging of an Apple product), to the broad and situated socio-political context of corporations (such as the gender make up of development teams at Nintendo; or the political investments of members of the Board of Directors at Twitter). This course will unpack the politics of platforms through an intensive study of key texts in the field, tracking significant debates and discussions, as well as new developments.
What is Communication Studies, anyway? In this course, we’ll explore the contested formation of the discipline, working across intellectual, contextual, and institutional dimensions. Given the scope of its topic, the course is necessarily selective in its coverage. We’ll start by considering efforts to delineate the idea of communication. Next, we’ll review broad surveys of the field, paying particular attention to absences or erasures in origin stories of Communication Studies. We’ll then explore examples of significant “turns” in Communication research – such as turns to infrastructure and mediatization – and examine shifts in the institutional sites of Communication Studies. Finally, we’ll address recent critical interventions in the discipline, including around #CommunicationSoWhite, de-Westernization, and climate crisis, reconsidering how earlier material in the course is implicated in these reckonings. The course will equip students with resources to navigate the discipline, locate their research interests within it, and appreciate the role of reflexivity in sustaining Communication Studies as a dynamic field.
This course considers the past and present of settler colonialism in Canada and the ways feminist movements have challenged and/or reinforced these relations in theory and practice. It centers the voices of Indigenous scholars, activists and allied feminists to explore the tensions and possibilities of alliance that exist between movements struggling against capitalist, heteropatriarchal, colonial and/or white supremacist relations. What are Indigenous critiques of feminism? How might feminism be a tool of decolonization? Students will learn of key terms, theories and politics, and will apply this knowledge through the study of historical and current issues facing Indigenous peoples.
Additional Courses
CS690 Directed Studies
A selected research project supervised by an individual faculty member.
CS695 Major Research Paper
A major research project to be undertaken on an approved topic and in accordance with the guidelines of the department.
CS699 Thesis
An independent thesis project to be undertaken on an approved topic based upon research connected with the discipline of communication studies and in accordance with the guidelines of the department.