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.

The idea of “the masses” or a “mass audience” for anything was a new idea at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries and attracted the attention of scholars across a number of disciplines. This course examines some of this nascent and foundational (i.e. old) communication studies research, which wasn’t even called that because “communication studies” did not yet exist.  What we see when we do this is not just the emergence of communications studies as a field of inquiry but also the crystallization, and early repeated treatment, of certain questions, including the relationship of the then-newly-emergent “mass media” to individuals, communities and to society at large. Key terms in these early considerations are “leisure” – itself a concept understood in a new way in the early 20th century – “mass culture,” “influence,” and “taste.”  With these signposts guiding us, we proceed from this proto-communication studies research to the public and intellectual battle of the 1950s and early ‘60s known as the “mass culture debates,” leading us to some more recent considerations of these century-old questions, in the contemporary context.

This course is an exploration of a number of critical approaches to risk communication, framed by a number of case studies. It examines the ways that risk messages are created, the influence they have on public understandings of science, and the effect these understandings have on attitudes and ideas regarding risk. Looking first to the ways that risk may be theorized, constructed and codified, this course then explores the role of media in evaluating and disseminating risk messages. The role played by news media in risk communication, and a look to risk communication by government, non-governmental organizations (such as Greenpeace and the AIDS Committee of Toronto), and other risk stakeholders (such as the pharmaceutical and insurance industries) is explored.

Are white American children being taught to hate themselves? Are American teachers indoctrinating children to ‘hate America’? Are campus ‘snowflakes’ running amok over conservative students? Are professors indoctrinating students in ‘cultural Marxism’? Is ‘free speech’ on campus in danger of disappearing? Are the ‘moral panics’ around ‘Critical Race Theory’™ and ‘Free Speech’™ manufactured by a network of well-funded right-wing organisations, provocateurs and media?

This course begins with a brief focus on the origins of the present ‘moral panics’ and ‘free speech crises’ in the debates around ‘political correctness’ in the 1980s and 1990s before examining contemporary manifestations. It examines the organisational, structural and institutional supports for manufacturing ‘free speech crises’ on campuses and other contemporary moral panics, such as the ‘anti-CRT’ movement in the USA, and the ways in which some organisations and individuals have responded. It will also focus on both the (social) media tactics and the ways in which arguments are articulated and their rhetorical appeals to the public as well as others’ attempts at countering these kinds of tactics. We will also examine how legacy journalism reports on ‘moral panics’. Key concepts include ‘free speech’, ‘freedom of expression’, ‘hate speech’, ‘moral panic’ and ‘academic freedom’.

This course addresses historical and contemporary practices of self-tracking from weight scales and height tables to wearable and ingestible self-tracking technologies. There is an extensive body of academic research on self-tracking technologies and practices, the bulk of which emphasizes medical uses (such as blood monitoring for diabetes).  By contrast, we will focus on self-tracking through a more critical / cultural lens and as it relates to larger conceptions of fitness and wellness, such as the promotion of FitBits, Apple and Garmin watches and the many related apps through which we track everything from what we put into our bodies to what we perform with our bodies.

The course is framed around the intersection of quantification and embodiment. 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?  Who has access to our self-tracked data and to what ends? What, if anything, is new about contemporary self-tracking practices?  To address these and related questions, we will supplement course readings with an exploration of our own practices of self-tracking.

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.