Graduate Courses

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.