In this course, students study the characteristics and social significance of mass media, including video games, social media, television, film, radio, recorded music, books, newspapers, and more. Students will gain an understanding of media’s power to influence our thoughts and actions. The learning objectives for this course include: understanding the historical development of mass communication technologies, understanding how basic concepts of media law and ethics are applied, thinking critically about mass media as an integral part of culture, and analyzing the complex roles of media economics in shaping media production and consumption.

This course introduces students to the study of interpersonal communication and culture by developing our understanding of communicative processes and practices that occur between people in face to face interactions. Students will gain an understanding of how whenever we communicate, we mean so much more than the literal words we say, and that our competency to communicate is at least in part due to our socialization in our culture. Learning objectives include being able to identify various dimensions of communication, how to analyze communication, and being able to connect communication to social structures.

This course examines the documentary tradition in film, television, and new media. Throughout the semester, we will analyze the various elements that contribute to the creation of informative, moving, and powerful works of documentary media. We will examine a range of techniques and modes of representation that documentarians use to effectively communicate their ideas through audiovisual forms. We will learn about ethical issues involved in using nonfiction media to promote social change, and we will consider how technological developments over time have led to new ethical questions. Students will also produce their own short documentaries in order to put what they have learned into practice. The class includes readings, screenings, short writing assignments, and the production of a short video. Learning objectives include: understanding how the documentary impulse has manifested itself across media and throughout history; evaluating the effectiveness of past attempts to spark social change through documentary; analyzing documentary texts via their modes of representing historical reality, their strategies for developing effective arguments, and the variety of experiences they offer audiences; and analyzing how different perspectives, production methods, and rhetorical constraints shape documentary expressions of the “real world.”

This course provides students with an opportunity to investigate how communication plays a fundamental role in our perceptions of place, nature, and the environment. Students will explore a variety of essays and media to analyze how we talk about the natural world including how environmental issues are communicated. Learning objectives include being able to think critically about how communication mediates the relationship between people and places, how we come to know “places,” “nature,” and our environment through what we say, and how issues related to place, nature, and the environment have been communicated to various publics.

Social movements exist within conditions that are particularly inhospitable for effective communication. Movements often seek to persuade people to adopt views that are unpopular—if the things a movement called for were already popular, the movement wouldn’t need to exist. Most movements work with a fraction of the resources available to proponents of the status quo: they often rely on volunteer labor to coordinate their messaging, and they lack institutional access to traditional broadcast media to amplify their messaging. They may even become targets of violence. How, then, do movements communicate effectively? To answer that question, we will consider interpersonal communication between community organizers, public speech that attempts to move people to action, mass media narratives in which movement organizers try to make their voices heard, and new media that provides new challenges and opportunities for movements. The course will focus primarily on movements in the US over the last decade, though some older cases and some movements from elsewhere will also be examined to help contextualize more recent developments.