400

Students study American political culture using a rhetorical lens. They analyze the rhetorical strategies used in political messages, that create, maintain, and denigrate our political institutions. Students gain an appreciation and understanding how humans use symbols and how the symbols that humans create use them. They can see how political rhetoric can liberate us and confine us.

This course draws on critical media theory to investigate social media through its broad ability to organize for social change, undermine governments, and polarize politics. Students learn to challenge corporate definitions of social media, while providing tools to analyze the underlying values expressed across platforms. This course relies on case studies to explore topics such as protest, identity, and surveillance.

Survey course designed to increase student's understanding of the United States First Amendment law as it relates to individual citizens, mass media, environmental protections, and organizational communication. Ethical considerations inherent in communication law decisions are emphasized.

East Africa is one of the planet's riches sites of human and nonhuman ecological histories and provides the ideal space to study diversity and ecological entanglement. Topics include environmental communication, eco-tourism, conservation, post-colonialism and neocolonialism, climate change, and slavery and trade.

This course develops the ability to identify and analyze assumptions underlying theoretical models of communication that shape knowledge about ourselves, others, and reality. The course investigates major explanatory theories of communication. Students develop foundational knowledge about the communication discipline, equipping them in all other courses in their major.

This course explores barriers to effective communication between members of differing social groups (sexes, races, generations, etc.). Consideration is given to causes of problems and effective strategies for solutions.

This course explores how to communicate during conflict in ways that create intimacy, connection, and peace in relationships, organizations, and society. This class begins by developing contemporary theory about communication, conflict, and peace. Students apply this theoretical frame to inform and shape practical skills that aid in ethically and constructively engaging in conflict communication.

Students learn about and explore romantic, familial, platonic, earthly, and sometimes “radical” relationships through various interpersonal, mediated, and culturally-situated communication concepts and theories. Special focus is given to the ways love, care, and/or grief inform our lived experience(s) over the life cycle. Topics span philosophies of birth, death, suicide, joy, fertility, queerness, eco-spirituality, and otherness.

This course integrates social scientific, interpretive, and critical scholarship connections between cultures and interactions. Encoded in communication, it unpacks how people’s cultures shape – and are shaped by – their socio-cultural realities, identities, and interactions across boundaries. It also applies that knowledge to help learners advance their cultural sensitivity, engagement, flexibility, and effectiveness in intercultural situations.

Students learn about the ideology of “the global commons” by considering what stories are told and what stories are hidden, whose positionalities are celebrated and whose are disappeared, and how liberation may be possible for our future work and relationships with/in the era of climate collapse. Special attention is given to indigenous, feminist, flora, and fauna ways of knowing.

This course explores current organizational issues from a critical perspective. Students use organizational communication theory to unpack various topics including gendered and raced labor, culture and identity, work/life balance, and organizational power and decision-making. An underlying theme of this course is the transformative potential of meaningful work in various contexts, such as for-profit, nonprofit, and global organizations.

This course offers an advanced investigation of organizational culture. Students will identify symbolic organizing practices and ideological meanings tied to them, and examine how plural cultural meanings and beliefs inform organizing practices. Topics include organizational ethnography, cultural diversity, and social justice. Drawing from interpretive and critical traditions, students will design and implement an advanced research project.

Examines the cultural significance and accomplishments of visuality. Considers the social and political implications of “looking” practices, the impact of “representation” in contemporary culture, and the circulation of images (through virality and sharing practices). Specific focus on race, gender and class and the role that visual images play in cultural perceptions of and practices toward race and racialized bodies. 

Students study and write media criticism which closely analyzes messages as cultural repositories of meaning or which investigates the interaction between media and culture. Emphasis is on the method, stance, and purpose of media critics.

Explores the influence of film on American culture. Students explore theories and ideas concerning film, society, conflict, visual persuasion, and narrative. Students view popular American films as focal points for lecture and discussion.

This course provides critical analysis and instruction about news that seeks to serve the public’s interest. Students learn to research, report, and write in-depth, interpretive, and analytical stories on public affairs in areas such as crime and police, environment, healthcare, politics, and education. Students learn how the press can best serve democracy and its role in public knowledge and debate.

This course teaches the fundamental nonfiction storytelling skills of professional media production. These skills are applicable to careers in public relations, marketing, journalism, or any modern communication field. Students gain hands-on experience with photo, audio and video production gear, analyze the work of professional producers and their peers, and discuss the many ethical questions that come along with nonfiction storytelling. 

Students learn and apply communication theories to critically analyze contemporary discourses and counter-discourses surrounding ecology, environmentalism, and environmental justice. Students unpack and interrogate how their own assumptions, beliefs, language, and practices support and/or resist various environmental narratives around plants, nonhuman animals, food systems, and climate communication.

This course provides a space to reflect, synthesize, and apply knowledge developed as a Communication Major or Organizational Communication Major. Students design and implement a semester-long culminating capstone project that showcases majors’ knowledge and competence in communication. Senior projects integrate theories, concepts, and processes learned as a major to generate knowledge and new applied communication practices about social issues.

Credit arranged.

Credit arranged.

Credit arranged.

Credit arranged.

Credit arranged.

This course provides reflective, specific guidance in applying communication theories to a professional communication setting. Students learn how to observe and apply theory to practice, increasing their understanding and ability to function successfully in a professional communication setting by working directly with a qualified internship supervisor and academic internship director. May be taken twice, only 3 credits apply to major.

This course is under the direction of a faculty adviser or within a class context, leading to a scholarly thesis document with a presentation of results. Students demonstrate advanced knowledge and research expertise in the communication field by designing, conducting, and implementing an original thesis study.