400

Students study the American political culture using a rhetorical framework. They evaluate the rhetorical strategies used in campaigns, that create, maintain, and denigrate our political institutions. They examine the political strategies used in deliberative and constitutive rhetoric.

This course overviews relationships between computer-mediated communication (CMC) and several forms and functions of human activity. It explores how humans use computers to construct knowledge, relationships, and specific realities. Utilizing different social media applications and tools will help identify, explain, and understand interrelationships among CMC, language, and identities.

Survey course designed to increase student's understanding of First Amendment law as it relates to individual citizens, mass media, and corporate 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.

Communication is a diverse discipline. This course provides students with a framework for understanding the variety of theories that influence what we know about human communication. This course investigates major explanatory theories of communication, with an emphasis on understanding theorizing as a powerful process of constructing knowledge and reality

This course investigates dynamics of differences that frame, enable, and constrain people’s communication opportunities across diverse social identity groupings. Focusing on ‘isms’ related to race, gender, sex, social class, ability, sexuality, and age, its learning activities apply theory and scholarship to understand, integrate, and more insightfully navigate interactions across the welcome range of human differences.

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.

An intensive study of orientations toward managing disputes and of specific processes and techniques currently in use. The course includes consideration of both organizational and interpersonal disputes and also focuses on the role of the mediator.

Investigates the dynamics of human communication in building, maintaining, or altering interpersonal relationships. Particular emphasis is given to family communication.

Course provides an introduction to the dynamics of intercultural communication. Content includes learning the importance of understanding one’s own culture, navigating cultural similarities and differences through communication, and negotiating skilled, adaptive identities within and across cultures.

The course examines alternative perspectives on international development, especially gender analysis in intercultural relationships, cross-cultural communication, peace and security, and nation building.  Focusing on dignity and social justice, students learn to analyze, reflect on, and deconstruct narratives about gender and culture in ways that demystify the interplay among individuals, political leaders, non-profits, and the nation in international development.

This course investigates organizations as sites of power, control, and influence. Major topics for the course include understanding organizations as raced, gendered, abled, classed, heteronormative, and more. An underlying theme of this course is to explore and consider how human communication sustains or transforms organizational power, control, oppression, and influence. 

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

Students study theory and analysis of visual public messages to understand the means of visual persuasion by rhetors who create important images, pictures, and designs. Students investigate ethical and influence dynamics of visual message design.

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

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

Provides instruction about news reporting of public affairs. Students learn to research, report, and write in-depth, interpretive, and analytical stories on public affairs in areas such as crime and police, courts, government, politics, and education. Students learn public records requests, common problems and techniques for covering public affairs agencies.

Prepares students to work in an online news environment where emerging devices, technologies, and social media are innovatively changing and challenging journalism practices.  Students learn how to report, write, and produce stories for online news audiences. Students will produce and edit original content with audio, photographs, video, maps, info graphics, and text, and evaluate and critique current online journalism practices.

Students learn how we experience and relate to the environment through various communication processes. The course applies communication theories to critically analyze contemporary discourses and counter-discourses on ecology, environmentalism, and environmental justice. Students utilize existing resources to examine how their own assumptions, beliefs, language, and practices support and/or resist various environmental narratives.

Under faculty supervision, each student works independently on a comprehensive project designed to display advanced skills.

Credit arranged.

Credit arranged.

Credit arranged.

Credit arranged.

Credit arranged.

Communication or organizational communication majors may undertake on-the-job training positions with professional organizations. This course is designed to provide reflective, specific guidance in applying students’ academic experience to a professional communication experience. Students may receive an IP (In Progress) grade until completion of their internship. May be taken twice. Only 3 credits can apply to the major.

Research, study, or original work under the direction of a faculty mentor, leading to a scholarly thesis document with a public presentation of results. Requires approval of thesis director, department chair, dean, and the director of the honors program, when appropriate.