COMH - Communication Honors

This faculty-led travel course takes students abroad to produce a documentary film about local changemakers in a foreign country. Students prepare for the trip at UT during the second half of the Spring semester, then travel to their destination over an extended May term to research, prepare, and produce a short documentary advocating a social issue through visual storytelling. Working under the guidance of UT professors and Actuality Media production managers, students also experience cross-cultural encounters with local food, art, history, commerce, and natural landscapes. In the following semester, students premiere their films as part of an Honors Symposium on campus. There are no language or production prerequisites for this course and its focus on media activism, public policy, and social entrepreneurship has the potential to appeal to students majoring in Communication, Entrepreneurship, Government and World Affairs, International Business, International and Cultural Studies, Public Health, and Sociology. Locations (such as Ecuador and Morocco) vary from year-to-year.

Through a thematic and largely chronological approach, this class explores the revolutionary in relation to TV. The bulk of the course focuses on the people who pushed TV in new directions and the programs that directly challenged social norms. The course introduces students to the historical and ongoing revolutions in the technology of TV in addition to social, cultural and technological theory. Students will do close readings of TV “texts” and read key and classic works in the field of television studies. May be used to satisfy general distribution requirements in the humanities if not used for the major.

For Honors Program students only. This course is an exploration of the concept of "ethnicity" and how it may be expressed through literature and film. May be used to satisfy general distribution requirements in the humanities if not used for the major.