COMM 226: Introduction to Political Communication (Fall 2020)

Instructor: Kathleen Hall Jamieson

This course is an introduction to the field of political communication and conceptual approaches to analyzing communication in various forms, including advertising, speech making, campaign debates, and candidates' and office-holders' uses of social media and efforts to frame news. The focus of this course is on the interplay in the U.S. between media and politics. The course includes a history of campaign practices from the 1952 presidential contest through the election of 2020.

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COMM 130: Media Industries and Society (Spring 2019)

Instructor: Lee McGuigan

The aim of this course is to prepare you to work in the media business as well as to be an informed citizen by acquainting you with the work and language of media practitioners. The class also investigates the exciting, and (to some employed there) scary changes taking place in the news industry, internet industry, advertising industry, television industry, movie industry, magazine industry, and several other areas of the media system. In doing that, the course ranges over economic, political, legal, historical, and cultural considerations that shape what we see when we go online, use social media, watch TV, read books, play video games, and more. This course fulfills one of the two introductory core survey courses required of Communication majors or prospective majors.

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COMM 220: Media, Culture, and Society in China (Fall 2018)

Instructor: Guobin Yang

This course covers contemporary Chinese media, culture, and society (1976- present). China today is a

profoundly different world from when its economic reform was launched at the end of the 1970s. We will survey some of the major changes that have taken place and analyze the causes and consequences of change, with some emphasis on media.In our analysis, we will make use of concepts and theories from sociology, communication, and other fields. In understanding the processes of social change, we attach importance to a historical perspective. At the same time, we will deveop a balanced view of social change as the outcomes of the interplay of multiple forces, both endogenous and exogenous. We will analyze the constraints of structural and institutions forces as well as the agency of the people. Narratives about China a re of ten contested and multiple. We embrace pluralism and openness in our discussions. This course will help you develop a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of important issues in contemporary China. The theoretical approaches we will cover will be applicable to the study of media and social change more broadly.

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​Making Teaching Accessible and Inclusive for Students (90min workshop)

Equal opportunity to fully participate in education is a civil right. But how can we, as graduate students, make our classrooms accessible and inclusive for all students? In this session, we will discuss institutional policies and pedagogical practices to create an accessibility-conscious classroom to better meet the needs of all your students. We will discuss some of the challenges students with disabilities have faced and may continue to face in seeking equal access to the classroom; the language of accessibility and inclusion; and what kinds of services are available to support students seeking accommodations. By familiarizing ourselves with these tools and histories, we can work to combat stereotypes and misconceptions about students with disabilities and instead promote an environment where differences are recognized and welcomed.

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Download PDF of workshop slides

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Using and Creating Social Media in the Classroom (90min workshop)

As social media companies grapple with the proliferation of mis- and disinformation on their platforms, a large portion of people around the world rely on these services for news and reporting of current events. According to Pew Research, around half of American adults get their news from social media "often" or "sometimes". Further, being adept with social media has become a desirable skill for employers and may affect future employment outcomes. Along with the influence of social media, there are a plethora of privacy and social justice concerns when it comes to social media use. This workshop will consider what instructors need to know before incorporating social media content and assignments into their syllabi.

 

Download PDF of workshop slides

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PROPOSED COURSES

 

​Introduction to Digital Culture (Undergraduate)

Social media platforms are digital places where millions of teens and young adults explore their identities in public, while also being prominent places for ideological formation, political activism, and trolling. This course introduces key terms for studying digital culture and its impact on society. We will look at the origins and development of terms such as going viral, influencers, trolls, fake news, shadow banning, false flags, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories online. We will consider various cultures of the internet from online gaming to influencer culture and how these spaces construct ideas of gender, race, and class. Students will reflect on how digital culture has influenced politics and how political actors are using social media to connect with their audiences. We will look at global case studies to understand how internet cultures differ across national, linguistic, and sociocultural boundaries. By the end of the course, students will have working knowledge and a broad vocabulary needed for the study of digital culture, while also understanding how digital culture influences social interactions.

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Digital Media & Society (Undergraduate)

From Netflix to internet-connected security cameras, digital media platforms and technologies permeate our social lives. Digital media play an increasingly central role in our society, including as public spheres, political tools, sources of entertainment and news, and as sites of commerce. Digital media can be enabling by connecting us to global markets, publics, and products. At the same time, digital media can contribute to a proliferation of social and environmental harms from the spread of viral disinformation to the mounting e-waste crisis. Digital media technologies are also changing the way we work by supporting precarious labor in the “gig-economy”; the policing of racialized groups; and promoting energy dependencies that accelerate climate change. During this course, you will develop a critical conceptual vocabulary on the social, economic, and environmental impacts of digital media technologies. Exploring concepts such as digital identity, data extraction, algorithmic discrimination, surveillance capitalism, digital infrastructures, and geographies of digital waste, you will investigate the way digital media has come to mediate our social and environmental relations.

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Rhetoric of Digital Media (Undergraduate)

Early internet terms relied on space and transportation metaphors such as the internet superhighway, internet chat rooms, and cyberspace. Now we understand our digital worlds in terms of clouds, streaming, and data as natural resource waiting to be extracted, scraped, harvested and sold as a commodity to advertisers. But what do these metaphors, myths, and narratives reveal about our relationship to our digital worlds and what do they obscure? This course explores the language and symbols used to construct competing sociotechnical imaginaries. Drawing from contemporary examples such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, virtual reality, blockchain, Web3, and the hype around the metaverse, we will study the rhetorical strategies used by tech boosters and consider which audiences are being constructed in these rhetorical acts. Together, we will analyze a range of materials from popular culture (such as memes, manifestos, film/video clips, news articles, and advertisements) to understand how the stories we tell about technology shape our relationship to the tools, devices, and platforms we all use to communicate. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify the persuasive techniques used by marketers and tech enthusiasts and understand the language we use to describe our digital world.

 

Critical Surveillance Studies (Undergraduate/Graduate)

Have you ever had the feeling that your devices are spying on you? We live in a society of ubiquitous surveillance where all of our online actions (and many of our offline activities) are meticulously tracked, catalogued, and even predicted to determine what we might do next. Oftentimes, we are sold the benefits of new technologies for their convenience and ease of use with the simple caveat that we will hand over the keys to our most personal information and allow companies to watch what we do online. But at what cost? And how do these surveillance tools affect what ads we see, what information we consume, and what news we might be exposed to? In this course, we will learn about the history of digital surveillance from the introduction of credit and financial tracking, digital cookies, spam, to the recent development in identity resolution. We’ll critically reflect on the different types of surveillances that we are exposed to—in the workplace, in schools and education settings, in urban and suburban spaces (like your doorbell!), on platforms and social media, and other seemingly banal forms of surveillance like the census or your water bill. You’ll learn about the different stakes of surveillance, the effects of racialized, gendered, class-based, and other discriminatory forms of surveillance, and why we should take our privacy seriously. You’ll also learn some tools and resistive strategies to avert, avoid, and mitigate surveillance of our everyday lives. In addition to scholarly writing on the topic, we will watch documentaries, news segments, listen to podcasts, and read popular press articles to help us make sense of the issues surrounding surveillance today. We will explore the ways that everyday surveillance is normalized in our social world and how it affects both politics and culture. For final projects, students will choose to write an opinion piece destined for a popular audience, devise an abstract and outline for a scholarly paper, record a short podcast, or develop an educational video on an important topic around surveillance.

 

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Labor in the Digital Economy (Graduate)

more on this soon!

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Digital Media Ecologies (Graduate)

Far from its immaterial metaphor, the digital cloud is full of hard stuff – wires, metal, concrete, asphalt, and plastics. Finite resources such as water and energy fuel our digital worlds creating local, global, and planetary impacts. Data centers, where the world’s internet traffic lives, are connected through global underwater cables and internet exchange points and rely on global supply chain networks from the mining of rare earth minerals, to manufacturing of silicon chips and digital devices, through to the sites of discard of e-waste and other digital discards. Extending on the field of media ecology, which focused on the nature of media themselves, this course will follow the nature of digital media from its the 19th century invention of telegraphy, through to the development of artificial intelligence and machine learning. We will revisit key readings in media ecologies from the Toronto School and the New York school and consider what the modifier “digital” does to our understanding of media, medium, and mediation, if anything. Students will engage with readings on platformization and digital culture, technological determinism and social constructivism, economies of digital media, the materiality of digital infrastructures, and the sociopolitics of digital worldmaking, among others. Students will develop a project that takes a position on how we might better understand the relationship between the digital, culture, and the environment. 

 

Feminist/Queer Data Studies (Graduate)

This course takes an anti-oppression, intersectional, and participatory approach where students will learn how to discuss, critique, and apply core readings from feminist and queer theory to digital media today. Students will come prepared to each session having read the materials and answered questions that will be discussed in class. More on this soon!

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​Introduction to Critical Infrastructure Studies (Graduate)

More on this soon!

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Data Justice  (Graduate)

Data justice is a movement that recognizes how data can be used to reinforce, exacerbate, and, in some cases, produce new inequalities and social harms. In this course, we will learn about the ways that data are never ‘raw’ but are ‘cooked’ and emerge through political, social, and economic processes. Drawing from the history of data and bodies, we will reflect on how data has been used to render some people hypervisible, while overlooking others. We will read about the limitations of data profiling and how algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence and how silences in training data reproduce historical forms of oppression. We will also investigate the environmental impact of data centers and think about data’s role in the future of our planet.

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