Graduate Courses in Communication Studies 2018-2019

This course introduces incoming CS graduate students to the field of communication studies and to the specific orientations and research interests of faculty teaching within the MA and PhD programs in communication studies at McGill University. The course is organized as three weeks of overviews of methodological, theoretical and disciplinary questions, followed by a series of guest presentations by departmental and associated faculty. We will dedicate a number of classes to grant and thesis writing as well.

I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Will Straw and Darin Barney, whose design of the Pro-Seminar in the last two years has provided me with a great many ideas, readings and insights.

Instructor’s approval required

ANIMAL/MEDIA
Recent years have seen the emergence of animal studies as a new field of study. This field has emerged alongside and often in dialogue with new theoretical approaches in feminism, media studies, and science and technology studies — such as affect theory, new materialisms, speculative realism, actor network theory, to name a few. Animal studies and these theoretical approaches are coeval but not coterminus: there are points of contention as well as significant overlaps. This seminar aims to introduce animal studies in the light of such theoretical shifts, with attention to three issues in particular. First, we will consider some ways in which nonhuman animals have entered into the study of different media and technologies, with an eye to how such concerns about animals may (or may not) transform received paradigms in media and technology studies. Second, we will take up debates about evolutionary theory, to consider how the resulting “new materialisms” affect our understanding of genealogy and the writing of history, and to consider their ethical and political challenges. Third, then, what are the implications of the ‘conscientiousness’ associated with animal studies for media studies?

This MA/PhD seminar features a combination of critical theory, media history, and science and technology studies with an emphasis on the political and conceptual resonances among various media and regions. The guiding question of the course is Foucauldian: what were the underlying historical and cultural conditions of possibility that led to the invention, circulation, and mutation of certain media forms? How might we question and politicize the assumed universality of “media” vis-à-vis the geopolitical differences of the non-West, and East Asia in particular? How might we resist the Eurocentric tendency to flatten and homogenize conceptions of “modernity” by paying attention to the racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed experiences of science and technology?

PART I of the course (“Knowledge, Vision, Capture”) focuses on the epistemic impact of early recording technologies such as chronophotography and photography in relation to the formation of modern disciplines such as physiology and criminology. The anchoring problematic of this section is the body. In this section we will learn how certain technologies helped generate a particular mode of knowing, and how knowledge production intersects with the late 19^th and early 20^th century media technologies. PART II of the course (“System, Governance, Labour”) shifts the focus away from knowledge to control. Framed around the problematic of system, this section will explore how certain modern epistemological frameworks such as bureaucracy, cybernetics, and biocapital developed in relation to the increasingly globalized infrastructure of communication and transportation in the mid- to late 20^th century. Part III of the course (“Critique, Democracy, Platforms”) turns to the 21^st century platform-based media and their relations to critical theory, Big Data, social media, and democracy. We thus come full circle, so to speak, by returning to the question of critique as a mode of knowing, and in so doing, reframe knowing as a mode of collective engagement.

Course description not available.

Among the conditions of possibility of communication are the availabilities and affordances of infrastructure. This seminar will investigate the recent (re)turn of attention to infrastructure in the field of communication and media studies, in the context of similar turns in related fields of anthropology, geography, sociology, architecture and environmental studies. What counts as infrastructure, and what are the limits of this category? How is power materialized, mediated and contested as, by and through infrastructure? What role does infrastructure play in the configuration of urban, rural, local, national, colonial and imperial imaginations, economies and geographies? Drawing on an emergent, interdisciplinary literature, this seminar will explore theoretical and empirical studies of the social, political and environmental dimensions of infrastructure across the terrains of communication, transportation, cities, colonialism/imperialism, resource extraction, logistics, energy, labour, environment and resistance.

Preparatory work towards the Master's thesis.

Preparatory work towards the Master's thesis.

Preparatory work towards the Master's thesis.

Preparatory work towards the Master's thesis.

Comprehensive examination as per departmental procedure.

Dissertation proposal.

Reading programs supervised by a member of staff; topics will be chosen to suit individual interests.

The subfield of policy studies referred to as “critical policy studies” challenges established
accounts and norms of policy-analytic methods. Critical policy studies scholars explore alternative
approaches to policy-making that pertain to democratic forms of governance, participatory practices, social
justice, and general public welfare. This orientation to policy formation, policy analysis, and policy
evaluation necessitates an emphasis on the interplay between qualitative and quantitative modes of
inquiry. The course thus moves beyond narrow empirical approaches to pay special attention to critical,
interpretive, and discursive orientations.

About critical policy studies (Fischer, Torgerson, Durnová, & Orsini, 2016):

“…throws the ideas of ‘expertocracy’ and technical governance into question” and “… seeks to
identify and examine existing commitments against normative criteria such as social justice,
democracy, and empowerment” (1).

“Adopts an interpretive, culturally and historically constructivist understanding of knowledge and
its creation” (2).

“Although … concerned about a ruling elite of experts, it is even more interested in the role experts
play in serving or challenging established elites, whose power is at the root of democratic deficits”
(7).

Instructor’s approval required.

In this seminar, we will examine the various ways queer theory has addressed and complicated questions surrounding the politics and aesthetics of death. We will explore questions such as: How has queer sexuality been linked to psychoanalytic and philosophical conceptions of the “death drive”? How and why have nonnormative or anti-normative sexualities interwoven understandings of eroticism with morbidity, self-annihilation, and violence? In what ways are non-normative genders and sexualities shaped by the regulation, management, and imagination of life and death? How is queer thinking about death troubled by the actual death of queer subjects, particularly those whose lives, under racist and colonial regimes, are always under threat? In addressing these questions, we will draw on interventions in queer theory that problematize death through an engagement with psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses, as well as with recent interventions in critical race theory, affect theory, and theories of temporality.

Preparatory work towards the Master's thesis.

Preparatory work towards the Master's thesis.

Preparatory work towards the Master's thesis.

Preparatory work towards the Master's thesis.

Comprehensive examination as per departmental procedure.

Dissertation proposal.

Reading programs supervised by a member of staff; topics will be chosen to suit individual interests.