Undergraduate Courses in Communication Studies 2018-2019

This course provides a foundational introduction to the Minor in Communication Studies at McGill, which is designed to provide undergraduate students with a critical understanding of the role that communication media and communication technologies
play in society.

The Minor in Communication Studies presents students with intellectually challenging instruction in key traditions of Communication and Media Studies and new theoretical and methodical approaches to studying the social life of communication technologies and the historical development and transformation of media and communication forms.

Courses in the Minor reflect faculty interests in critical, anti-oppressive, and interpretive traditions in communication studies.

Courses offered are organized around three primary themes that address a variety of institutions, practices, and the representation and mobilization of social difference:
• History and Theory of Media
• Media, Communication and Culture
• Power, Difference, and Justice

This course explores these and other dimensions through three modules with readings,
discussions, assignments, and an exam:
1) Production: focusing on the role of institutions and organizations in the
making, marketing, and selling of communication media and
communication technologies
2) Object/artifact: the texts/things/objects/products and services themselves
3) Reception: how people (communities, institutions, organizations, audiences,
users, consumers, citizens, etc.) respond to, use, and experience
communication media and communication technologies.

“…if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing…” 
                                                    - Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge (1844)

This course will survey foundational texts and thinkers in critical social theory, as they relate to the fields of media and communication studies. This will include core texts in Marxism, the Frankfurt School, feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, queer theory, indigenous thought, and critical theory of and from the global south. The course will prepare students with key theoretical and conceptual vocabularies for advanced study in the field.

Course description not available.

A survey course that explores how communications policy advances or inhibits freedom of expression and political equality through a comparative and historical examination of media and telecommunications laws and structures in the United States and Canada.  In addition to an examination of broadcast and cable regulation, the course will compare the different approaches to support for public and community media , as well as internet deployment and net neutrality.

This course explores the intersections of disability and media studies in order to rethink our basic concepts of communication, technology and culture, as well as to advance our understandings of disability and the technocultural environments in which it exists. We will consider critical accounts of disability against theories of technology and communication. Through readings, discussions, and student research, we will develop scholarship that provides alternatives to the idealized norms of able-bodiedness that pervade the humanities and social sciences.

Internet Governance from a Social Justice Perspective
This seminar takes up a specialized/contemporary topic in the field of Internet Governance Studies and engages students in original research and writing for an actual research client that is working in this field of policy studies.

In brief, the field of Internet Governance (IG) is an emerging field of scholarship, policymaking, and policy advocacy that concerns how the Internet (a vast electronic network of computer networks) is managed. This course zeroes in on socio-political and cultural dimensions of IG from a social justice perspective.

Both terms—internet governance and social justice—enjoy a variety of interpretations. This class explores the tensions and ambiguities of the relationship between IG and social justice by focusing on the contemporary issue of data protection as a social justice issue. For this seminar, the issue is data protection from a social justice perspective specifically related to gender violence in Latin America. We will be collaborating with a graduate seminar on the same topic at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The client organization for this seminar is a Brazilian consumer protection organization, The Brazilian institute of Consumer Protection, or IDEC (the Instituto Brazilerio de Defesa do Consumidor). IDEC is a member organization of Consumers International and is based in Sao Paolo, Brazil..

A seminar course on what the United Nations declared a universal right: Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.  This course will explore the impact of information and communications technologies in a global environment of extreme inequality and increasing nationalism.  

Course description not available.

This class introduces students to the critical study of the history of communications by surveying the social and cultural implications of major developments in
communications, technologies and media from prehistory to the electronic era. The course is primarily focused on key issues and practices of historical thinking about the role of media technologies in society (mostly within a North American context). The course moves from mid- 1800s to the early 2000s. This class draws on classic works in several fields, such as anthropology, media and communication studies, history and philosophy of science and technology, sociology and cultural studies to shed light on how historical tributaries feed into today’s media manifold.

Historical technological developments will be situated as co-evolving alongside particular socio-political, economic, and cultural practices. At the end of this class, students should understand and critically engage with the debates, controversies and issues that shape the history of communication, as well as write critically about communication and media objects, both from the recent past and present.

This course introduces students to a range of issues surrounding the relationship between communication, media and politics in contemporary liberal-democratic and capitalist societies. Starting from the premise that media and communication are central to the possibilities of the democratic public sphere(s), the course will critically examine the role, performance and structure of contemporary mass media, democratic governance of media and communication, and emerging political practices and selected issues surrounding digital information and communication technologies and network media.

This course introduces students to debates about the emerging international field of Big Data research, theory, and practice and how they are reconfiguring academic, social, industry, business and governmental relations, expertise, methods, concepts and knowledge. More specifically, the course invites students to join a combination of scholarly, public, and professional conversations about the implications of big data practices for vulnerable and marginalized peoples, groups, and communities.

Key concepts: data justice, data protection laws and regulations, algorithms, data colonialism, privacy
advocacy, datafication, data activism, data-veillance

The age of algorithmic decision-making has raised public awareness about the politics of calculation. Today we are being constantly watched, recorded, calculated, and turned into useful numbers, both by the state and the market. This is not a new phenomenon. The only new thing about the age of algorithmic media is the instruments of calculation, which are now faster—and fancier. This course will examine the historical and critical aspects of the technologies used for calculating people and their activities. The topics covered in this course will include a range of calculating techniques including the census, house numbering, identity documents, and credit reporting to newer forms of surveillance technologies that are used today to datafy entire populations and their behaviors.

Ethics in Photography: Representing Pain and Violence
This course will examine photography that represents violence in a range of temporal and socio-political contexts. Case studies will include photographs of conflict zones and contemporary art that depicts scenes of violence, for example, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles’s whose work captures the aftermath of drug violence and femicide in Mexico City and other global contexts. Issues related to spectatorship, race, gender, trauma and social responsibility will be discussed.

This course builds on the foundations of critical social thought to engage students in intensive study of emerging and contemporary themes in social and cultural theory related to media and communication studies. Focus will be on current texts and debates of significance in the field, and will include prominent work in areas including political economy, feminism, gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial and critical race theory, radical democracy, environmentalism, and media and cultural studies.

Course description not available.

Supervised independent research on an approved topic.

No prerequisites except having already take a 400 (if an undergrad) in AHCS or another department. Also open to MA and PhD students.

Summary: A subfield of policy studies referred to as “critical/interpretive policy studies” challenges established accounts and norms of policy-analytic methods by exploring alternative approaches to policy-making that pertain to various forms of governance, participatory practices, social justice, and general public welfare. Each student, in consultation with the professor, will take up a specific policy-relevant issue of their own choosing as a lens for exploring course materials (e.g., media justice, data justice, digital rights, communication rights, climate change, racism, sexism, indigenous rights, consumer protection, electronic privacy, mobility, affordable housing, reproductive rights, public health, migration, immigration, gender/sexuality, homelessness, poverty, etc.). Weekly assignments will provide opportunities to apply course concepts to their students’ chosen issues. Expectations on final projects will vary based on academic level, i.e., upper division undergrads, MA students, and PhD students.