Undergraduate Courses in Communication Studies 2019-2020

This class uses the angle of controversy to introduce students to various academic and popular approaches to the social scientific and humanistic study of science and technology. The class draws on classic academic works in diverse fields, such as the history and philosophy of science, anthropology, and bioethics, while also integrating a broad base of engaging and accessible material (editorials, op-eds and journalistic pieces) that educate as well as evoke critique and transformation of the complex contemporary practices, methods, and politics of science and technology.

This year the course will be organized around the interrelated themes of truth, lies, visibility/invisibility and bias, in the fields of Science, Technology, and Journalism. Among many other themes, the course will examine: the nature of truth, uncertainty, and paradigm shifts in science, the role of values and bias in the design of technological production and scientific discovery, fights for openness and transparency in science and technology, and the politics of algorithms and surveillance, and leaking.

Class is organized around two weekly lectures, course readings, and movies and podcasts that students must listen to or watch before class.

Even skeptics among us believe that in Canada and around the world, media make a difference in our democracy and in our everyday lives. COMS 210 takes that belief to heart, examining the social and cultural role of media in advanced, post-industrial Western societies. We will consider how media and their surrounding economic and institutional framework shape and are shaped by cultural, political and ideological processes. The course introduces foundational theories of media, focusing on industry, technology, materiality, and audiences/users. Throughout the course we will consider whether and how media influence our cultural assumptions regarding justice, identities (shaped by gender, racial identity, ethnicity, sexuality, and social class), and the nature of social life.

“…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.

Feminist Media Studies is a broad ranging and, at its best, deeply engaged and socially conscious area of inquiry. Our course examines contemporary scholarship and writing in feminist studies of digital culture and new media in dialogue with longer debates about whiteness, intersectionality, the politics of representation, consent, gendered and racialized labour, personal autonomy and other key issues in feminist theory and media studies. Across their readings, the authors examine new and emerging contours of feminist thinking, doing, and debating in the context of changing media environments. Much of our course material will focus on digital culture, social media, and critical race feminisms: paying close attention to how current feminisms are being practiced using the tools and infrastructures of social media, mobile phones, apps, and online platforms. We will also analyze the contemporary terrain of online and offline oppressions and the critical feminist tools people are using to fight back against them. This means that our course approaches media not simply as “pictures in the world” (e.g. representations of (fill in the blank) ….), but as systems, tools, technologies, infrastructures, codes, platforms, social practices and genres of communication. We will approach feminism not only as modes of thinking and analytic frameworks, but also as movements and forms of activism. While the course and the professor do not espouse a particular feminist politics, part of our task is to openly, and vigorously, discuss feminist thinking, feminist research, and feminist activism in their relation to a range of intersectional, socially differentiated relations of power. If you take this course, you need to be up for this.

The night of cities has recently become the focus of historians, city governments, cultural activists and others. This course will look at the key concerns of what are now called “night studies”. How have media and cultural events organized themselves in relation to the 24-hour cycle of day and night? Are there media of the day and media of the night? How have cities responded to the rise of notions like the “night-time economy” or the spread of governance instruments like the “night mayor”? How has the night become a focus of conflicts over gentrification, noise and the right of different groups to occupy the nocturnal spaces of the city.

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.

This seminar takes up a specialized/contemporary topic in the field of Internet Governance Studies. In brief, Internet Governance (IG) is now an established field of scholarship, policymaking, and policy advocacy that concerns how the Internet (as a vast electronic network of computer networks) is managed. This course zeroes in on the 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 “datafication”.

A seminar course examining communication policy as a human right, as declared by the United Nations. What does it mean in practice to agree that: 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 course begins by examining the history of the idea of communication, mindful of how communication itself has been conceptualized in radically different ways over the past century, and that the academic field of communication studies has porous boundaries and a scattered genealogy. The course then proceeds to explore the social implications of media and communication technologies, on the one hand, and their phenomenological and experiential affordances, on the other, focusing on how those technologies, and people’s relations with them, have changed over time. The mutually constitutive relationship between media “causes” and media “effects” on self and society will be emphasized. Where possible, the course will incorporate a transnational or an anthropological perspective on the development of communication processes and relations over time. One of the goals of the course is to convince students that communication history is worth caring about – by showing them how the media have always been intimately tied to people’s daily and life experiences.

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 is about the historical relationship between the exercise of European imperial power, the development of mass media technologies, and the proliferation of colonial discourses and ideologies. We will study cases involving different technologies, time periods, and regions - for example, the telegraph during the period known as high imperialism (approx. 1870-1914), the photograph in colonial Congo, the radio in decolonizing/revolutionary Algeria, the smartphone here and now. We will explore topics such as: colonial and neocolonial visual and textual discourses; racialization, gender, and colonialism; technologies of settler colonialism; the persistence of colonial categories and imagery in current technology design and media narratives. Each class will consist of a lecture, the presentation of related visual materials (e.g. film clips, images, artworks, historical documents), and various types of group discussion.

The term “visual culture” has been used for almost two decades to describe the range of images which circulate within our social and cultural worlds. "Visual culture" may include prestigious forms of image-making, such as high art painting, or less respectable forms, such as the popular cultural imagery of advertising and television. The institutions of justice and policing have used visual images for a variety of purposes, from cataloguing suspected criminals to reconstructing the scenes of crimes. Painters and photographers have used images of crime to "prove" prejudices about the criminal personality, to aestheticize the contemporary city, to raise metaphysical issues of life and death, to transgress cultural norms of taste and so on.

In this course, we will be looking at a wide range of images which deal in some way with crime. Some of these will be in the form of "moving" images -- that is, films or television programs. Others will be "still images": photographs, paintings, drawings, newspaper and magazine covers, maps, etc. The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of many of the genres and styles through which crime comes to be represented visually.

Please note that, while this course will deal with a variety of social and cultural issues, it is not primarily a course in criminology or social analysis. Rather, we will be looking at the ways in which different media -- artistic, informational and entertainment -- represent crime.

“In this actual world there is then not much point in counterposing or restating the great abstractions of Man and Nature…It will be ironic if one of the last forms of the separation between abstracted Man and abstracted Nature is an intellectual separation between economics and ecology (Raymond Williams 2005, 84)”.

Textbooks tell us that economics is “the study of the use of scarce resources to satisfy unlimited human wants”. While this understanding is influential in the social sciences, it is also a far cry from how social theory has historically interpreted the terms ecology and economy. How we understand these terms has important consequences. Both economy and ecology are often treated as the most “material” and “urgent” aspects of our lives. Yet our common-sense conceptualizations of these terms are filled with abstractions that evade close scrutiny. This course builds on the foundations of social and critical thought to engage students in an intensive study of different “economies,” especially as they imagine and conjure their surrounding “ecology”. The course draws on key texts in social theory, as well as introducing the students to newer material in geography, media and cultural studies and political theory. By the end of the course students will develop a critical understanding of the concepts “economy” and “ecology” from the standpoint of the humanities.

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. The focus of the seminar for this termwill be critical theories of media, culture and environment.

In her pivotal 1995 essay “Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration,” anthropologist Kath Weston examined how the rural/urban binary was the very condition in which gay/lesbian subjectivities became legible. Weston postulated that the subject’s incorporation into a “gay imaginary” was characterised by movement –movement from rural settings, which were often cast as lonely, as a spatial form of closeting, to urban settings, where individuals could find others “like themselves.” She claims: “From the start, then, the gay imaginary is spatialized, just as the nation is territorialized. The result is a sexualgeography in which the city represents a beacon of tolerance and gay community, the country a locus of persecution and gay absence” (Weston, 282). These notions of tolerance and absence form the basis from which this course will interrogate how infrastructures of major metropolitan centres allow for diverse imaginings ofqueer urbanism(s).This course proposes to look at the wealth of scholarship that has structured the fields of queer theory, urban studies, media studies, and queer social geography in thetwenty-fiveyears since the publication of Weston’s essayto address a number of theoretical questions: how has the conception of the major metropolitan city (e.g. New York, London, Berlin) shaped our perceptions of how queer communities form, where they reside, and the types of culture they create? How has “metronormativity” (Halberstam, 2005) shaped the perception of rural spaces ashomophobic and transphobic while glossing over/eliding structural violence and inequalities present in neoliberal cities of the Global North? Which urban infrastructures allow for marginalised sexual communities to appear in public (Butler, 2015) and to lay claims to public space? How are alliances formed between diverse social groups? What happens when the normalising forces of gentrification, class stratification, hetero-and homonormativity, and neoliberalism aid and abet the disintegrations of “gaybourhoods”?

This seminar will interrogate the infrastructures of the city and how they lend themselves to cultures of sexuality -in particular, queer sexualities. While the course material will be heavily weighted towards queer theory as well as queer social geography, historiography, and urban studies, students will be encouraged to think about normative infrastructuresof sexuality such as those explicitly directed at heterosexual audiences: from media depictions of major cities such as New York and Paris as places to find a partner (cities of love), to on-street advertisements, museums, bars, clubs, red-light districts, and other spaces of sex that cater to heterosexual audiences.Seminars will be arranged based on theme, beginning with gay/lesbian urban histories, and touching on gay villages, HIV/AIDS activism in urban environments, sex in public (Berlant and Warner, 1998), queer urbanism(s) in popular media, queer peripheries and queerness outside the Global North, and digital technologies, among others. Seminars will consist of student presentations(beginning week two)along with short lectures and introductions of case studies, media, and other material pertinent to the course readings.

This is a seminar designed for final year undergraduates, about what we will call technologies of domination and techniques of liberation. “Technology” is defined here in the broad sense of the application of knowledge to practical pursuits - in this case, the practical pursuit is the hierarchical organization of human life – as well as in the usual sense of media technologies. We foreground the dynamic relation between forms of domination and practices of liberation or counter-hegemonic world-making. We will discuss, in this order: the plantation, policing and surveillance technologies, the prison, technologies of liberation, settler colonial technologies (such as the 1876 Indian Act, the railroad, methods of resource extraction and land dispossession, sexual violence as colonial domination), finance and speculative capitalism, logistics and supply chain capitalism, algorithms, and “radical markets”.

This course will explore the politics of our contemporary digital landscape. It will track the evolution of the
digital media landscape from the early internet to the social web, through to how today’s digital
infrastructures shape the public sphere and the social, economic and political interactions that it facilitates.
Digital media and online platforms, once celebrated as a democratic good for giving voice and
representation to those excluded from the public sphere and from political processes, have increasingly
come under scrutiny for how they can also intensify social and economic inequality, amplify political
divisions, lower the character of our civic discourse, and even undermine democracy. Like other
technologies before them, digital media are profoundly political -- they are developed, shaped, and used
according to specific social, political, geographic and economic conditions. At the same time, digital media
are powerful sociotechnical agents which reshape publics, politics and the governance of society. At the
end of this class, students should understand and critically engage with this reciprocal relationship between
media and politics, including the central debates, controversies and issues that shape the contemporary
digital landscape. Students will be trained to present, comment and write critically about the power, politics
and governance of digital media.

Independent Study - Instructor approval required

This course discusses the multi-faceted power relations embedded in our contemporary cities, drawing from Urban Communication research and public interest advocacy. From the “city as medium” to the “media city”, data governance to the dystopian smart city, these reflections are intended to present a critical analysis of smartness, new media, regulatory frameworks, and urban public policies. The increasing number of people living in urban areas, the emergence of megacities, and the challenges of fighting the climate crisis highlight the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to cities and data/information. The course is divided into three overlapping sections: cities (concepts, history, controversies), data (technologies across time, from rudimentary tools to the data-centric society), and rights (regulations, the right to the city, social justice). We will use various materials during the course, such as academic literature, reports, policy papers, laws, photography, films & data analyses.

This course examines computer hackers to interrogate not only the ethics and technical practices of hacking, but to examine more broadly how hackers and hacking have transformed the politics of computing and the Internet more generally. We will examine how hacker values are realized and constituted by different legal, technical, and ethical activities of computer hacking—for example, free software production, cyberactivism and hacktivism, cryptography, and the prankish games of hacker underground. We will pay close attention to how ethical principles are variably represented and thought of by hackers, journalists, and academics and we will use the example of hacking to address various topics on law, order, and politics on the Internet such as: free speech and censorship, privacy, security, surveillance, and intellectual property law. We will pair empirical readings on hackers with more theoretical text or other material on digital media to probe the ethics and politics of hacking.