Undergraduate Courses in Communication Studies 2021-2022

Introduction to Communication Studies is a course in media civics. It is designed to help you become a better citizen of reality. It also offers an introduction to the field of Communication Studies as it is practiced at McGill. We live in a media-saturated world, yet despite the constant talk about media by media institutions, technologies, and personalities, most people know surprisingly little about how and why these systems work the way they do. You will learn about media economics and institutions; ecological impacts of media systems; and media practices and ideologies. Throughout the term we will attend carefully to questions of power, justice, and inequality.

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“…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 examines contemporary scholarship and writing in feminist studies of digital culture and new media in dialogue with 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. Authors we will be reading examine new and emerging contours of feminist thinking, doing, and debating in the context of changing media environments. Most of our course material will focus on digital culture, social media, and critical race feminisms. We will pay 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 feminist tools people use 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 as sets of ideas and forms of analysis, 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 movements 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 kind of engagement.

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Contemporary ecological crises can in many ways be thought of as crises of the hydrosphere, figured
by both the excess and lack of planetary waters, unequally distributed and extracted from different
parts of the world. People and places around the globe are devastated by both floods and droughts,
marginalized communities continue to struggle for the human right of access to clean water,
refugees brave perilous journeys over seas and deserts in search of livable conditions, and the
porosity of our own watery bodies forces us to recognize our shared vulnerability with planetary
waters.

Media and the Hydrosphere thinks about water through a variety of topics: from dams, data centers, and
global shipping, to hydraulic citizenship, waste waters, and social movements organizing around the
importance of ‘water as life.’ We will follow various thinkers, makers, and activists who think with
water from a variety of perspectives and geographies. Engaging work in media studies,
environmental humanities, feminist science studies, critical race and anticolonial scholarship,
alongside media of various forms (film, podcast, poetry and more) that think with water, we ask the
following questions: Can approaching anthropogenic environmental crises through a focus on water
reveal new ways of thinking about the social and the ecological together? How does water situate us
in place, and inform our relationships with environments, nonhuman worlds, and one another?
How might thinking with water offer critical pathways for grappling with the climate crisis alongside
co-constitutive crises of systemic racism, structural poverty, and the politics of unequal mobility?

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Instructor's approval required.

This course is a critical overview of the sociocultural histories of modern communication technologies that shaped the 19th and 20th centuries. The focus is on the conditions that produced these modern tools of communication as well as on their social and political ramifications. The course examines an array of technologies and media forms —from railway and telegraph networks, to early film, photography and radio—through a postcolonial lens, and maintains a comparative approach to communication that reads against the idea of Western development and technological progress. By focusing on the relation between culture and power, the course aims to shed light on the role played by these technologies and media in re/producing and expanding (colonial) power relations, structures, and ideologies, as well as on their emancipatory potential for various historical contexts.

The course also explores recurring cultural anxieties about gender, race, class, and national sovereignty that have shaped the production, circulation and use of modern communication technologies. The aim of this course is to provide a historical perspective on contemporary technologies and media to better understand some key themes that dominate current media debates, such as surveillance, governance, propaganda, fake news, the politics of representation, and the ecological impact of media technologies.

Oil has played a central if elusive role in shaping cultural life across the planet over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Today, oil permeates the microscopic relations of everyday life just as it does planetary ones. From the introduction of the mass-produced automobile by Henry Ford for which cities have been planned to the emergence of plastic as a ubiquitous material in domestic and industrial life, oil remains near and far, yet never too far from view. This paradoxical relationship of oil’s proximity and distance has received heightened critical attention over the past decade, motivated by the urgency of addressing climate change propelled by the combustion of fossil fuels. The study of petrocultures—a term that describes the bound relationship between contemporary cultural life and oil—brings oil into view on these terms, revealing how oil mediates and is mediated by cultural forces rather than merely economic, technological, or political ones. This course takes up these key concerns that inform the study of petrocultures from a media and cultural studies perspective.

This course examines the relationship between culture, emerging (or “new”) technology, and power. Questions of inequality and resistance, social change, and emerging strategies and forms of social organization will feature centrally in our course and our class discussions. To examine these questions, we will examine a broad range of scholarship on the internet, digital culture, and new and emerging media, including work on: memes, online misinformation and fake news, contemporary technological skeuomorphs(tech that looks like older tech), the gendering of digital labour, anti-racist and indigenous hashtag organizing, the limits of content moderation, new modes of camera and live-stream consciousness, the cultural role of algorithms and the datafication of identity, and awesome new work on data feminism and feminist data visualization. You will read key thinkers and practitioners in these areas of scholarship. This course will equip you to become more attuned, more analytically minded, and more “literate”participants, users and critics of internet culture and online platforms, their content, their governance and the roles they play in shaping public social and political life. If you take this course, you need to be up for, and open to, these kinds of discussions.

The night of cities has recently become the focus of attention by 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? How does the night function within what geographer Luc Gwiazdzinski calls the “discontinuous citizenship” of the 24-hour cycle, in which the rights of different groups to occupy cities varies as we move from day to 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 gender-based safety? What might be the future of night-time culture in a post-pandemic world?

A survey of contemporary approaches to communication, media and environment in the field of communication studies. The course focuses critical attention on media, communication and knowledge practices concerning environmental information, issues and controversies, as well as the environmental impacts of media technologies, infrastructures and practices. Topics include public communication of science and environmental information (journalism, governments; social movements), climate change communication, media materialities and toxicities (energy, pollution, waste), environmental racism and environmental justice, environment and disability, environmental humanities, and non-human communication.

Not open to students who took COMS 361 in W2021 due to same topic. This course does not require pre-requisites.

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, posthumanism and media and cultural studies. In particular, this year’s seminar will focus on the themes of biopolitics, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism.

In this course, we will consider some of the key issues related to Black Canadian history as they relate to race and art history in Canada. We will examine the cultural and historical contributions by Black people and think critically about the disciplines of museology, curating and art history in Canada. We will develop an understanding of Black feminisms as well as harness skills to discuss art from critical perspectives considering issues around identity, gender, race, sexuality and class.

In this fourth year seminar, we will focus on several dimensions of urban life in
Canada and the US. We begin with the built environment infrastructure,
architecture, design whose development has been shaped by legacies of
colonialism and transatlantic slavery. We then turn to the social fabric of the city
(inextricable from the built environment), examining the structural inequities and
cultural dynamics that shape urban life: polarization of wealth and poverty, private
property ownership vs. public commons, houselessness, policing and incarceration,
and differential access to resources and care. Finally, we consider propositions
about what makes a good city (good as in: habitable, humane, safer, a place of
refuge, a public commons, etc.), and look at ways that city residents and
communities are re making their cities. Reclamations of urban space and life are
manifest in the practices of (and discussed in the writings of) migrants, queer and
trans people, over policed and under resourced communities, artists, activists, and
planners. Reclamations also happen through protest and commemoration, as in the
Black Lives Matter social movement. At various points, we will examine specific
interventions into urban space and culture, on the part of e.g. disability activists,
architects and designers, and amateur cartographers.

Seminar participants can expect to develop a greater facility with theoretical texts,
hone their seminar discussion and critical analysis skills, and improve their
understanding of contempo rary urban sociocultural transformations. They will be
expected to read, comment on, and engage in debate about the critical perspectives
in the course readings, as well as to develop original analyses of urban sites and/or
interventions.

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