Communication Department Course Information 

Analysis of Media Forms and Cultures

This course builds the critical skills to understand, analyze, and interpret audiovisual media (films, television series, short-form social media, video games) by introducing students to the basic “form” or vocabulary and grammar of moving image texts—how they create meaning through compositional visual and narrative style—and key methods for interpreting media and its cultural contexts. Understanding form as an extension of content, we will look at the conventions of narrative, the employment of formal techniques like production design, composition, cinematography, editing and the use of sound as they function within particular media texts Alongside these tools for describing films we will explore how movies and other media affect us personally, convey theme, ideology and message, and represent people and events. NOTE: This class includes screenings as part of its runtime. Registration and attendance are required for both lecture and section periods for this reason.

Introduction to Media Industries

This course is an introduction to the Media Industries & Communication major. We'll examine various industries, including film, TV, social media, music, gaming, and publishing, and discuss issues that impact all of them like globalization, copyright, creative labor, consolidation, and financialization. Students will read recent coverage in the trade press, discuss and write about current events, and learn to analyze contemporary media companies and systems.

Propaganda and Persuasion

Terms like propaganda and persuasion evoke a variety of concerns about culture, technology, and knowledge. Propaganda is a term that, until recently, mostly summoned images of wartime mass mediated persuasion in 20th-century conflicts. While we will touch upon these issues, they will not be our sole focus; rather, we will build a set of concepts and frameworks to help us consider what persuasion and propaganda mean, and the roles they play, in the everyday lives of people today.

Black Women Filmmakers

Students examine film and video media made by Black women with an emphasis on global film movements. This course emphasizes contextualization of films through reading about the history, politics, and social conditions in which films were made as well as the lives of the filmmakers themselves. Students can expect to watch between 2-4 films per week, complete regular personal reflections, present on a filmmaker of their choice, and be open to peer collaboration. The course final will be an oral examination on a filmmaker from the syllabus. This course will be taught asynchronously.

Environmental Communication

Environmental information, disinformation, and multiple instances of contestation appear in a variety of media and have changed over time. This course will begin with a brief glimpse at the period that preceded the modern environmental movement (that is, before 1968), and then examine the framing of environmental problems through prose, photography, audio recording, film, and video by a cross section of actors: environmental advocates, artists, scientists, journalists, government, and industry groups. We will examine rationalized argumentation, informed by the sciences, as well as the deployment of efforts to persuade through emotional content.

The summer 2025 offering of Comm 171 will be taught by Dr. Mark L. Hineline, author of Ground Truth: A Guide to Tracking Climate Change at Home and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Communation.

Junior Seminar: Film, Television & New Media Criticism

This course explores the profound influence of visual storytelling and the power wielded by those who create the images we consume. Moving beyond entertainment, we examine how film, television, and new media are deeply intertwined with ideological, social, and economic forces that shape and sustain our way of life. Through critical analysis, participants will learn to dissect the layers of influence embedded in media, unraveling the societal narratives reflected in each image. From the early days of cinema to contemporary digital media, this course traces the evolution of film theory and criticism, examining how creators and critics alike grapple with the complexities of representation, style, and production. Engaging with a range of texts—from accessible works about life’s intricacies to challenging interdisciplinary studies—we will uncover the ways media communicates, reinforces, or disrupts societal norms. By investigating cinematic style, image production, and genre, participants will develop the tools to critically analyze the media they consume and, in turn, reflect on their own place within these narratives. The goal of this course is to foster a space for thoughtful critique and self-reflection, empowering students to navigate the intersection of media and society with a discerning eye. Whether the films challenge or entertain, they serve as mirrors to our collective consciousness—and by understanding them, we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Introduction to Communication

This course provides an introduction to the main areas of focus in this department and to several major areas in the field of communication including: the relation between communication, the self and society; the operation of language as a mechanism of power; the emergence and significance of new communication technologies in different historical periods; the role of the news media in democratic societies; debates about the social and political influence of culture industries like film and music; the relationship between communication and globalization.

In examining these areas, the course also introduces students to a wide range of theories reflecting the department’s interdisciplinary diversity including: political economy, poststructuralism, feminism, critical race studies and globalization. In the process, the course provides students with the tools for beginning to answer five key questions: What is communication? Where does it occur? How does it occur? Why does it matter? How do we study it?

Communication, the Person, and Everyday Life

Communication, the Person, and Everyday Life is part of the three-course COMM 100 series, which offers an overview of fundamental theories and practices within the interdisciplinary field of communication. While the other COMM 100 courses teach you to analyze representations and media institutions, this course introduces students to perspectives that locate communication as a feature of people’s everyday lived experiences and their participation in social activities with particular histories. We will explore the ways in which our daily social practices depend on representations and interpretations, which shape how we (re)produce, sustain, and transform social institutions and structures. We will approach these themes from theoretical, empirical, and creative perspectives. In the assignments, we will ask you to relate the ideas introduced in the readings, lectures, and section discussions to your own knowledge of everyday life as you experience it.

Data and AI Industries

Developments in artificial intelligence are being combined with unprecedented levels of personal data collection, which are used to make inferences about who we are, what we are interested in, and where we belong. In response, this course takes a cultural lens to issues around data and AI. What are the practices and politics of quantifying humans and society? How do technologies like personalized microtargeting and machine learning actually work? How are classic and contemporary culture industries (film, TV, journalism, video games, etc.) are using data and AI in their work? What are the implications of giving us the search results that will keep our eyeballs on the screen the longest? The issues that arise in representing culture through analyses of data date back to the first censuses in ancient times, but have taken a turn with new methods and data. What do these approaches capture and what do they miss?

Global Borders: Communication and Conflict

This course focuses on geopolitical borders as charged sites of cross-cultural communication and conflict. By exploring the border between the U.S. and Mexico within a historical and global perspective, students will become mindful of how borders come into being and serve as much more than just fixed physical demarcations between nation-states. Students will learn to interrogate borders as dynamic multi- dimensional spaces where complex forces --political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, and ecological -- converge and diverge. We will examine how the policies and practices of enforcing borders impinge on those seeking to cross borders, and in the everyday lives of people living on either side of borders. We will then consider the impact of these anthropocentric (human-centered) borders on non- human and more than human ecosystems of land, water, and animal and plant life. While the U.S.-Mexico border will serve as our primary site of consideration, we will expand our geographic and conceptual maps to examine other borders between the “global north” and “global south,” and to consider how borders extend into the territory of the nation-state itself. Students will emerge from the course with a new critical awareness of their own position within the geography of Southern California and of the multiple borders crossed by its diverse residents from across the globe. We will hear directly from community-based groups, activists, artists and scholars working in this and other border regions. NOTE: Students must participate in two field trips including a visit to the Hostile Terrain 94 exhibit at the Museum of Us in Balboa Park and a Trolley Ride from UCSD to the border (on the U.S. side).

Intermediate Topics: Intro to Argumentation

A study of argumentation in several areas of modern society: political, legislative, judicial, commercial, and educational. The focus is on learning the basic principles of argumentation theory and developing skills in advocacy through practical exercises in each speech setting. Students will learn:

- to provide students with an opportunity to develop and improve extemporaneous public speaking effectiveness.
- to assist students in becoming more analytical listeners.
- to encourage students to improve rational thought processes while accessing, analyzing, and utilizing information from a variety of sources.
- to better apply techniques of audience analysis for speaking to diverse groups.
- to encourage ethical communication among students who seek to use public speaking as a means of improving the global society.
- to help students project a positive image.
- to instruct students in the proper use of visual aids.

Advanced Topics: Making Space

Do maps represent spaces? How can we understand the politics of space? Are geographies fixed or fluid? This class will be a foray into these questions by emphasizing the connections between spatial thinking and social relations. We will learn mapping and counter mapping practices by looking to film, poetry, digital media, and more. This course has two primary learning objectives: 1) question space as a given configuration, and identify both dominant and subversive productions of space, and 2) create persuasive counter-cartographic representations of spaces familiar to you. We will utilize spatial thinking to emphasize sites of struggle against systems of power and oppression. The class forefronts that new ways of knowing are germinated from working, crafting, and creating.