Components
of our Program
The UCSD Communication
program blends two traditions: critical communication research and empirical
American scholarship. Study is organized around the following three
analytic perspectives: communication
as a social force, communication and
culture, and communication
and the person . In addition, the department believes that investigation
into communication requires a blending of theory and practice; hence
our attention to the media
practices.
Despite this diversity
in faculty approaches, some common points of reference exist. The faculty
emphasizes historical and comparative approaches to the study of communication.
The question of power is central to most faculty research. Individual
faculty research and teaching interests seek to bridge these components
of the curriculum.
Communication
as a Social Force
Communication as a social force examines the relation
of communication institutions to the broad structures of power in society.
In this part of the curriculum we examine institutional arrangements
and structural characteristics regarding:
• communication and political systems: state, law, regulation,
social movements and political parties, democracy
• communication and economic systems: markets, ownership, access;
"demographics" and class/gender/racial and national stratification
• the production of content within media industries
Faculty research includes the following topics:
• The study
of news as public information and political ideology
• Telecommunications and the information economy
• Intellectual property and the flow of culture between global
North and South
• The relationships among law, communication technologies, ownership,
democracy and the public sphere.
• Comparative analysis of media systems
• Communication, globalization and economic development
Communication
and Culture
We experience our everyday lives through a variety of
cultural artifacts and discourses including news reporting, law and
public policy, commodity markets, popular music, films and television
shows, advertisements, museum displays, landscape and urban design,
and health and identity documentation systems. How can we understand
the histories and changing practices associated with these forms of
representation? What is the role of media (print, visual, electronic,
material) in forming ideas about social identity and in shaping subjectivity?
This part of the curriculum draws on the humanities, anthropology, history,
political theory, cultural studies and the sociology of culture to offer
students a range of methods and theoretical frameworks for interpreting
the production and circulation of artifacts, discourses, and meanings
in a range of local, national, transnational, and diasporic cultural
contexts.
Faculty research includes the following topics:
• Collective
memory and the struggles over the meaning of the past
• The study of power and politics in the interaction of nature
and culture in contemporary theme parks and in historical court gardens
• The politics of representation of women, children, abortion,
and childbearing
• Film and feminist theory
• The representation of race, gender, and nationalism in colonial
settings.
Communication
and The Person
Our experience as human beings is created by the communicative
practices of the societies in which we live and the cultural practices
of our families and communities with which we interact from the earliest
days of life. The Culture and Person area of the curriculum examines,
with a sociocultural lens, the role of communication through language
and other organized symbolic media. Because both individuals and their
environments are constantly changing, the study of culture and the person
pays special attention to the cultural and historical contexts of personal
experience and the practices that constitute the proximal environments
of individual development. This part of the curriculum draws particularly
on the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, cognitive
science, and education to examine such processes as learning and cognition,
language structure and language use, the construction and negotiation
of meaning, and the organization of mental worlds.
Faculty research includes the following topics:
• The evolution
of language and communication in human beings
• The role of literacy in individual and social development.
• The role of new communicative practices on human development.
• The use of new communication technologies for the implementation
of new forms of educational and work activity
• The study of human cognition as distributed among people and
coordinated in communicative practices.
• The development of reading and writing in young children
• The changing nature of play in contemporary society and its
role in human development.
• The potential of interactive communications technologies for
the reorganization of personal experience and social life.
• Bilingual and bi-cultural development in a globalized world.
Media
Practices
Hands-on practice is crucial to the experience
of a communication student. The major has a required production component
that complements the three areas of theoretical inquiry. Through courses
in production, students may produce a documentary video or audio program,
create a web site or software project, or organize a media event. Projects
may be individually produced, collaborative and/or community-based.
With departmental approval, a media project may count toward the degree
requirements. Direct involvement in production gives students opportunities
to expand their understanding of how media is made, distributed, and
interpreted, and how authorship is determined in media arts and industry.
Some Communication Faculty production interests include:
•
Hybrid documentary
and narrative forms
• Alternative
representation of gender, race, and ethnicity in film and electronic
media
• Distributed and networked media production
• Digital media based on game-like forms
• Altering and diversifying the terrain of mass media
• Development and use of media technology in and for educational
contexts
• History, Theory and Development of world cinema and folklore
• Global media networks
• Experimental approaches to cinematography and sound design.
• Media as a tool for social and political activism
