Communication Department Course Information 

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?

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.

Communication, Institutions, and Power

Communication media—from the printing press to the Internet—have played a fundamental role in the formation of modern society and culture. This course introduces students to the institutional dimensions of communication and media, and zooms out to analyze large-scale, structural elements. Specifically, we’ll examine how media and communication institutions work, how they organize power, and how they impact social life. We’ll start by looking at history (e.g. the history of media, of state regulation, of capitalism) and pursuing more technical inquiries (e.g. what economic factors make media different from other goods? what are the rules of copyright? what does the FCC do?). Then we’ll move toward more complex or theoretical questions (e.g. what values do communication institutions promote? What makes internet platforms so appealing and so powerful?). Along the way, we’ll consider the impact of media concentration, the role of democratic ideals online, the nature of media and communication work, and the relationship between consumers and producers.

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.

Advertising and Society

Advertising aims to convince us to buy stuff, but that’s not all it does. Commercials pay for almost all our media content. Socio-technical advertising systems collect ever-increasing data about our behaviors. And advertising has long been deeply cultural: it reflects and influences our understandings of humor, art, personal expression, aesthetics, and social norms. This course examines advertising as the intersection of the commercial and the social. You will learn different ways of understanding advertising’s presence in--and influences upon--your everyday life, and you will practice critically assessing and communicating about advertising’s history, political economy, cultural meaning(s), and social significance.

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.

Communication and Community

This course examines how different forms of communication affect people's everyday lives. More specifically, we will focus on how members of different communities acquire information from and interact with a variety of institutions through forms of communication, such as linguistic practices, (community) media, and other audiovisual and artistic modes of communication. We will use these cases to better understand how people use communicative resources to position themselves as individuals, as part of a community, and within society more broadly.

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.

Science Fiction

What does it mean to take a science fiction course under science fiction conditions? How to understand fictional settings that seem to have colonized everyday life as fact? Is science fiction a genre, a mode or a device? How does it work?

The specific conditions under which these course will be offered —after a global pandemic, through electronic devices and during racial and social unrest throughout the world— will also offer us a very particular atmosphere through which to question how science fiction works and its relationship to time, space and intersectional realities. Through the exploration and discussion of theoretical, narrative and aesthetic examples of the genre, we will try to understand science fiction as a “mode of awareness” (Csicsery-Ronay Jr.) particularly well-suited for dealing with a mode of life which relies on science and technology to carry on with everyday existence, at the same time it provides tools to question what reality really is, and that firmly believes technology changes us in strange and radical ways.

All of this plus spaceships, aliens, space and time travel, weapons of mass destruction, drugs, cyborgs, quantum realities, schizodiagnosis, non- and post-humans.

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: Design(ing) the Pacific

What does it mean for us to live in and by the Pacific? And what meanings does ‘The Pacific’ hold for those who reside and think about its geopolitics, ecology, and cultural histories? Geopolitically, the Pacific conjures up many meanings at once serving as a crucial trade route, and a militarized zone. Ecologically, it serves as the place where half of the world’s ocean is with a wide range of unique ecosystems that sustain the planet. For many it is also a place where multiple cultures, histories and worlds are entangled by colonial violence, imperial control, and capitalist extraction. As politicians, artists, scientists produce and work with an array of policies, theories and representations of the Pacific, it is a reminder that imagining the Pacific is always a fractured practice. This course asks how do discourses, imaginaries, and social practices inform and activate the Pacific as a site of interest in the West? We explore different ways of navigating knowledge by encountering the works of artists and designers of/from the Pacific who shed light onto the roles that militarization, indigeneity, diaspora, and environmental crises play in shaping ideas of the Pacific. Through the use of critical design methodologies and by drawing on an interdisciplinary archive of literature, artworks, and other media, students will develop their own ways of navigating that challenge dominant visual and spatial representations of the Pacific while exploring alternative and critical modes of communication.

This is a hands-on class design course meaning that you will practice critically engaging with, imagining, proposing, soliciting feedback and presenting your own ways of challenging dominant representations of the Pacific whether it be through zines, illustrations, sculptures, or other forms of interactive media. The course is designed to situate yourself in complex contexts and build a critical analytical framework that can be expressed through different mediums of communication.

Junior Seminar: Film, Television & New Media Criticism

Course cancelled.

Junior Seminar: Gender Aesthetics in the Media

This course examines several controversial, high-profile cases of gender-based violence that have served as historical turning points in the U.S., Latin America, and the world. Students will engage with and evaluate these case studies through print newspaper archives, social media, and other relevant sources. This course engages feminist theory and media aesthetics to analyze the complex interplay between gender, media, technology, and power, and how these issues impact contemporary cultural and political discourse. In addition, there is a strong emphasis on cultural analysis, which means that students will have the opportunity to closely read texts, films, and artworks through storytelling, class assignments, and group projects.

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?

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.

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.

Communication, Culture, and Representation

This course is a critical introduction to the history of representation, surveying a range of theories and methods that have been used to understand and shape representational practices. The course will focus on relationships between form and content across various representational genres in shifting cultural contexts. Course work may integrate scholarly study with production (e.g., image-making or video/media production).

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?

Communication in Organizations

Whatever your career goals, this course will help you make sense of the importance of communication to the organizational experience. The course is intended to increase your awareness of communication processes central to organizing, and to develop new vocabularies and skills for working within modern organizations. Your participation in the course should help you better understand how organizational communication contributes to the overall quality of work life and the role of communication in creating and working well with the challenges of organizational communication.

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: Drugs in America on Film

Examine drug culture and cultural representations of substance abuse through film and other visual media.

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.

History, Memory, and Popular Culture

What is the difference between history and memory? What role does popular culture play in shaping and creating societies’ shared memories of the past? This advanced level course examines diverse sources such as school textbooks, monuments, holidays and commemorations, museums, films, music, and tourist attractions in order to explore the complex and often taken-for-granted relationship between history, memory, and popular culture, and the political and sociocultural implications of this relationship.

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.

Junior Seminar: Performance as Praxis: Examining the Political Potential of Performance

In this course, we will examine various modes of performance as modes of political commentary, intervention and resistance. Drawing from both performance theory, art history and ethnography, students will develop tools to explore social justice activism through the lens of artistic practice. Topics include the ballroom scene, the riot grrrl punk movement, Theater of the Oppressed and performance art made in response to the AIDs epidemic. For the final assignment, students may write a research paper or develop a performance that stages a political intervention.