Graduate Courses and Seminars

2018/2019 Academic Year

FALL 2018

COGR 200A: Communication as Social Force

Instructor: Kelly Gates

This course focuses on the political economy of communication and the social organization of key media institutions. There will be both descriptive and analytical concerns. The descriptive concern will emphasize the complex structure of communication industries and organizations, both historically and cross-nationally. The analytic focus will examine causal relationships between the economic and political structure of societies, the character of their media institutions, public opinion, and public attitudes and behaviors expressed in patterns of voting, consuming, and public participation. The nature of evidence and theoretical basis for such relationships will be critically explored.  

COGR 201J: Comparative Analysis

Instructor: Dan Hallin

The logic of comparative analysis and its role in communication research. Scientific inference in qualitative research. Selection of cases. Problems of translation across cultures.

COGR 275: Feminisms in Critical Dialogue

Instructor: Boatema Boateng

This course undertakes a theoretical and political history of feminist scholarship. It considers the ways in which such scholarship has expanded in part due to contests over the bases of feminist knowledge production. It takes into account points of contention and dialogue including challenges from Black and Third World feminists, as well as demands for attention to issues like sexuality, performativity, and intersectionality. The course provides students with a foundation for identifying a body of feminist literature tailored to their individual research interests and goals.

COGR 294: The History of Communication Research

Instructor: Shawna Kidman

Intellectual history of the field of communication studies from Robert Park to the present. Explication and assessment of major research approaches and classic studies representing both empirical and critical traditions.

WINTER 2019

COGR 200A Introduction to Study of Communication: Communication and Culture 

Instructor: Kelly Gates

This course focuses on questions of interpretation and meaning. This course will examine how people use texts to interpret the world and coordinate their activities in social groups. Students will study both theories of interpretation in the conventional sense and theories about the act of interpreting.

COGR 200C Introduction to the Study of Communication: Communication and the Individual 

Instructor: Lilly Irani

This course will draw on theorists who examine human nature as constituted by social, material, and historical circumstances. This course considers the media in relation to the ontogenetic and historical development of the human being and an examination of the individual as socially constituted in a language-using medium. The role of new communication technologies as part of research methodologies is explored in lecture-seminar.

COGR 201B Ethnographic Methods for Communication Research 

Instructor: Boatema Boateng

A supervised and coordinated group project will allow students to develop competence in a variety of ethnographic approaches to communication. Subjects covered include choosing a fieldwork site, setting or process for participation; entry and development of relationships; techniques of observation, interviewing, note taking, and transcription. Course may also include photography and video as research tools. All participant observation and interviewing strategies fall under the review of the Committee on Human Subjects.

COGR 275 Mediated Ability: [Dis]ability and Audio-Visual Culture

Instructor: Brian Goldfarb

Description: This seminar considers the role media play in how ability and disability is conceived, represented, and negotiated. Through weekly readings and discussions participants will examine theoretical approaches at the intersection of disability studies and media studies. Our discussions will be framed in relation to a range of empirical examples from screenings of mainstream and alternative film/video, educational and internet-based media as well as examination of assistive technologies. Beyond critiques of representation, we will consider the ways that media technologies and practices structure embodiment, experience and affective dimensions of (dis)ability. We will also devote attention to the co-constitutive nature of discourses of gender, class, race, nationality, and disability.

COGR 280 Advanced Workshop in Communication Media

Instructor: Zeinabu Davis

This course is a project course in which students prepare a production or experiment using one of the forms of media. The course is designed to allow students to experiment in a communication form other than the usual oral presentation in class or a term paper. Students can do a video production, a coordinated photographic essay or exhibit, a computer instructional game, a published newspaper or magazine article directed at a special audience, a theatrical presentation, or some form other than those listed. Prerequisites: graduate standing or consent of instructor.

SPRING 2019

COGR 296: Communication Research as an Interdisciplinary Activity

Instructor: Caroline Jack

A course that introduces students to the interdisciplinary nature of the field of communication research as represented by the work of faculty in the Department of Communication. Through faculty research, students are presented with concrete examples of communication research theory and practice that can provide them with insights for conducting their own research projects.

COGR 241 Geography and Communication

Instructor: Matilde Cordoba Azcarate

Geographies as media of political cultural communication. Not simply mapping but also territorial engineering as a way of constituting geographical significance. Cross-mapping practices—intersecting representational practices—as political forms of communication. Geographies as visual practices of power. 

COGR 275 Object Theories

Instructor: Fernando Dominguez Rubio

What is an object? Why do objects matter? The aim of this course will be to answer these questions by exploring some of the ways in which objects have been conceptualized, studied, feared or ignored across a variety of disciplines, historical periods and geographies. 

COGR 275 Research Methods: Crafting Research

Instructor: Gary Fields

This course focuses on the crafting of dissertation research in the social sciences and humanities. Admittedly, the seminar is something of an autobiography. It represents a personal reflection on the methodological challenges embedded in a major research project, based on the recent experience of the instructor in researching and writing a book-length comparative historical geography of land conflict across three case studies. Courses devoted to so-called "methods" generally focus on a canon of knowledge consisting of texts perhaps best characterized as 'primers' for doing research. While literature has its uses, reading it can be a turgid exercise. This seminar takes a very different approach to learning about methods for dissertation-writing. Instead of focusing on methods-specific texts, we will read some of the most engaging, influential and even controversial literature in humanities and social sciences. Although we will critique these reading for substance, our focus will be on the methodological architecture of these