Graduate Theory and Methods Courses

COGR 275: Critical Studies of Promotional Culture
Instructor: Caroline Jack
Theory Course

This graduate course introduces theories and methods to critically interrogate the representations, practices, logics, and systems of promotion. We will examine practices that have originated in fields of practice such as advertising, marketing, and public relations, with attention to their adoption in politics, institutional life, and understandings of the self and others. Topics covered include critical approaches to brands and branding, the commodification of the self, histories of consumer culture, rhetorics of the market, and surveillance capitalism.

COGR 275: Theory & Practice of CBPR
Instructor: Brian Goldfarb
Methods Course

This seminar serves an inquiry into the theory and methods of community-based participatory research/action research. The texts covered will span interdisciplinary themes and considerations with the aim of engaging students from a variety of programs in a conversation that will generate a broad and complex understanding of CBPR practices and history. The seminar is intended to serve as a hybrid methods and theory course that will support graduate research at various stages.

COGR 264: Feminisms in Critical Dialogue
Instructor: Boatema Boateng
Theory Course

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 highlighting challenges from Black, Indigenous, People of Color and queer theorists, including demands for attention to factors like intersectionality and performativity. The course provides students with a foundation for identifying a body of feminist literature tailored to their individual research interests and goals.

COGR 275: Ecological Thinking
Instructor: Fernando Domínguez Rubio
Theory Course

Over the last decade, different voices have emerged to claim for the urgent need to construct “a world in common”. This, it is argued, is the only the way to address the formidable challenges posed by the compounding effects of increasing racial and economic inequalities, the environmental collapse created by capitalist extractivism, and the failure of liberal democracies to address them. “The political in our time”, Achille Mbembe writes, “must start from the imperative to reconstruct the world in common”.
 
This course will propose a different route to address these contemporary challenges by asking: What if we abandon this search for a “common world” and come to terms with the fact that “we” are always in uncommon? What kind of political and ethical vocabularies emerge when this uncommonality is not taken a problem to be solved, but as the inherent and irresoluble condition of the world we inhabit? What happens when this uncommonality is not merely seen as a tragedy, but as the productive ground to cultivate alternative trajectories for grounding ethical and political interventions?

The course will address these questions by engaging with the work of a diverse array of classic and contemporary authors.

COGR 275: Creative Ethnographic Methods
Instructor: Alex Fattal
Methods Course

Under the banner of multimodality, a wide range of creative and collaborative practices are enriching contemporary ethnographies. The term has become a catchall for how to do ethnography in ways that are less textual, more ethical, and more relevant to the broader public. This class critically interrogates this trend and term so that graduate students can think through if and how they want to integrate creativity and collaboration in their own projects and ethnographic research. Inherent in this discussion about multimodality is the changing terrain of scholarly production and the academy writ large, issues that we will discuss through the lens of the assigned works. The class will strive to balance theoretical and practical considerations. The final assignment is a grant application.

COGR 275: Language, Immigration, and Education in the US
Instructor: Anthony Harb
Theory Course

COGR 262: Geographies of Difference, Exclusion and Conflict
Instructor: Megan Ybarra
Theory Course

COGR 201D: Historical Methods for Communication Research
Instructor: David Serlin
Methods Course

COGR 201B: Ethnographic Methods for Communication Research
Instructor: Alex Fattal
Methods Course

Ethnography is a practice and ethnography is a genre. This course will familiarize you with both and help you think about how you might use ethnography in your own research. Central to our exploration of ethnography will be the multimodal turn in anthropology in the last ten years in which creative, collaborative, and public facing research design are reshaping the contours of what ethnography is and what it might be. With the subjunctive mood in mind, the course is an invitation to think through how you can draw upon ethnography’s virtues and avert its vices. The class is not a training in the classical sense of practicing a given toolbox, though the assignment for the quarter will involve a creative/ethnographic project that will provide a hands-on, methodological experience.

COGR 201L: Interviewing, Grounded Theory, and Situational Analysis
Instructor: Lillian Walkover
Methods Course

This research methods class focuses on collecting and analyzing data from a critical perspective. We will frame our work by exploring questions of knowledge construction and pursuing research justice, before learning and practicing data collection and analysis in a hands-on workshop setting. While the course focuses on conducting interviews as a mode of data collection (including interviewing in person, via video and phone, and in written form), the analytic tools (including grounded theory and situational analysis) we will develop are designed to be used across interview-based, ethnographic, archival, and mixed-methods research. Throughout the course, and building on the department legacy of Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Starr, we will explore what it means to analyze and categorize, and how the modes of research we employ impact the types of knowledges we produce.

COGR 243: Media Technologies 
Instructor: Kelly Gates
Theory Course

Adopting an historical lens, this course aims to identify consistent patterns and discontinuities in media-technological change, and to understand media technologies as historical agents or actors, though not autonomous ones. The course will be centrally concerned with the relationship between old and new media, and with the co-development and co-production of media technologies, human bodies, perception and cognition, and forms of social organization.

COGR 275: Crafting Research: Methods of Historical, Visual, and Geographic Inquiry
Instructor: Gary Fields
Theory Course

This course focuses on the crafting of dissertation research and aims to chart a different pathway for teaching and learning about methods across the humanities and social sciences. Most courses on methods focus on a canon of knowledge deriving from texts best described as ‘primers’ for doing research. This seminar, by contrast, will feature a broad selection of engaging and even controversial literature as the anchor for learning about methods and will focus on the methodological architecture of these texts exemplified by the following questions:

How did authors frame a research question and set-up their arguments? How did they situate their research within a body of literature? What kinds of archives did authors enlist for evidence in support of the claims in the arguments? What were the different types of data and evidence collected by authors? What was the organizational structure of the work in terms of chapters or subheadings? What was the “voice” of the writing in the text? What were the challenges – logistical and conceptual -- confronting authors in gathering evidence to support the argument? What theories did authors use in developing their narratives? What is a case study and when is it appropriate to compare different cases? How did authors justify the importance of their research? Such questions will frame the agenda of the course, highlighted each week by a specific methodological theme. 

COGR 201J Comparative Analysis
Instructor: Daniel Hallin
Methods Course

COGR 201D: Historical Methods for Communication Research
Instructor: David Serlin
Methods Course

This graduate seminar will introduce students to historical research methods and historical analysis by assessing various critical approaches to source materials as well as the practices (and meta-practices) of historical writing. Through extensive reading, discussion, and hands-on activities including small group presentations, we will explore critical debates related to the production of historical knowledge, the politics of the archive and archival practice, and the interpretive possibilities of using both traditional and non-traditional media in historical research. Students will complete one substantial final project at the end of the quarter.

COGR 219: Discourse and Organizations
Instructor: Anthony Harb
Theory Course

This graduate seminar explores how language and discourse shape people’s everyday experiences within a variety of institutional and community organizations. Students will be exposed to some of the theoretical traditions in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and communication to gain a better understanding of how (meta)language shapes and is shaped by socio-political and economic context. We will consider topics such as discourses of immigration within education, multilingual media production, and community organizing and activism, among others. We will also think critically about the idea of “academic discourse” and work together to uncover the hidden curriculum around some of the discursive genres that undergird academic knowledge production.

COGR 275: Critical Studies of Promotional Culture
Instructor: Caroline Jack
Theory Course

This graduate course introduces theories and methods to critically interrogate the representations, practices, logics, and systems of promotion. We will examine practices that have originated in fields of practice such as advertising, marketing, and public relations, with attention to their adoption in politics, institutional life, and understandings of the self and others. Topics covered include critical approaches to brands and branding, the commodification of the self, histories of consumer culture, rhetorics of the market, and surveillance capitalism.