Graduate Theory and Methods Courses

Graduate students are required to take a selection of theoretical and methodological courses as part of our program requirements. COGR 275 and most other graduate level courses in our department are taught as special seminars offering graduate students the opportunity to take part in group discussions about a specific topic. COGR 201 courses focus on theory-driven methodologies. While the course number and/or title might remain the same, the content of these courses changes depending on which faculty teach them. Our faculty work closely with graduate students to ensure their academic needs are met and are open to designing new courses or revising previous courses based on the needs of the current student population.

2025-26 Theory and Methods Course Offerings

Fall 2025

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: Borders: Theory and Method
Instructor: Elana Zilberg
Theory Course

The seminar considers borders - geo-political, intra-national, more -than-human, aesthetic and conceptual – as charged sites from which to approach communication and conflict across scales and through theory and praxis. Our regional geo-political border is necessarily foregrounded, both for its geographic proximity and its centrality in the genealogy of Borderland Studies. However, the course pushes beyond the literal and regional through a serious consideration of distinct border zones, historical and ethnographic, geo-political and otherwise. While commonly conceived as fixed geopolitical demarcations between nation-states, in this course we will examine borders as both material and conceptual sites of exchange, as contested boundaries where diverse actors and practices converge and diverge, and as complex historical and socio-spatial formations that call into question presumed divisions between inside/outside, us/them, human/non-human and technological/ecological. Drawing on Mezzadra and Neilson, we will consider borders not only as a research site and as object of research, but also as an epistemic framework and as a method for producing, dividing, ordering and appropriating worlds and subjectivities, and for contesting, reshaping, rescaling and resisting the very processes of border making.

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.

Winter 2026

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

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

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

Spring 2026

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

Recent Theory and Methods Course Offerings

You can find more of our recent course offerings below.

Fall 2024

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.

Winter 2025

COGR 201J Comparative Analysis
Instructor: Daniel Hallin
Methods Course

The purpose of this course is to explore the uses of comparative analysis in the field of Communication. Because comparative analysis has been relatively rare in Communication until recently, much of the reading is drawn from Political Science and Sociology, which have developed much more substantial bodies of literature. However, we will try to reflect on the differences between comparative analysis in Communication and in other disciplines. We discuss various approaches to comparative analysis, but the emphasis is on the "historical-institutional" tradition, which mainly compares small numbers of cases based on in-depth, mainly qualitative research.

Comparative analysis most commonly involves comparing different "nations" or "societies." Often this is appropriate to Communication, as it is to other disciplines, particularly since communication systems and policies are often organized at the national level. However, as we shall see, comparative methodology also applies to other kinds of comparisons: between differing local communities, for example, or between differing organizations or industries, technologies or events or processes of a certain type, like protests or social mobilizations. There is an important emphasis in the class on issues of doing comparative research involving the "Global South," and the effort to "decolonialize" comparative analysis.

The course begins with a set of general readings about comparative analysis, then moves on to discussions of examples of comparative research. The final session will be reserved for presentations of student projects. I will ask each student to work on a case study, and to present it for discussion in class. These can be single case studies, or they can be genuinely comparative studies (we will spend some time talking about the uses of case studies in social science). But either way, I will ask the student to reflect on what kinds of comparative analysis might help to deepen the analysis of the case or cases in question. I am assuming that some are probably engaged in ongoing case studies for orals papers, etc., and will want to use the course to pursue these, and others may do a smaller study or simply write a proposal for a hypothetical study specifically for this course.

COGR 237: Performance Theory
Instructor: Patrick Anderson
Theory Course

COGR 275: The Uncommons
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.

Spring 2025

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

2025-26 Planned Graduate Courses

Explore the full academic year schedule of Graduate Courses.

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