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.

2026-27 Theory and Methods Course Offerings

Fall 2026

COGR 275: Topics in Communication: Mediated Ability: Media, Technology, and Dis/Ability
Instructor: Brian Goldfarb
Theory Course

This graduate seminar examines how ability and disability are conceived, represented, mediated, and negotiated through media and technology. Through weekly readings, screenings, and discussions, students will analyze mainstream media representations of disability across film, television, and digital culture, while also engaging alternative film and video, educational media, internet-based media, assistive technologies, and accessibility design.

The course asks how communication, media, and technology shape cultural understandings of ability, disability, embodiment, identity, and access. It considers the historical transformation of disability representation; the ethical challenges of visibility, voice, and representation; the prosthetic and assistive functions of media technologies; and the intersections among disability studies, critical gender studies, critical race theory, media studies, and related approaches to power and social difference.

COGR 262: Geographies of Difference, Exclusion and Conflict
Instructor: Elana Zilberg
Theory Course

This seminar focuses on borders as infrastructures of differential exclusion and inclusion. Borders - geo-political, intra-national, more -than-human, aesthetic and conceptual – are 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 Mezaddra and Neilson (2013), we will consider borders not only as research sites and as objects 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 201B: Ethnographic Methods for Comm Research
Instructor: Alex Fattal
Methods Course

Ethnography is a practice and ethnography is a genre. At this point, it’s really multiple practices and multiple genres. We can’t survey and train in them all, but we will strike a balance between covering some basics, e.g., taking fieldnotes, while also exploring sub-genres and emergent trends that are relevant for ethnographers of the early twenty-first century: multi-sited ethnography, digital ethnography, sonic ethnography, auto-ethnography, graphic ethnography. Our reading list will draw from methodological pieces and ethnographic monographs to strategically tack between finished products and the process that goes into making them. We will strive to understand the two in dialectical relationship as we explore tensions between analytical, practical, and ethical considerations.