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.

2024-25 Theory and Methods Course Offerings

COGR 201B: Ethnographic Methods for Communication Research
Fall 2024
Instructor: Alex Fattal

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
Fall 2024
Instructor: Lillian Walkover

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
Fall 2024
Instructor: Kelly Gates

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
Fall 2024
Instructor: Gary Fields

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
Winter 2025
Instructor: Daniel Hallin

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
Winter 2025
Instructor: Patrick Anderson

Course description TBA.

COGR 275: The Uncommons
Winter 2025
Instructor: Fernando Domínguez Rubio

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 201D: Historical Methods for Communication Research
Spring 2025
Instructor: David Serlin

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
Spring 2025
Instructor: Anthony Harb

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: Promotional Culture
Spring 2025
Instructor: Caroline Jack

Course description TBA.

Recent Theory and Methods Course Offerings

COGR 275: Community-Based Participatory Research
Spring 2024
Instructor: Brian Goldfarb

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. The term paper or project will offer flexibility in applying the topic of the course to student’s current research.

COGR 275: Media Studies Methods
Spring 2024
Instructor: Shawna Kidman

This course is designed for graduate students who lack formal training in media studies but are interested in incorporating media into their research. The focus is explicitly on methods from the field of media studies, a discipline that often does not foreground or even name methodology, but has nonetheless developed very useful approaches for researching and writing about media, including audience ethnography, production ethnography, fan studies, textual analysis, political economy/industry studies, and new cinema history. Our readings will not conform to any canon, and our attention will not be on theoretical insights, but on reverse engineering both old and new works in these areas to unearth their methodological architecture. How do they frame their intervention? Within what fields and discourses do they situate their research? What types of evidence (data? archival? Ethnographic?) make up their body of research? How do they construct a theoretical framework? How do they organize and structure their argument? And how do methodological practices vary between articles, dissertations, and books?

COGR 275: Ethnography and Creativity
Spring 2024
Instructor: Alex Fattal

The written ethnographic monograph has long been the sine qua non of an anthropologist’s coming of age, proof that a researcher has ventured into a world and come back with a coherent story to tell. Despite rounds of withering critiques the practice of ethnography and its idealized format endures. A new generation of ethnographers, however, is searching for ways to do this rite of passage differently, notably by integrating creative and collaborative practices into their work. Such works have clustered uncomfortably under the term “multi-modal” anthropology. In this course we will engage ethnographic monographs, creative ethnographic interventions across mediums, and artistic practices that ethnographers produce as corollaries to their peer-reviewed scholarship. The goal is to foster a stimulating debate that will help graduate students think through how they might want to integrate creativity into their scholarship.

COGR 201D: Historical Methods
Winter 2024
Instructor: David Serlin

This graduate course 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, 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 traditional and non-traditional media in historical research. Students will complete one short analytical essay and one substantial final project.

COGR 275: Researching Creative Labor: Media Production Cultures
Winter 2024
Instructor: Erin Hill

This seminar examines major theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of workers and labor in creative industries via the case of the U.S. film/television Industry. Rather than the industry’s cultural products (“Hollywood” films, television series, and short-form electronic media), students will attend to the various “cultures of production,” or organizational cultures, in which practitioners engage in creative, collaborative work. Using macroscopic analyses and closer textual and discourse analyses, the course considers a cluster of concerns surrounding the creative collaborative workplace including hiring, training and recruitment; working conditions, safety and oversight; pay, credit, and symbolic capital; ownership and authorship; exploitative gig, work-for-hire and "free" labor arrangements; explicit structural and implicit cultural discrimination; unions, guilds, and their organizing efforts.

The class provides its methodological overview through a focus on the array of primary and secondary materials needed to illuminate the lives of workers without tidying the “messiness” or complexity intrinsic to creative labor sectors, including widely divergent forms of practitioner statements and self-disclosure; industrial discourse in trade, union, and vocational publications, corporate records and legal documents; worker artifacts, media events and rituals. Students will consider ethical, practical and theoretical questions posed by the these materials as they begin to form their own practices for researching workers and organizations.

COGR 275: Borders: Site I Theory I Method
Winter 2024
Instructor: Elana Zilberg

In this seminar 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. We will consider borders not only as research sites and as objects of research, but also as 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: Environmental Communication
Fall 2023
Instructor: Christo Sims

This seminar explores how humans, environments, and communication (broadly construed) co-construct each other. Topics will include: how differently situated actors – from activists, artists, and scientists to corporations, consultancies, and governments – attempt to shape knowledge, debates, policies, and practices related to ‘nature,’ climate change, and other human-environment relations; how environmental hazards and benefits are unevenly distributed and experienced; how legacies of environmental racism, exploitation, extraction, and degradation might be repaired, dismantled, exacerbated, or sustained in the decades to come. Readings will be drawn from numerous fields including communication, media studies, political ecology, geography, science and technology studies, indigenous studies, sociology, history, and anthropology. My aim is for you to become familiar with how leading scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences are studying and theorizing contemporary environmental controversies as well as how they advocate for particular remedies. My hope is that the seminar will allow you to converse intelligently with scholars from different disciplines who are working on environmental issues and to identify areas of scholarship that you might want to explore more deeply for your qualifying exams and/or dissertation projects.

COGR 275: Creating to Think
Fall 2023
Instructor: Boatema Boateng

This course begins with the premise that “art is epistemological” and conceives of creative practice as a means of knowledge production. Drawing on activist art projects and on texts like Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin’s edited volume, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, the course explores ways of knowing that have been historically overlooked or invalidated by dominant educational and legal institutions. These include the knowledges of women and queer and BIPOC communities. It centers those ways of knowing and seeks to create a space where students can use their own creative practice to generate knowledge on a question of their choice.