Fall 2022
COMS 210 (CRN 2115) (3 credits)
Introduction to Communication Studies
Prof. Jonathan Sterne
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:35 pm-3:55 pm
ENGMC 204
COMS 210 is a course in media civics. It is designed to help you become a better citizen of reality. It also offers an introduction to the field of Communication Studies as it is practised at 黑料不打烊. We live in a media-saturated world, yet, despite the constant talk about media by media institutions, technologies, and personalities, most people know surprisingly little about how and why these systems work the way they do. You will learn about media economics and institutions; ecological impacts of media systems; and media practices and ideologies. Throughout the term we will attend carefully to questions of power, justice, and inequality.
COMS 310 (CRN 2116) (3 credits)
Media and Feminist Studies
Prof. Carrie Rentschler
Monday and Wednesday, 11:35 am-12:55 pm
ARTS W-215
鈥淢edia and Feminist Studies鈥� examines contemporary feminist, queer and trans scholarship on internet studies, new media, and techno-culture. We will analyze how structures of power shape, script and condition media technologies and their social relationships, engaging in debates about whiteness, intersectionality, the politics of representation, online oppression and resistance, and the goal of critique, among other key issues. Our course approaches media as systems, tools, technologies, infrastructures, codes, platforms, social practices, and genres of communication, in addition to representations (of (fill in the blank) 鈥�.). While the course and the professor do not espouse a particular feminist politics, part of our task is to openly, and vigorously, discuss feminist thinking, feminist research, and feminist movements. If you take this course, you need to be up for this kind of engagement.
COMS 330 (CRN 2117) (3 credits)
Media in Cultural Life: Critical Perspectives on AI and Data Justice
Helen Hayes
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:35 pm-3:55 pm
MCMED 1034
In the last five years, there has been an 鈥淎I boom鈥� in research, business, and popular culture, resulting in a groundswell of critical AI scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In this course, we will read and discuss much of this contemporary critical scholarship on AI and data justice. Our goal will be to critically examine AI technology and its increasingly prominent role in our everyday lives. To do so, we will engage with and study technology鈥檚 social, political, environmental, and cultural implications by learning from and making use of cross-disciplinary theories and practices embedded in intersectional feminist thought, Indigenous perspectives, and civic and human rights debates.
The course will start with foundational work on what AI 鈥渞eally is.鈥� Then, building on this, it will explore how AI contributes to or alleviates existing social and political tensions surrounding capital, race, gender, and colonialism; how biases and issues of ownership shape technological conditions; how AI and its computational analogs contribute to the climate crisis and other environmental issues; and how AI regulation figures within current approaches to tech governance.
Course topics will include, amongst others, AI and labour, data subjectivity, algorithmic coloniality, technological materiality, AI and environment, tech policy, and AI governance.
COMS 350 (CRN 7200) (3 credits)
Sound Culture
Prof. Alex Blue V.
Monday and Wednesday, 2:35 pm-3:55 pm
CURRIE 305/6
鈥淪ound Culture鈥� is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of sound studies. This course explores the concept of sound in a multitude of ways - as material; as ephemera; as vibrations in the air; as consumable object; etc. - and explores sound鈥檚 constant interaction with daily life and culture. A vast array of topics will be investigated, including sound and technological mediation, sound as weapon, deafness, and noise; you can also expect a very high level of engagement with theory from Black studies, queer studies, disability studies, and other identity-related areas of study to further hone our listening. Knowledge gained throughout the semester will equip you to address fundamental questions within sound studies, such as: how has the mediation of sound changed modern life? What counts as noise, and how does this affect our lives? How are spaces and places organized by sound? Why do we hear deep voices as authoritative? In addition to reading, writing, and discussion, there will also be sound-oriented projects, giving you the opportunity to immerse yourself even more deeply with these topics. How does that sound?
COMS 425 (CRN 7797) (3 credits)
Urban Culture and Everyday Life
Prof. Jenny Burman
Tuesday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS 385
Explores how popular and artistic cultural texts interrogate the dimensions of urban culture that shape everyday life, such as transnationalization/ globalization; gentrification, migration and other displacements; the proliferation of mobile media and communication technologies; and the political mobilization of fear and anxiety about violence and terrorism.
COMS 491 (CRN 2118) (3 credits)
Special Topics in Communication Studies: Queer Time
Prof. Bobby Benedicto
Wednesday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
ARTS W-220
In this seminar we will examine the various ways queer theory has complicated and challenged different models of temporality. We will explore questions such as: How is queerness experienced as a form of untimeliness鈥攁 being and becoming out-of-step with the normative, linear (鈥渟traight鈥�) time of history and of individual and social 鈥減rogress鈥�? How are conventional narrative structures contested and alternative queer temporalities created through aesthetic interventions, particularly in media such as film? How are queer thinking and queer politics troubled and enabled by notions of negativity and futurity, death and spectrality, optimism and nostalgia? What does an understanding of queer time reveal about other structures of violence, particularly racial violence? And how does it contribute to a broader critique of the subject in the humanities? In addressing these questions, we will draw on interventions in queer theory that problematize time through an engagement with psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses.
COMS 497 (CRN 2119) (3 credits)
Independent Study
Independent study of a particular topic in communication studies taken under the supervision of an instructor with relevant expertise in the area.
Prerequisite: Instructor's approval required.
Winter 2023
COMS 230 (CRN 7326) (3 credits)
Communication and Democracy
Prof. Mark Lloyd
Tuesday and Thursday, 4:05 pm-5:25 pm
ENGTR 0100
It is often written that communication is vital to democracy, but too often the words "communication" and "democracy" are wrongly assumed to be understood and their meanings shared. With the rise, and recent concerns around 鈥渟ocial media鈥� and its now generally accepted negative impact on liberal democracies around the world; with the prominent calls to 鈥減rotect鈥� liberal democracy from rising authoritarianism, this course will take a deep-dive investigating the meaning of both communication and democracy and what these concepts mean in this century and in different places around the globe. It will begin with a critical historic approach to both democracy and communication, and end with the students acting democratically to advance their own ideas about the meaning of democracy and the proper role of communication and its relationship to democracy. Though this is a lecture course, students will be expected to work in groups and participate actively in class.
COMS 340 (CRN 1912) (3 credits)
New Media
Prof. Carrie Rentschler
Tuesday and Thursday, 11:35 am-12:55 pm
ARTS W-215
This course examines the relationship between culture, emerging (or 鈥渘ew鈥�) technology, and power. Questions of inequality and resistance, social change, emergent media strategies and forms of social organization will feature centrally in our course and our class discussions. To examine these questions, we will read a broad range of scholarship on the internet, digital culture, and new and emerging media, including work on: histories of new media, contemporary technological skeuomorphs (tech that looks like older tech), the gendered labour of technological work, meme culture, online misinformation and fake news, technologies of anti-racism, how affordances shape the use of technologies, design justice, new modes of camera and live-stream witnessing, and the forms of participatory peer production on Wikipedia. You will read key thinkers and practitioners in these areas of scholarship. This course will equip you to become more attuned, more analytically minded, and more 鈥渓iterate鈥� participants, users and critics of internet culture and online platforms, their content, their governance, and the roles they play in shaping social and political life. If you take this course, you need to be up for, and open to, these kinds of discussions.
COMS 361 (CRN 1913) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Communication Studies 1: Radio and Audio Media Theories
Dr. Gustavo Ferreira
Tuesday and Thursday, 8:35 am-9:55 am
ARTS W-215
Is radio old news? In this course we will dispute this notion by framing radio as a part of the audio media ecology. We will explore theories of radio as a medium and as a language, and how 鈥渘ew鈥� streaming, podcasting and audio social media all share characteristics and practices employed by traditional terrestrial radio. You will learn how to engage with media discourses about listening practices and the aesthetics of audio media: legacy and digital. Through the analysis of recent scholarship, we will debate methods of investigation on the politics, economics and cultural implications of audio media and theories of communication through sound mediation. We will be particularly interested in how these media are explored and appropriated in global South contexts, decentering the global North experiences, specially in Latin American societies, where radio was instrumental in their 鈥渕odernization鈥� push during the 20th century.
COMS 362 (CRN 1914) (3 credits)
Selected Topics in Communication Studies 2:
Techlash: Critical Studies of Technological Solutionism
Dr. Gustavo Ferreira
Wednesday and Friday, 1:05 pm-2:25 pm
ARTS W-215
The 2010s were the decade of the startup and disruption rhetoric. Rooted in hopes of technological development as the solution for all humanities' problems, we have seen the rise and fall of the "Uber of X" solutions from deliveries, through health, to financial services. Despite critiques of such promises being raised almost simultaneously with this phenomenon, this discourse is still relevant today, albeit somewhat transformed. Our goal in this course is to understand these changes and what novel critiques reveal about them. We will overview studies of digital technology that critically explore their ideologies, assumptions, and consequences, and contradict their ability to address contemporary societal challenges. Questioning the neutrality or objectivity of technological tools, we will map new trends in the tech development world and articulate new scholarly critiques in experimental media modalities to identify actual potential engagements with new technologies.
COMS 411 (CRN 1915) (3 credits)
Disability, Technology and Communication
Prof. Jonathan Sterne
Monday, 2:35 pm-5:25 pm
ARTS W-220
This course explores the intersections of disability and media studies in order to rethink our basic concepts of communication, technology and culture, as well as to advance our understandings of disability and the technocultural environments in which it exists. We will consider critical accounts of disability against theories of technology and communication. Through readings, discussions, and student research, we will develop scholarship that provides alternatives to the ableist concepts and practices that pervade the humanities and social sciences.
COMS 435 (CRN 7327) (3 credits)
Advance Issues in Media Governance
Prof. Mark Lloyd
Thursday, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
SH688 465
Media governance issues impact nearly every facet of our digital age 鈥� from how markets operate to what movies are produced to what code is introduced to the internet. These issues are both global and local and touch on how we are educated, how we make a living, whether we have access to news and entertainment, whether we can communicate effectively in an emergency. This is a seminar on current issues regarding how nations govern media and telecommunication. After a brief survey of the field, the course will be driven by student interest in particular topics such as Intellectual Property, Privacy and Corporate and Government Surveillance, Freedom of Expression and Censorship, Media Representation, Communication Access, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Literacy.
COMS 490 (CRN 6885) (3 credits) / ARTH 422 (CRN 6884)
Selected Topics in Art and Architecture 3: Black Sound and Technoculture
Prof. Alex Blue V.
Wednesday, 2:35 pm-5:25 pm
ARTS W-5
This course offers the opportunity to expand our understandings of race (with a particular focus on Blackness), sound, aesthetics, and technology, and the ways in which these things overlap and interact. We will address numerous questions, including: how can a sound have a race?; What does it mean to sound Black (adjective)? What does it mean to sound Black (verb)? In addition to readings, we will incorporate film, music, and other forms of media to explore a range of topics at the intersection of Black sound and technoculture.
Cross-listed with ARTH 422.
COMS 492 (CRN 1917) (3 credits)
The Politics of Care, Interdependency and Mutual Aid
Prof. Carrie Rentschler
Monday, 2:35 pm-5:25 pm
ARTS W-5
Over the past few years, the COVID-19 pandemic and the international movement for Black Lives brought into strong relief those durable forms of necropolitical violence, oppression and inequality that shape social life and political structures of governance. They also revealed some of the strategies people use to organize social movements and articulate claims to what is possible and just 鈥� from long before the pandemic. This course examines a set of social movement imaginaries for creating more just and humane societies based in social relationships of care, mutual aid, and interdependency, and the media and communication practices that represent, mobilize, and transform them. We start
from the premise that how people respond in times of crisis reveals some of the essential structures of care 鈥� and lack thereof -- that reproduce our social world. We will consider care work as not only necessary, but as foundational, highly valuable, and socially transformative practices.
Over our seminar, we will read current works of political theory and recent books on social change and mutual aid alongside key examples of social movement media. Students will create a collaborative public-facing project over the term, working with different movement media genres to examine how they shape the work of doing social change: from manifestos and open public letters to telephone hotlines, resource guides and handbooks, social media activism, zines, and archiving projects.
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