400

This course will investigate the vast body of empirical work on the effects of both media content and media technology upon users and audiences. In particular, social, attitudinal, and behavioral approaches will be the focus to infer effects of media and technology. Classic and new media effects theories will be critically analyzed, discussed, and used to develop practical and theoretically grounded media effects projects.

Survey course designed to increase student's understanding of the United States First Amendment law as it relates to individual citizens, mass media, environmental protections, organizational, and health communication. Ethical considerations inherent in communication law decisions are emphasized.

East Africa is one of the planet's richest sites of human and nonhuman ecological histories and provides the ideal space to study diversity and difference. Topics will include evolution and ecology, marine ecology, land use conflict, and sustainability.

This course develops the ability to identify and analyze assumptions underlying theoretical models of communication that shape knowledge about ourselves, others, and reality. The course investigates major explanatory theories of communication. Students develop foundational knowledge about the communication discipline, equipping them in all other courses in their major.

This course investigates dynamics of differences that frame, enable, and constrain people’s communication opportunities across diverse social identity groupings. Focusing on ‘isms’ related to race, gender, sex, social class, ability, sexuality, and age, its learning activities apply theory and scholarship to understand, integrate, and more insightfully navigate interactions across the welcome range of human differences.

Students study American political culture using a rhetorical lens. They analyze the rhetorical strategies used in political messages, that create, maintain, and denigrate our political institutions. Students gain an appreciation and understanding how humans use symbols and how the symbols that humans create use them. They can see how political rhetoric can liberate us and confine us.

Students learn about and explore romantic, familial, platonic, earthly, and sometimes “radical” relationships through various interpersonal, mediated, and culturally-situated communication concepts and theories. Special focus is given to the ways love, care, and/or grief inform our lived experience(s) over the life cycle. Topics span philosophies of birth, death, suicide, joy, fertility, queerness, eco-spirituality, and otherness.

This course explores the intersection between bodies and place, with particular attention to our natural ecosystems in the creation of meaning and regeneration within the arc of trauma. It draws on a range of communication and ecological perspectives on health, land, community, imagination, and media representations of identity to critically examine relationships between micro and macro systems of belonging and embodiment.

This course offers an advanced investigation of organizational culture. Students will identify symbolic organizing practices and ideological meanings tied to them, and examine how plural cultural meanings and beliefs inform organizing practices. Topics include organizational ethnography, cultural diversity, and social justice. Drawing from interpretive and critical traditions, students will design and implement an advanced research project.

Examines the cultural significance and accomplishments of visuality. Considers the social and political implications of “looking” practices, the impact of “representation” in contemporary culture, and the circulation of images (through virality and sharing practices). Specific focus on race, gender and class and the role that visual images play in cultural perceptions of and practices toward race and racialized bodies.

Students closely analyze mediated messages as cultural repositories of meaning and investigate the interaction between media and culture. Emphasis is on the method, stance, and purpose of media criticism.

This course investigates theoretical and practice-based evidence for the powerful role communication plays in the knowledge, maintenance, and promotion of health and wellness across individuals and communities. Students learn issues in health communication campaigns with particular attention to misinformation, public health disparities, and the consequences on health outcomes. Students will design and implement health communication research and intervention projects.

This course provides critical analysis and instruction about news that seeks to serve the public’s interest. Students learn to research, report, and write in-depth, interpretive, and analytical stories on public affairs in areas such as crime and police, environment, healthcare, politics, and education. Students learn how the press can best serve democracy and its role in public knowledge and debate.

This course teaches the fundamental nonfiction storytelling techniques of professional media production. These skills are applicable to careers in public relations, marketing, journalism, or any modern communication field. Students gain hands-on experience with photo, audio and video production gear, analyze the work of professional producers and their peers, and discuss the many ethical questions that come along with nonfiction storytelling.

Students learn and apply communication theories to critically analyze contemporary discourses and counter-discourses surrounding ecology, environmentalism, and environmental justice. Students unpack and interrogate how their own assumptions, beliefs, language, and practices support and/or resist various environmental narratives around plants, nonhuman animals, food systems, and climate communication.

This course provides a space to reflect, synthesize, and apply knowledge developed as a Communication and Media Major. Students design and implement a semester-long culminating capstone project that showcases majors’ knowledge and competence in communication. Senior projects integrate theories, concepts, and processes learned as a major to generate knowledge and new applied communication practices about social issues.

This course provides reflective, specific guidance in applying communication theories to a professional communication setting. Students learn how to observe and apply theory to practice, increasing their understanding and ability to function successfully in a professional communication setting by working directly with a qualified internship supervisor and academic internship director. May be taken twice, only 3 credits apply to major.

This course is under the direction of a faculty adviser or within a class context, leading to a scholarly thesis document with a presentation of results. Students demonstrate advanced knowledge and research expertise in the communication field by designing, conducting, and implementing an original thesis study.