Graduate Courses

This course investigates the role of social science research in building knowledge to improve human communication. Students prepare graduate-level research papers while learning about the scientific method and its application in conceiving, designing, and implementing an original quantitative research project. Students further learn skills in research collaboration and discuss research ethics and how to evaluate and critique others’ research.

Protest and activism play an important role in struggles for social and environmental justice. From hashtag activism to visual culture and performance to building solidarity, communication is at the heart of protest and activism. This course will examine several different examples (BLM, Climate Strikes, and more) to consider the visual, embodied and discursive practices at work in the formation and growth of activist movements.

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 as graduate students.

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.

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.

This class challenges students to think, analyze, and write thoughtfully about public messages that influence your experience, profession, life, and culture. Your study of rhetorical theory and criticism will provide lifelong tools with which you can better understand the possibilities and difficulties of forming, using, and evaluating messages that individuals or groups use to influence or change large public audiences.

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 introduces qualitative research methods as the study of how humans create culture through symbolic communication. Students learn about qualitative methods through application in a semester-long project. Students will develop a research focus, gain access to a research site, design an ethical research study, collect and analyze data, and create an interpretation and representation of the data for others.

This course integrates social scientific, interpretive, and critical scholarship connections between cultures and interactions. Encoded in communication, it unpacks how people’s cultures shape – and are shaped by – their socio-cultural realities, identities, and interactions across boundaries. It also applies that knowledge to help learners advance their cultural sensitivity, engagement, flexibility, and effectiveness in intercultural situations.

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 explores current organizational issues from a critical perspective. Students use organizational communication theory to unpack various topics including gendered and raced labor, culture and identity, work/life balance, and organizational power and decision-making. An underlying theme of this course is the transformative potential of meaningful work in various contexts, such as for-profit, nonprofit, and global organizations.

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 study and write media criticism which closely analyzes messages as cultural repositories of meaning or which investigates the interaction between media and culture. Emphasis is on the method, stance, and purpose of media critics.

Explores the influence of film on American culture. Students explore theories and ideas concerning film, society, conflict, visual persuasion, and narrative. Students view popular American films as focal points for lecture and discussion.

Students learn and apply communication theories to critically analyze contemporary discourses and counter-discourses surrounding ecology, nonhuman animal rights, land sovereignty, 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.

Course designed to help students attain professional-level competence in oral and written business communication. Students learn rhetorical principles and apply them to business communication situations. Included: making formal oral presentations, conducting meetings, writing business reports.

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, leading to a scholarly thesis document with a public presentation of results. Students demonstrate advanced knowledge and research expertise in the communication field by designing, conducting, and implementing an original thesis study. The course must be taken twice for 6 credits, which fulfills two degree elective requirements.