Graduate Student Seminars

Credit: 4 hours
Christians / Williams
General discussion of the mass media of communications since the Enlightenment, their role as social institutions, and their control and support; content, audience, and effects of the mass media.

Credit: 4 hours
Valdivia

Credit: 4 hours
Nerone / Frost
This course examines the history and theory of the freedom of expression. Arguments about whether the public expression of ideas should be forbidden, limited, censored, permitted, encouraged, or celebrated have a long and varied history. At stake in such debates are the significance and political priority of principles such as the family, honor, justice, order, stability, progress, and truth. Students will acquire a working knowledge of classic articulations of the relationship between freedom of expression and politics – Antigone, Socrates, Plato, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mills, and Marx – as well as familiarize themselves with some of the leading contributors to contemporary forms of these debates – including Judith Butler, Stanley Fish, Pierre Bourdieu, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Rey Chow, Lauren Berlant, Cass Sunstein, Michael Rogin, and Michel de Certeau.

Credit: 4 hours
Christians
There is an important body of literature from those who think philosophically about technology as a central component in modern culture. This course selects the major books which define the nature of technology and deal with the theoretical issues involved. Those of us interested in new media technologies, informatics, systems, and global communications realize that the background problems are often shared with technology generally. And communication technologies are an important window on the larger issues. The readings include Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, Martin Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Judy Wacjman, Feminism Confronts Technology, Andrew Feenberg, A Critical Theory of Technology, Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Norbert Wiener, Human Uses of Human Beings, Ivan Illich, Tools of Conviviality, and Pacey, The Culture of Technology.

Credit: 4 hours
Denzin
Analysis of social interaction based on the social psychology of C.H. Cooley, G.H. Mead, and W.I. Thomas; presentation of problems of theory, concepts, and method. Same as SOC 580. Prerequisite: 4 hours graduate credit in sociology.

Credit: 4 hours
Treatment of basic research concepts and procedures in the social sciences with emphasis on advertising and communications; examines both non-quantitative and quantitative methods. Same as ADV 582. Prerequisite: ADV 581, a basic course in statistical methods, and consent of department.

Credit: 2 to 8 hours
Independent Study.
Instructor Approval Required.

Credit: 4 hours
Lecture-Discussion, McCarthy
The events of 9/11 and their repercussions have provoked a particular urgency within the field of communication studies to better understand how modern human actors are connected across the particularities of ethnicity, nation, region, culture, language, and identity. Indeed, in the broad theater of the human sciences, across disciplines and fields of affiliation, there is now a collective intellectual desire, perhaps not always fully articulated, to explore the matter of global interconnections--inequalities, uneven development, movement and migration of people, ideologies, images and economic and cultural capital--- in a far more rigorous way than we have considered these issues in the past. The "Pro-seminar in Globalization, Communications and Culture" is an experimental course aimed at the exploration of the topic of global interconnections and relations. The course should appeal to a wide range of students from a variety of disciplinary interests and backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences, educational policy, and the fine arts. Readings for each weekly session will be determined as we go along and as suggested by participants. Each seminar session is regarded as a public forum. So, all and sundry are invited to participate.

Credit: 4 hours
Lecture-Discussion, Schiller
This course develops a historical account of a vital producer and consumer service: telecommunications. Its focus is how, through key episodes of conflict over system development, changing industry structures and public policies have emerged within the longer-term historical movement of American society.

Credit: 4 hours
Davis / Cook
This doctoral-level seminar examines the boundaries, shape and trajectories of what many refer to as "consumer culture." Through an intensive examination of theoretical and historical works addressing consumption, students will be challenged to confront the problem of how the contemporary moment can be understood, analyzed and critiqued as a culture of consumption. Implications of what makes consumer culture a "culture" extend into and blend with issues and concerns about gender, race/ethnicity, sexuality, the consuming self, spaces and "themed" environments, globalization and beyond.

Credit: 4 hours
Treichler
The cultural analysis of science and medicine is among the richest and most productive research areas of the last decade. In this seminar we will examine studies that are of theoretical, social, historical, and/or methodological interest. These address such topics as the U.S. health care system, scientific and medical professionalization and conduct, cancer, HIV/AIDS, cultural variation in health and disease, reproductive technologies, genetic medicine, sexuality, clinical drug trials, bioterrorism, and imaging technologies. Generally speaking, these studies can be called "cultural" because they focus, to a significant extent, on the concrete languages, texts, and discourses of the issues they are investigating, thus treating as interesting and problematic the production, representation, interpretation, and circulation of scientific and medical texts even while pointing to the social contexts of their production. We can use these works, then, to learn something about the function and range of scientific and medical discourses, the complexity of current debates within science and medicine and the disciplines that study them, and about the nature and explanatory power of a number of central concepts in cultural studies and science studies (including ideology,
hegemony, identity, body, language, code, culture, theory, practice, the media, and representation).

Credit: 4 hours
Press / Mastronardi
Historically, how we have understood adolescence has had profound social, cultural, and economic implications for young people. Recent cultural discourses about adolescence have been troubling because they naturalize adolescence as a dangerous developmental stage, a "stormy passage" provoked by an individual adolescent's naturally pathologized interior. This course examines the social construction of adolescence by taking a close look at popular texts about adolescence, including bestselling books (Reviving Ophelia, Odd Girl Out), popular film and television texts that feature adolescents, academic discourses that have historically defined adolescence (e. g., psychology), and critical discourses about young people. We then look at how adolescence has been addressed in the literature of cultural studies, highlighting the work of Valerie Walkerdine, Angela McRobbie, Paul Willis , Dick Hebdige, other scholars of adolescence. We attempt to develop a critical perspective on how it might be most constructive to "study" and analyze this type of "category," and the issues (emergent sexuality, emergent personal "identities," family and social identifications) it involves, from a critical cultural perspective.

Credit: 4 hours
Rustin
This course will build on emerging efforts to create a theoretical framework and/or conception of history treating masculinity as a site for analysis within gender and sexuality studies, race studies, and cultural studies. The work of the course will be to examine how categories of masculinity are produced and contested historically and to develop a critical analysis of culture and race in the process. Ranging through historical, sociological, literary, psychoanalytic, feminist, queer, philosophical, comparative, and linguistic approaches to the study of culture and agency, the readings for this class will introduce students to the major problems within the field of masculinity studies.

Credit: 4 hours
Davis
This course is designed to give PhD-level students and interested MA-level students an introduction to some (but by no means all) of the many and varied, major techniques, problems and ethical issues in conducting qualitative research. The emphasis in this class will be heavily practical and "hands on," and you will be asked to conduct small research projects as part of your course assignments. We will go through the process of writing a University application to conduct research on human subjects – an essential step in getting started in advanced qualitative research projects. You will also be asked, on occasion, to read and give helpful criticisms of your classmates' various works in progress.

Credit: 0 to 16 hours
Independent Study.