Graduate Courses in Communication Studies 2013-2014

The transnational movement of bodies, images, and capital has
transformed modern conceptualizations of gender and sexuality. Sexual
practices, identities, and subcultural formations have been altered
through processes of migration and tourism, as well as by the advent of
new media technologies and the global circulation of categories such as
“gay,” “lesbian,” and “transgender.” In this class, we will examine the
varied ways local histories and geographies interact with the forces of
political, economic, and cultural globalization, focusing especially on the
experiences of sexual minorities in the Global South and of queer
diasporas in the Global North. Drawing on material from Anthropology,
Geography, Literary Studies, Media Studies, and Ethnic Studies, among
others, we will investigate non-normative gender and sexual formations
in relation to emerging discourses on race and class and to anti-colonial
theories of modernity and global capitalism. We will tackle questions
such as: How have queer subjects been incorporated into nationalist
projects and consumer culture? How has the liberal framework of human
rights reshaped the struggles of “queer” movements outside the “West”?
In what ways have transnational labor flows and discourses on
multiculturalism reshaped notions of queer community and belonging in
global cities and in postcolonial metropolitan spaces? What role have
media technologies and various forms of visual culture played in the
reconstitution of gender and sexual identities and of representations of
queer desire, affect, and kinship? In addressing these questions, we will
situate categories of gender, class, and racial difference within specific
cultural and political contexts. We will draw on examples from different
geographical regions in order to investigate how sexual minorities
negotiate the borders between and within nation-states.  

Participation  10%
Seminar Facilitation/Presentation  20%
Final Essay Proposal 20%
Final Essay  (5000-6000 words) 50%

Communication is fraught. To be fraught is to carry threat or promise. The word derives from the Middle
English verb fraught, for ‘to load with cargo’ which, in turn, derives from the Middle Dutch vrecht, for freight.
Communication carries freight: a threat and a promise, a problem and a solution. This course will examine the
problem/solution of communication as it has been treated in the tradition of western social and political
thought, and also in challenges to this tradition. We will try to unpack the freight with which communication
has been loaded, by close reading and discussion of selected primary texts. 

Seminar participation   - 20%
Seminar presentation   - 20%
Short papers (x6)   - 60%

This is a team-taught and reading/writing-intensive course intended to introduce incoming
graduate students to the field of communication studies and to the expectations and requirements
of the MA and PhD programs in communication studies at McGill University.1 Weekly seminars
will feature readings on the history and themes of media and communication studies traditions
primarily in, but not limited to, Europe, Canada, and the United States; a variety of academic
writing genres (e.g., the professional bio, the research abstract, the book review essay, the
reflective essay, the grant proposal, the annotated bibliography, MA theses and PhD
dissertations, etc.); teaching and research facilities at McGill; AHCS Communications Faculty’s
research interests and bodies of work; and other information designed to familiarize students
with the academic profession and various career options resulting from graduate study in this
field.
 
Learning outcomes: given that academic life is largely a writing culture, especially in research
intensive institutions like McGill, familiarity and practice with a variety of academic writing
genres and resources to support productive academic writing habits will be emphasized. In
addition, students will gain some familiarity with the history of the field of communication
studies and its primary academic associations, journals, conferences, handbooks, readers, and
encyclopedias. They will also acquire skills using academic search tools that help them
efficiently find scholarly, applied, and ‘grey’ literature. Another outcome will be clarity on
McGill’s expectations for graduate students, including the MA thesis and PhD dissertation forms
and templates; and most importantly, understanding the AHCS Department’s graduate program
culture and requirements.
 
Seminar participation - 40%
Writing assignments - 60%

Description to come

This course is designed to examine a number of issues and recent debates in the
study of two cultural forms: popular music and cinema.  While the official, calendar title for the course is
"Textual Analysis of Media", this course is concerned with textual analysis in a general sense and is not
principally about methods of close textual reading.  Rather it addresses the ways in which both popular
music and cinema have become the object of analysis across several disciplines.  

The course does not presume any previous study of either popular music or cinema.  This is not a history
of popular music or cinema, but, rather, a sampling of questions which surround these cultural forms
within present-day media and cultural studies.  The first few weeks of the course will be devoted to
popular music, and the latter part to cinema.

Reading "highlights" exercise - 20%
Attendance and participation - 10%
Case Analysis - 30%
Final paper - 40%

COMS 639 explores long-running debates in Communication and Media
Studies about the spectatorship of distant suffering, media witnessing and the issues of epistemology, social
responsibility, agency, and activism they engender. In this seminar we will analyze the relationship between
media witnessing and the capacities for knowing and acting, and the difficult questions of interpretation
they raise. We will be reading a range of texts from the fields of media studies, philosophy, political theory,
postcolonial theory, affect theory, and feminist studies in the process.    
 
To witness generally means to experience something so significant or extraordinary that it calls one to
testify, or otherwise bear affective and moral witness. In affective terms, witnessing tends to signal that one
experiences the heightened emotional and ethical weight of an event and its particularizing effects. In our
seminar, the concept of “media witnessing” guides much of our reading and discussion.  Media or “mediate”
witnessing refers to the act of seeing, hearing or otherwise experiencing an event structured by practices of
mediation and other forms of intervening agency. Witness is always inter-mediated, a way of bodily
experiencing an event from perspectives conditioned by systems of reference and representation in which it
occurs, but often in excess of those very systems. According to Barbie Zelizer, to witness “is to be a
bystander to history-in-the-making,” an experience of being in proximity to events of historical significance.
Most theories of witness posit a subject—a person—who witnesses, someone with privileged experience of
an event such as a survivor of violence, for instance, or a war correspondent. Among other things, our
seminar readings and discussion will probe how questions of distance and closeness shape our
understanding of the ability to feel and act in ethical ways.
 
Our goal in this course is to use witness as a conceptual tool with which to play out the issues raised by our
readings.  If, as John Peters suggests, witness is the prime case of a medium, something that supplies the
original to those who otherwise lack access to it, then witness simultaneously constitutes subjects,
technologies, and infrastructures. For Lisa Parks, witness signifies witnessing technologies like satellites that
can remotely sense for others and us, far above earth’s atmosphere.  In addition to these key terms, other
essential concepts that populate our readings and discussion include: spectatorship, memory, testimony,
accountability, response-ability, distant suffering, affinity and solidarity, among others. We will ask what it
means to witness, how conceptions of mediation are tied to notions of witnessing, how technologies act as
witnesses, how technical and representational infrastructures shape experience and capacities for agency,
how subjectivity is constituted by relations of spectatorship and performance, and how non-
representational and non-referential traces of events complicate our very understanding of collective
subjectivity and agency and the interpretive frameworks we can use to study them.   

Weekly Short Writing Assignments [15%]
Seminar Paper Proposal [20%]
Discussion Facilitation [15%]
Final Seminar Paper [50%]

The course is organized around the political and conceptual problem of mediation,
tracing the trajectory of the development of modern media technologies into the present day.
Mediation is a mode of power as much as it is a transformative process. Focusing around the
concept of mediation challenges us to reflect on the field of “media studies” and its
encounter with “Asia.” The course is structured around theoretical issues pertaining to old
and new technological modes of mediation – from photography and architecture to software
and biometrics – the readings are selected on the basis of their methodological compatibility
and their potential to bring the context of media in places like Japan and China to bear upon
the discipline of media studies.  
 The aim here is to develop a conceptually and geopolitically expanded field of media
studies – to push the discipline of media studies beyond its comfortable boundaries of North
America. Thus, the readings may not necessarily be about discrete media forms, such as
television and cinema. Rather, they are meant to offer critical frameworks through which we
may rethink the question of mediation as it informs the discipline of media studies. The
course is also based on the premise that we must go beyond the simple dichotomy between
the West and the East, if one were to generate a productive dialogue between media studies
and area studies.  
Designed as a graduate reading seminar for students interested in film and media
studies, communications studies, cultural studies, area studies, and art history, the course
encourages students to critically reflect on the historicity of analytical methods, disciplinary
boundaries, and economic and political conditions that shape our perception of media in and
beyond Asia.

Attendance - 10%
Participation & Weekly One-Paragraph Response Papers - 30%
Midterm Paper or Critical Media Project - 20%
Final Paper - 40%

This course focuses on key issues in the history and evolution of radio, television and new media in Canada; the legislative and regulatory framework of Canadian broadcasting and Internet; the role of public, private, community and on-line media; and the efforts of interest groups to influence the direction of the Canadian media system. The course also considers the global media policy environment and its impact on Canadian media.

A diverse array of political, economic, social and cultural processes have traditionally shaped media and communication systems and their governance at the national level, rooted within territorial boundaries. Within a context of globalization, however, local and national media and communication systems have been evolving and forced to adapt, increasingly, to transnational dimensions of media and communication policy. This trend has influenced the emergence of a global media and communication system that now demands attention to new policy issues, innovative approaches to these issues, and consideration for the assortment of policy actors, processes and structures that support their governance. For example, the convergence of the media and telecommunications sector, shifting regulatory demands, the emergence of the Internet and new media, and changing communication needs affect policies that operate simultaneously at the local and global levels but which still pass through the national domain.

This course will cover key issues that arise in the context of emergent spaces for global media policy governance. These issues include the fundamental relationship between media policy and democracy, the role of civil society in shaping global media policy, as well as core topics such as internet governance, concentration of media ownership, access to technologies, intellectual property, communication rights and the role of media in reflecting cultural diversity.

The course will draw from a variety of policy, institutional, theoretical and analytic texts. Students will be encouraged to consider the utility and methods of mapping the shifting media policy landscape in order to critically reflect upon issues, opportunities and challenges for actors, processes and policy activities taking shape in the global arena.

Technological Underworlds:
Today it is impossible to read a newspaper or magazine without stumbling upon at least one article featuring digital media as its main subject. Whether it is the so-called Twitter Revolution during the Arab Spring or the promise of “big data” for curing social ills, digital media in various forms and capacities is heralded as either savior or demon, and has, in turn, captured and saturated the public imagination. Despite its inescapable presence in public life, so many facets of digital technologies lay untouched, are grossly misunderstood, or barely pierce public consciousness. These include infrastructure and hardware, digital media in non-Western societies, and the seedy/transgressive cultures of digital media. This course attends to the contemporary politics of digital media through the angle of its unexplored and misunderstood underworlds: servers and spam, darknets and black code, invisible users, trolls and misfit activists. As we read various in-depth accounts, the class will interrogate the myopias that have grown in tandem with the the study of digital media, consider why and how digital phenomena are rendered invisible, and discuss the methodological difficulties in accessing and addressing digital underworlds.

Class Participation and Questions: 25%
Presentation and Handout: 25%
Final Paper: 50%