Undergraduate Courses in Communication Studies 2014-2015

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.” — Karl Marx, Grundrisse, ca. 1858

“Then I would let my eyes go from his face down to his hands. I would then discover Le Corbusier. It was his hands that revealed him. It was as if his hands betrayed him. They spoke all his feelings, all the vibrations of his inner life that his face tried to conceal [...] Hands that one might have thought Le Corbusier had drawn himself, with that trait made of a thousand small successive traces that seemed to look for one another but that in the end formed a precise and exact line, that unique contour that outlined the shape and defined it in space. Hands that seemed to hesitate but from which precision came. Hands that always thought, just like he did in his thinking, and on his hands one could read his anxiety, his disappointments, his emotions and his hopes. Hands that had drawn, and were to draw, all his work.” — André Wogenscky, Le Corbusier’s longtime assistant on Le Corbusier, 2006

“The hand is in danger” — Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand,” 1985

The hand leads a secret life art and media. Testifying to this are its influences scattered throughout our language in unexpected places: A surgeon is literally and etymologically, “one who practices the art of healing by manual operation” (OED), one who heals with hands. The surgeon may do so adroitly, in its root sense, using the right hand (the same source as the word dextrous). Similarly, a handshake, originally a gesture of good faith meant to disarm one’s strong hand, may turn into hand-to-hand combat if someone acts sinisterly, concealing one’s left-handedness and the dagger so clutched. A new television comes with a manual. Video games require hand-eye coordination. Artists engage in handicraft.

This course offers an entry into the complex history and theory of the hand in art, technology, and design. Of special interest will be contemporary digital technologies; however, our readings and screenings will seek to contextualize these technologies by gaining a deeper understanding of the past. Digital technologies are technologies of the digit—technologies of the number and of the finger that once represented it. To understand this aspect of the digital—the digital in its materiality—we have to understand how new media have mobilized the hand in revolutionary ways. The piano keyboard, for instance, opened broad new possibilities for finger placement and hand movement in the creation of music. The typewriter keyboard opened similar avenues for the rapid transcription of texts. The touchscreen on current tablets and mobile phones has inaugurated a new field of human-machine interaction that has only begun to be tapped into. Perhaps the theremin, which allows for orchestration without physical contact between thereminist and instrument, points toward future, touchless technologies between hand and computer, as was the stuff of science fiction in Minority Report (2002).

The course features a number of rigorous philosophical texts, without which any discussion of the hand would be incomplete. I will provide reading questions for several of the more difficult weeks to help guide your reading and our discussions through the text, but one of the best ways for us to get a handle on these complicated issues is to use concrete examples. I have a number of such examples already in hand, but I encourage you to bring your own to the table. Such examples may very well become the topics of final papers.

Assignments
15% – Attendance and participation, including one week when you will be scheduled to provide discussion questions on the week’s readings or to lead discussion on an object related to class. Objects might include clips from films and television, artistic pieces of all sorts, literary works, etc. Be creative! I look forward to seeing what you find.

30% – Response papers (6), one page each, due in phases: within weeks 1–2, 3–4, 5–6, 7–8, 9–10, and 11–12. These windows are meant ideally to pace the papers so that different people are contributing each week with written thoughts that they can read aloud to help spark discussion. Papers should be submitted to the course website no later than 8 a.m. on the day of class. I will look over the responses before class and ask people to read their insights to the class. Feel free to offer to read your own. Finally, the specification of one page is just that: keep it to one page using a 12-point font. However, you can adjust the spacing between single-spaced and double- spaced depending on how much you have to say.

15% – Applying theory paper (5–6 pages, double-spaced, 12-point font, 1-inch margins), due October 8 in class. More info to come in an assignment sheet on September 24.

40% – Semester project, consisting of a formal scholarly paper (15–20 pages). If you have an alternative proposal for the semester project, please get in touch with me by October 10 so we can work out a plan before the first deadline.
October 17: Email me a one-paragraph paper proposal, pitching a topic and some preliminary research questions by 17:00
October 29: Formal paper proposal (4 pages), including a clear statement of topic, research questions, and an annotated bibliography November 26: A short presentation of your research
December 5: Formal scholarly paper (15–20 pages, plus citations) posted on the course website by 17:00.

Coming soon.

An overview of the growth and impact of 20th century media such as radio, television, cinema and the mass-circulation press; their role in shaping the technological, socio-political and aesthetic dimensions of urban modernity.

This course is designed to deal with the relationship between communications media and those social and cultural transformations which have been loosely grouped under the heading of “modernity” in the 20th century. These transformations include the rise of the press and electronic media, widespread urbanization, shifting relationships between elite and popular culture, the development of powerful media institutions, governmental efforts to influence media for various ends through regulation and public policy, and the strategic ‘use’ of media by activist groups for social and political purposes.
The emphasis on “the 20th century” is central to the understanding of the course. Beginning with the discovery by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895 that the electromagnetic, or ‘radio’, spectrum could be used for the transmission and reception of intelligible messages, a new “modern” era of communication was inaugurated. The 20th century saw the introduction of new media like radio and television, and new media practices like advertising, public relations and propaganda. Other communication technologies, like the press, photography, sound recording and motion picture film, combined with the new electronic media to form a “system” of communication that became an integral part of social and cultural life, beginning in the developed economies of Europe and North America and spreading eventually to encompass the globe. Media played an important role in the defining events and social processes of the 20th century worldwide, including the consolidation of a global capitalist economy and the challenges to it, the rise and decline of colonialist and imperialist projects, war and economic crisis, the birth of the welfare state and its neoliberal successor, various iterations of a ‘new world order’, the equating of the idea of ‘the good life’ with that of a consumer society, and the emergence of new social and cultural movements predicated on alternative visions, equality, justice and structural change. Towards the end of the 20th century, the Internet and ‘social media’ ushered in a new set of transformations – which will not figure in the present course except as referents of the transition from ‘then’ to ‘now’.

The course will be organized in three overlapping, roughly chronological sections, mirroring technological changes as follows:
-1895-1930, from the early use of the radio spectrum to the rise of mass media
-1920-1970, press, radio, television; the liberal ideal of mass media for entertainment, education and information; the dominant use of one-way mass communication of persuasion for purposes of political and economic control through propaganda and advertising
-1960-1998, the rise of alternative and oppositional media forms and practices; the beginnings of bi-directional, participatory communication, ‘user-generated content’ etc.

Quizzes: 30%
Assignment: 20th century media user profile - 30%
Assignment: Research paper - 40%

Coming soon.

The Visual Culture of Crime

The category of "visual culture" encompasses the range of images which circulate within our social and cultural worlds.  "Visual culture" may include prestigious forms of image-making, such as high art painting, or less respectable forms, such as the popular cultural imagery of advertising and television.  The institutions of justice and policing have used visual images for a variety of purposes, from cataloguing suspected criminals to reconstructing the scenes of crimes.  Painters and photographers have used images of crime to "prove" prejudices about the criminal personality, to aestheticize the contemporary city, to raise metaphysical issues of life and death, to transgress cultural norms of tastefulness and acceptability and so on. 

In this course, we will be looking at a wide range of images which deal in some way with crime.  Some of these will be in the form of "moving" images -- that is, films or television programs.  Others will be "still images":  photographs, paintings, drawings, newspaper and magazine covers, maps, etc.  The purpose of this course is to provide an overview of many of the genres and styles through which crime comes to be represented visually.

Please note that there are no tutorials/discussion groups for this class.

Visual Analysis 1: Still Image - 20%
Visual Analysis II: Moving Image - 30%
Readings comments posted to MyCourses - 20%
Final Exam - 30%

This course explores disability scholarship in order to rethink our basic concepts of communication, technology and culture. We will consider critical accounts of disability against theories of technology and communication. Most available theories of communication and technology presuppose a fully “able” subject, even though there is little warrant for doing this when we consider the full variety of human conditions. What happens if we remove that presupposition and instead begin by presupposing the human variety?

Weekly response papers (30%)
Dates Project (10%)
Discussion Participation (15%)
Semester Project (45%)

This is an advanced undergraduate seminar that introduces students to the field of scholarly research, policymaking, and public interest advocacy known as “Internet Governance”. Many courses about the Internet feature what people are doing or saying online; in contrast, this seminar covers the structure of the Internet and the technology and politics involved in how it is governed.

Expectations of students in this course are high given that coursework involves taking on a research project for an actual client: an NGO involved in public interest advocacy about Internet governance. For this reason, students should prepare to spend at least 2 hours studying outside of class for every classroom hour: in addition to each weekly 3-­‐hour seminar, students should plan each week to spend at least six hours of study time reading, doing research, and writing related to the final project. In previous seminars, the most successful students often made an investment of nine hours a week, including class time.

Students will be assessed on the quality of their preparation for and engagement in class discussions, their ability to work productively as part of a research team, and by the quality of their contributions to a final project that is achieved collaboratively by the entire class.

Coming soon.

Hackers, the Class

This course examines computer hackers to interrogate not only the ethics and technical practices of hacking, but to examine more broadly how hackers and hacking have transformed the politics of computing and the Internet more generally. We will examine how hacker values are realized and constituted by different legal, technical, and ethical activities of computer hacking—for example, free software production, cyberactivism and hactivism, cryptography, and the prankish games of hacker underground. We will pay close attention to how ethical principles are variably represented and thought of by hackers, journalists, and academics and we will use the example of hacking to address various topics on law, order, and politics on the Internet such as: free speech and censorship, privacy, security, surveillance, and intellectual property. We finish with an in­depth look at two sites of hacker and activist action: Wikileaks and Anonymous.

Reading Responses - 40% (7 total and see separate sheet for grading rubric).
Questions/participation - 20% (see separate sheet for grading rubric).
Final Writing Assignment - 40% (short essay: what is a hacker? See below for basic description and a longer one is forthcoming)

Coming soon.

Cultural Industries (Queer Theory, Queer Time)
 
In this seminar, we will examine the various ways queer theory has complicated, challenged, and appropriated different models of temporality. We will explore questions such as: How is queerness experienced as a form of untimeliness—a being and becoming out-of-step with the normative, linear (“straight”) time of history and of individual and social development? How do queers produce alternative temporalities through new modes of intimacy, textual and visual representations, and forms of kinship? In what way are non-normative genders and sexualities shaped by the fantasies and teleologies imputed by neoliberal culture and by the regulation, management, and imagination of life and death? How are queer thinking and queer politics troubled and enabled by notions of futurity and utopia, hope and optimism, memory and nostalgia, and sociality and negativity? In addressing these questions, we will draw on interventions in queer theory that problematize time through an engagement with psychoanalytic and philosophical discourses, as well as with recent interventions in critical race theory, postcolonial theory, affect theory, and theories of space.