Please note that room locations and schedules are subject to change and all details should be confirmed before the start of the class.
Fall 2026
COMS 616 (CRN 2390)
Staff-Student Colloquium 1 (3 credits)
Prof. Darin Barney
THursdays, 11:35pm-2:25pm, Arts W-220
Introduces 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. The course will focus on the theme of “study,” and involves review of selected materials in the field of communication studies grounded in disciplinary, interdisciplinary, critical, and/or interpretive perspectives. Students are expected to prepare for each seminar by completing assigned readings and related activities, actively taking part in seminar discussions and events in the department, and completing a series of minor writing assignments. Attendance is mandatory. The course will be augmented by specialized seminars given by the departmental faculty in their respective fields.
COMS 630 (CRN 2391)
Readings in Communications Research 1 (3 credits)
Reading programs supervised by a member of staff; topics will be chosen to suit individual interests.
Note: Instructor's approval required.
COMS 646 (CRN 2392)
Popular Media (3 credits)
Prof. Yuriko Furuhata
Wednesdays, 2:35pm-5:25pm, Arts W-220
Cross-listed with EAST 564, this seminar on “structures of modernity” explores the roles of various media technologies in shaping histories of colonialism, capitalism, territorial conflicts, and knowledge production. The seminar brings together critical theory, media history, environmental humanities, cultural studies, and science and technology studies to rethink the purported unity of “modernity” across the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Modernity is not one thing, as we will see, but rather fractured along the lines of media, geopolitics and the environment. The guiding question of the course is Foucauldian: what were the underlying historical and cultural conditions of possibility that led to the invention, circulation, and transformation of certain media technologies? How might we resist the Eurocentric tendency to flatten and homogenize conceptions of key terms such as media, technology, and human by paying attention to the racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed structures of modernity?
COMS 681 (CRN 2393)
Special Topics - Media and Culture: "Echo" (3 credits)
Prof. Alex Blue V
Thursdays, 11:35pm-2:25pm, Arts W-220
This is a class about haunting. This is a class about memory. This is a class about repetition, about repetition, about repetition. This is a class about repetition, about repetition, about repetition. This is a class about the ways in which the past continues to shape our present and future, about sounds that keep returning to us, about listening to ghosts and having them listen back. This course is an exploration of the literal, the representational, and the presence left by absence. This is a course about ECHOECHOECHOECHOECHOECHO.
This experimental course offers the opportunity for us to explore echo as material and metaphor, and to consider how echo can provide new ways of looking at temporality, tradition, and transitions.
COMS 682 (CRN 2394)
Special Topics in Media Theory (3 credits)
Prof. Carrie Rentschler
Tuesdays, 2:35pm-5:25pm, Arts W-220
This seminar starts from the premise that something quite significant, profound even, happens when we place co-existence and finitude at the center of how we theorize media. COMS 682 focuses on existential media theory and the existential in media theory: theories of media where conditions of being, of life and death and everything in-between, take centre stage. For Amanda Lagerkvist, one of the authors we will read, existential media theory is “cognizant of finitude” and “existential inevitabilities” (2022, 12, 13). For John Durham Peters, media “provide conditions for existence” (2015, 13,14).
Existential media theories are well-represented in the field, in technology studies, digital culture studies, witnessing theory, disability media studies, affect theory, Black studies, and more. Their frameworks on media and existence, the relationality of human and non-human, and structures of power, domination, transformation and care, will orient our work, situating us around questions of being and the infrastructures required to support co-existence. We will experiment a bit with different forms of writing as research practice, using vignettes, fieldnotes, and “hundreds” (Berlant and Stewart), among other formats, that focus attention on smaller, closer, often intimate and situational scales of perception and analysis.
Winter 2027
COMS 630 (CRN 7329)
Readings in Communications Research 1 (3 credits)
Reading programs supervised by a member of staff; topics will be chosen to suit individual interests.
Note: Instructor's approval required.
COMS 635 (CRN 1853)
Communication and Postcolonial Thought: Experimental Methodologies (3 credits)
Prof. Jenny Burman
Wednesdays, 2:35PM-5:25PM, LEA 917
This is a methodologies seminar, in which we will (a) read experimental and autobiographically informed methodologies in post/anti-colonial scholarship: autoethnography, speculative inquiry, research-creation, etc., and (b) experiment together with different ways of writing, assembling archives, and approaching our objects of inquiry. We will visit two off-campus archives to talk about research outside of universities, as well as invite 2-3 guest speakers who work in research-creation.
Readings will likely draw from: Dear Science (McKittrick), Hawthorne Archives (Gordon), Pollution is Colonialism (Liboiron), Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Hartman), Dusk of Dawn (Du Bois), Diminished Faculties (Sterne), In Praise of Risk (Dufourmantelle), Picturing Aura (Stolow), Black Undertow (ka Canham), Psychoanalysis under Occupation (Sheehi + Sheehi), Alien Forms and Minor Genres (Chen), dear elia (Khúc). And other readings, viewings, and listenings.
COMS 647 (CRN 1854)
Emerging Media (3 credits)
Prof. Sara Grimes
Mondays, 11:35AM-2:25PM, Ferr 230
COMS 681 (CRN 1855)
Special Topics - Media and Culture: Sex, the Subject, and Psychoanalysis (3 credits)
Prof. Bobby Benedicto
Tuesdays, 11:35AM-2:25PM, Arts W-220
What is the subject? How is it constituted, and what does sex have to do with its constitution? Sex and sexuality are often imagined as things a subject has: an identity, an orientation, a set of desires, or a domain of experience belonging to an otherwise coherent self. Psychoanalysis begins from a more troubling account. For Freud and Lacan, sex registers a disturbance within subjectivity itself: a point at which the subject fails to coincide with itself, where desire exceeds intention, pleasure becomes entangled with unpleasure, and identity is unsettled by forces it cannot master. This seminar takes sex as a privileged route into the problem of the divided subject. Reading Freud and Lacan alongside later psychoanalytic theory, we will examine concepts including alienation, castration, desire, pleasure, enjoyment, the gaze, and the death drive. Films, alongside selected works from the visual arts and visual culture, will serve both as objects of psychoanalytic interpretation and as ways of thinking through these concepts, asking what becomes visible when sex is approached as a register of the fracture through which the subject comes into being.