Please note that room locations and schedules are subject to change and all details should be confirmed before the start of the class.
Fall 2024
COMS 616 (CRN 2025)
Staff-Student Colloquium 1 (3 credits)
Prof. Jenny Burman
Thursdays, 11:35am-2:25pm
This seminar is only open to incoming MA and PhD students in communication studies. Its format varies from week to week, ranging from workshops on writing grant applications, to lectures by faculty members, to visits to libraries and archival resources on and off campus.
COMS 630 (CRN 2026)
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 2027)
Popular Media (3 credits)
Prof. Yuriko Furuhata
Wednesdays, 11:35 am-2:25 pm
This course explores the modern and contemporary screen environments and media technologies, analyzing media forms such as photography, cinema, television, digital media, and architecture through historical and theoretical frameworks. Emphasis will be placed on comparative approaches to media practices in Asia and beyond.
This seminar is cross-listed with EAST 560 Screen Cultures and Media Arts.
COMS 683 (CRN 2028)
Special Topics in Media and Politics (3 credits)
Energy
Prof. Darin Barney
Fridays, 11:35am-2:25pm
This seminar will consider the material, cultural, aesthetic, political and environmental dimensions of energy, across its various elemental forms, and the infrastructures, media and relations by which it comes into being and is communicated. The course will be informed by historical, Marxist, feminist, Indigenous, materialist and post-materialist approaches in the emerging fields of energy and environmental humanities and will study the implication of energy and its mediation in the social reproduction and contestation of (racial) capitalism, (settler) colonialism and extractivism.
Winter 2025
COMS 500 (CRN 6882)
Special Topics in Communications Studies 1 (3 credits)
Noise
Prof. Alex Blue V
Tuesdays, 2:35PM-5:25PM
This course will cover everything from the implications of the word as both fixed meaning and metaphor, to the ramifications of private and public perceptions of noisiness; noise music scenes; policy and legislation around noise complaints and noise ordinances, etc. It will also discuss visual noise, static, interference, and various other permutation of noise. While the final project can be a research paper, there will an option for different media submissions.
COMS 647 (CRN 1854)
Emerging Media (3 credits)
Remix and Algorithmics Cultures
Sara Grimes
Wednesdays, 11:35am-2:25pm
This course explores remix and algorithmic cultures and the complex relationship between these two areas of practice and inquiry. Topics include: the histories, theories, and methodologies used to understand remix and algorithmic cultures as genres, as analytic frameworks, as forms of creative and/or cultural practice, and as technosocial systems of production and (re)distribution that challenge traditional ideas about art, creativity, copyright, and cultural rights. Examples include: Hip Hop, Queer fandoms, social media feeds/recommenders, DeviantArt and DreamUp, Roblox AI Assistant.
COMS 682 (CRN 1856)
Special Topics in Media Theory (3 credits)
Ethnographic Writing
Prof. Alex Blue V
Mondays, 2:35PM-5:25PM
To be posted soon...
COMS 683 (CRN 1857)
Special Topics in Media and Politics (3 credits)
Death, the Body, and Visual Culture
Prof. Bobby Benedicto
Thursdays, 11:35am-2:25pm
Death, it is often said, lies beyond representation. It cannot be known or communicated. It is a singular event that speaks to the shared limit of human consciousness, sense, and perception. Despite, or because of, the radical incommunicability of death, it has long been a central preoccupation of artists, writers, and filmmakers, and of philosophers and theorists working across various disciplines and fields of inquiry. In this seminar, we will examine efforts to think through, capture, and confront the specter of human finitude. We will ask: What is at stake in attempts to aestheticize and theorize that which cannot be reclaimed for the domains of knowledge and experience? How are these attempts shaped by the politics of gender, sexuality, and race and their relationship to the politics of the image? How have the materiality of the body and the uneven distribution of risk and vulnerability shaped conceptualizations of death more broadly? In asking these questions, we will engage various psychoanalytic and philosophical approaches to the problem of death and dying, and set them against examples drawn from across the visual arts.
