Graduate Courses in Communication Studies 2015-2016

This course introduces students to theory and research in the interdisciplinary field of discourse studies. Readings, discussions, and assignments are designed to sensitize students to language-­‐society relations and the role of discourse in social, political, and cultural change. We begin by exploring the interdisciplinary foundations of this field of inquiry. We then examine examples of discourse analytical research taking critical and anti-­‐oppression perspectives. At the end of the semester, students apply knowledge gained throughout the course in a bibliographic essay that relates to their research questions and topical interests. 

Participation - 40%
Final paper - 60%

This course introduces incoming AHCS 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 involves a review of selected materials about the field of communication studies from the department’s international and interdisciplinary perspective grounded in critical, anti- oppression, and/or interpretive perspectives. Students are expected to prepare for each seminar by completing the assigned readings and related activities, actively taking part in seminar discussions and events in the department, and completing both a mid-term and end of term writing assignment. Attendance is mandatory.

Seminar participation - 40%
Mid-term writing assignment - 30%
End of term writing assignment - 30%

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Structures of Modernity: Culture & Capital

Objectives:
The goal of this course is to provide students with three different perspectives on the relationship between culture and capital: Marx’s critique of political economy; Deleuze and Guattari’s reworking of Marx with an emphasis on subject formation; and Graeber’s anarchist anthropology. Students will be encouraged to develop a research project of their choosing and to address it from these three perspectives.

Methodology: Each unit centers on a book, and seminar time will be devoted to delineating the major features of its theoretical approach or conceptual framework in order to assist students with working through it in the context of their research project. The reading is exceedingly demanding, but the seminar will not succeed unless everyone keeps up with the materials (a minimum requirement). Course time will generally be divided in three parts: an hour of focused review of the readings, and hour of discussion dealing with practical implications, and an hour devoted to student’s case studies (not necessarily in this order).

Evaluation:
There are two options.

1. At the end of each unit, you will submit a paper (a highly focused five to ten pages) in which you consider your research project in light of the unit’s framework. By the end of the course, you should have three proto-chapters for your thesis, or three sections of an essay. Ideally, when you submit the third and last paper, you will be able to reformulate the three parts into an essay format, with a brief introduction and conclusion. But you have the option to submit only the third paper without reworking the three sections in a whole.

2. At the end of each unit, you will submit a précis of the book (approximately five pages) addressing its central problems, assumptions, aims, methods, and conclusions. Details will be given in class.

The due dates are as indicated in the outline below: Oct 5, Nov 2, and Dec 11.

This course deals with cities and with the place of culture within urban life. Its main focus is on the ways in which various cultural forms may be seen as contributing to the “mediality” of urban life – that is, to the storing, transmission and processing of information and cultural expression. Designed for both Communications and Art History students, the course will deal with such topics as the transformation of urban facades into expressive surfaces, the cultural role of the urban night, the sensory character of cities, shifting patterns of urban media and so on. The main focus of the course will be Montreal, but we will be looking at other cities as points of comparison and dealing in a more general sense with cities and their culture.

Marking and Assignments

Attendance and participation: 20%. This mark is self-explanatory, but its principal purpose is to provide incentives for active participation in the class. The quality of participation is as important as the quantity. Regular attendance is expected.

Reading “highlights” exercise: 20%. For each week’s class, you are required to choose one of the readings and write a paragraph (150 wordsor so) highlighting what, for you, is the most interesting or important idea or concept in that reading. The paragraph should briefly summarize the idea and give some sense of why you think it is important. These paragraphs should be sent in emails distributed to the class through the MyCourses “Discussion” tool by 6pm each Sunday before the next day’s class. This exercise is meant to provide some basis for the class discussion. You are required to do 9 of these exercises, beginning with the week of September 21st (which means that you may skip a couple of weeks.)

Team-Based Urban Site Analysis: (30%) The purpose of this is to present an analysis of a particular site within Montreal in terms of its place within media flows and cultural processes.

This exercise will be undertaken in groups of 3-4. You should have arrived at the composition of your group by the end of September. Each group should choose a given space within Montreal. The space may be as small as an individual building and no larger than a city block or street corner. Your analysis should provide an inventory of media-related activity occurring within and upon this space. This inventory should include information on as many as possible of the following features of the site: ownership of media, rhythms and frequency of usage, range of dissemination of media “messages”, range and variety of connections to other places, forms of content and textuality produced or disseminated at this space, and so on. You are encouraged to be creative and playful.

Please note that, while it is expected that most of you will look at a site in its present condition, you are welcome and encouraged to undertake the historical analysis of a site. That is, you may choose a moment in history and reconstruct the “mediated” or cultural character of the space at that moment, or trace the development of a site over a length of time which you have chosen. The output of this exercise will be a presentation in the last class, which should last approximately 20 minutes. This presentation should include significant audio visual materials.

Final Essay: 30% Students are required to submit a final paper of approximately 20 pages on an issue raised by the readings or discussions in the class. While it should include examples or case studies, you are invited to prepare papers which are theoretical in character. The choice of topics is up to you, but these must be approved by me by November 16th on the basis of a one-paragraph proposal sent to me via email . This paper is due on December 15th.  

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The course seeks to assess the significance and ramifications of time technologies and cultural techniques of time keeping for social relations, stratifications of power, cultural forms and ways of life. It brings together scholarship on temporal artifacts and the lived experience of time from communication and media studies, sociology, cultural studies and related discourses. Throughout the seminar we will interrogate the ways in which timekeeping and time-management practices influence and coordinate divers processes and the movements of people, matter, and signs and how these time technologies, from medieval clocks to smartphones, feed back into temporal orders, infrastructures, and practices that sustain and transform socioeconomic, political, cultural, conceptual and personal temporalities. By offering new understandings of media theory grounded in temporality this course finally hopes to provide opportunities for developing new perspectives on your own projects.

More specifically, we will engage with the following and related questions:
• How are technologically induced changes in the fabric of time being reflected in contemporary scholarship and artistic practice?
• How do technical time, human time, and other forms of temporality interact with one another, interface with one another, or fold into each other?
• In what ways might economic power be rethought as being exercised through the alteration of temporal structures, as through processes of optimization, rationalization, and increased efficiency?
• How do narratives of technological progress and cultures of efficiency, based on technological acceleration, effect individual freedom, the politics of affect, and different ways of living?
• How are media temporalities, as factors organizing lived temporalities, distributed unequally, for instance, along gender, race, class, labor, and geographic lines?
• How can media scholars critically engage with discussions on accelerationism or microtemporality while doing more detailed historical and material analyses of temporal structures and processes?
• What has changed or needs to change from earlier time-related media theories to account for our contemporary situation?

This course is closely built around the SSHRC-funded two-day symposium “Hardwired Temporalities: Media and the Material Patterning of Time,” to be held at Thomson House on March 11 and 12. The conference is organized by Kyle Stine, Jonathan Sterne and me and will feature some thirteen international speakers who represent a cross section of the most innovative directions of contemporary media research. Nearly half of the researchers have devoted a significant amount of their research to critically investigating relations of media and temporality, while the other half have been invited because of their wide-ranging expertise in contemporary networks, infrastructures, and platforms to reengage their objects through specific questions of temporality.

​In preparation of the event we will read and discuss work by the conference presenters and related texts. During the symposium students will be active participants and have special access to the conference presenters. For instance they will ask questions after the presentations and interview the conference participants. They will also be able to attend social events around the conference and meet the presenters.

To digest the conference productively, students will have the opportunity to contribute to the event by preparing a shorter but in-depth blog post for the conference website rather than the usual formal scholarly paper (publication is not obligatory though). As a preparation for the interviews and the blog-post, we will perform a couple of exercises in digital media production (video recording and editing; working with blogs and social media).

Assignments
I. Seminar attendance and participation (20 %)
II. Weekly response papers (20 %)
III. Conference participation, interviews with presenters and online publication project (60 %)