Please note that room locations and schedules are subject to change and all details should be confirmed before the start of the class.
Click here for a list of complementary courses in other departments which count towards the Minor.
Fall 2026
COMS 210 (CRN 2380)
Introduction to Communication Studies
Rob Arcand
Monday, Wednesday, 04:05-05:25 pm, LEA 219
The social and cultural implications of media. Surveys theory and case studies relevant key issues such as the ownership, structure and governance of media industries; the significance of emergent media technologies; and the roles of media as cultural forms and practices.
COMS 230 (CRN 2381)
Core Concepts in Critical Theory (3 credits)
Prof Jenny Burman
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:35am-12:55pm, Arts W-215
This course explores what it means to establish and maintain a democratic community – as well as to live as an ordinary citizen in that community – amid the never-ending proliferation of new media technologies. We will investigate our current political juncture and media landscape, trying to contextualize these by way of historical case studies: pre- and postcolonial articulations of democratic governance; mass youth protests against authoritarianism (e.g. in Egypt, Iran, Kenya, India, and Nepal); tech companies’ infiltration of democratic political structures; models of citizen participation such as participatory budgeting exercises (Brazil) and Citizen Assemblies (Ireland and France). We will talk about the acts, practices, and rights that make a society democratic, and how to enact the promises of a democracy at an interpersonal scale (the scale of a classroom, for example!).
COMS 310 (CRN 2382)
Media and Feminist Studies (3 credits)
Emma Blackett
Wednesdays and Fridays, 11:35pm-12:55pm, Arts W-215
This is a course about feminist media critique. It draws from feminist, queer, and trans media studies (including film, television, and digital media studies), as well as adjacent fields, namely psychoanalysis, affect studies, Marxist cultural studies, Black studies, and anti-colonial thought. The principle of genre—specifically, what queer/feminist scholar Lauren Berlant calls “genres for life”—will organise our study of various media forms and objects, including film, TV, social media, and other digital matters. We look at how genres such as romance, horror, and comedy play out both in media and in the social and political practices of which media are part. For example, romance will help us think not just about romantic comedies but about gender identity formation, the idea of ‘good’ representation, and dating apps; horror will direct our conversation about the mediation of both sex and colonialism. The class engages feminism as a multiple set of ideas, analytical methods, and activist movements: we pproach it as a manifold and hard-todefine critique of systems of oppression based upon gender, sexuality, and other matters of embodiment (race, class, disability). Students are expected to participate in open, rigorous discussion about what feminism is, what it could or should be, its relation to media objects, and the purpose of feminist critique. Writing skills, as the toolkit of the critic, are emphasised in the course content and assessment.
COMS 360 (CRN 2018)
Environmental Communication (3 credits)
Malcolm Sanger
Mondays, Wednesdays, 4:05pm-5:25pm, MCMED 325
This course considers how we communicate with environments, how we communicate about environments, and how environments themselves communicate. It surveys contemporary environmental thought in media and communication studies as well as critical theory, cultural studies, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, Marxism, and decolonial and Indigenous studies. We will study the ways in which media objects represent environments, environments are mediated by material processes arranged by political economic formations, media technologies are made up of environmental materials, media function as environments themselves, and environments communicate themselves and mediate our relations. Topics to be discussed include climate change, science communication, media materialities, infrastructures, waste, labour, environmental justice, climate anxiety, nonhuman communication, and methods of reading and writing.
COMS 361 (CRN 2384)
Selected Topics Communication Studies 1 (3 credits)
Children, youth and digital media
Prof Sara Grimes
Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:35-3:55pm
Children and young people’s relationship with media technologies and media content is often a source of controversy, panic, and/or hype. This course examines the prominent roles digital media have in children’s culture, learning, identity formation, and play, and how digital media designs and discourses reflect and reproduce dominant (often conflicting) ideologies, controversies, and social values. Emphasis is placed on understanding the continuities and discontinuities that exist between emerging and traditional children’s media, the unique opportunities and challenges associated with digital technologies and how they are currently (re)shaping children’s lives and cultures.
COMS 425 (CRN 2386)
Urban Culture and Everyday Life (3 credits)
Prof Jenny Burman
Tuesdays, 2:35-4:55pm, Ferr 230
In this fourth-year seminar, we will discuss several dimensions of urban life, mostly in Canada and the US. We begin with the built environment – city planning and design, infrastructure, architecture – whose development has been shaped by a multitude of historical events, ideologies, and movements (industrialization, deindustrialization, modernism, racial capitalism, colonialism, and transatlantic slavery, for a start). We then focus on the social fabric of the city, to consider the variable dynamics that shape urban life: polarization of wealth and poverty, private property ownership vs. public commons, housing and houselessness, and differential access to resources and care. Finally, we consider propositions about what makes a good city (good as in: habitable, humane, safer, a place of refuge, etc.) and we look at ways in which city residents and communities are re-making their cities. Reclamations of urban space and life are manifest in the practices of (and discussed in the writings of) migrants, queer and trans people, over-policed and under-resourced communities, artists, activists, and planners. Reclamations also happen through protest and commemoration, as in Black Lives Matter and other social movements. At various points, we examine specific interventions into urban space and culture, on the part of disability activists, radical architects and justice-oriented designers, squatters, and amateur cartographers.
Seminar participants can expect to develop a greater facility with theoretical texts, hone their seminar discussion and critical analysis skills, and improve their understanding of contemporary urban sociocultural transformations. They will be expected to read, comment on, and engage in debate about the critical perspectives in the course readings, as well as to develop original analyses of urban sites and/or interventions.
COMS 491 (CRN 2388)
Special Topics in Communication Studies (3 credits)
Image, Film, and Psychoanalysis
Prof. Bobby Benedicto
Wednesdays, 2:35pm-5:25pm, Ferr 476
How might psychoanalysis help us read film and visual culture? What kinds of questions does it allow us to ask about desire, fantasy, identification, pleasure, sexuality, violence, and death? And what might cinema, in turn, contribute to our understanding of psychic life and human subjectivity? This seminar introduces students to key concepts in psychoanalytic thought—including the unconscious, the gaze, the drive, jouissance, abjection, and the uncanny—through their application to contemporary films and other works of visual culture. Alongside foundational texts in psychoanalysis, we will read works of feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic film and cultural theory concerned with the ways subjects are shaped by desires and conflicts that exceed conscious intention. Rather than treating films simply as illustrations of theory, we will consider how cinema gives form to problems of identification and alienation, pleasure and repetition, embodiment and desire, and the limits of selfknowledge. Our aim will be twofold: to use cinema to develop an understanding of psychoanalytic thought, and to use psychoanalysis to develop more rigorous ways of interpreting the narrative, formal, and aesthetic operations of films and other media.
Winter 2027
COMS 301 (CRN 1845)
Core Concepts in Critical Theory (3 credits)
Prof Darin Barney
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:05am-11:25pm, Arts W-215
This course will survey foundational texts and thinkers in critical social theory, as they relate to the fields of media and communication studies. This will include core texts in Marxism, feminism, post- structuralism, post-colonialism, critical race theory, queer theory, Indigenous thought, and critical theories of and from the global south. The course will prepare students with key theoretical and conceptual vocabularies for advanced study in the field.
COMS 330 (CRN 1846)
Media in Cultural Life (3 credits)
Prof Sara Grimes
Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:35pm-3:55pm, Arts W-215
COMS 340 (CRN 1847)
New Media (3 credits)
Prof Carrie Rentschler
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:35pm-3:55pm, STBIO S3/3
COMS 350 (CRN 1848)
Sound Culture (3 credits)
Prof Alex Blue V
Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:05pm-2:25pm, Arts W-215
This course engages with prominent themes in the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies and introduces a multitude of ways to think historically, socially, and materially about sound. *This is not a music course.* Though music will very occasionally be discussed in this course, it is not a primary subject of the course. Instead, this course reaches far beyond the precariously-defined concept of 'music' to examine the concept of 'sound' as it extends across disciplines, across timelines, and across cultures.
COMS 362 (CRN 1849)
Selected Topics Communication Studies 2 (3 credits)
Media and wellness, media and illness
Prof Jenny Burman
Fridays, 1:35pm-3:55pm, Arts W-215
COMS 492 (CRN 7014)
Power, Difference and Justice (3 credits)
Prof Carrie Rentschler
Wednesdays, 11:35 am-2:25 pm, Arts W-220