214 courses with the subject COMM, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
Addresses the many ways our communication--including language, discourse, performance, and media--reflects, creates, sustains, and transforms prevailing social and cultural practices.
Theory and extensive practice in various types of speaking.
An introduction to communication theory, research, and practice in a variety of interpersonal and organizational contexts. This course examines the role of communication in both personal and professional relationships. Honors version available.
Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Prerequisite for all production courses. Introduces students to basic tools, techniques, and conventions of production in audio, video, and film.
An introduction to the critical analysis of film, television, advertising, video, and new media texts, contexts, and audiences. Honors version available.
This class explores the historical, social, political, and cultural significances of popular music as a communicative practice in the United States from 1950 to the present.
An introduction to the design, aesthetics, and analysis of various forms of digital media. Hands-on experience with different modes of creation, including graphics, web-based communication, and social media.
As the introductory course in performance studies, students will explore and experiment with performance as ritual, performance in everyday life, and the performance of literature. Honors version available.
Examines the basic nature and importance of rhetoric and argumentation. Attention is devoted to interpreting the persuasive function of texts and their relation to modern forms of life.
Analysis of issues, use of evidence, reasoning, briefmaking, and refutation. Argumentative speeches and debates on legal cases and on current events. Designed for prospective law students, public policy students, speech teachers, and college debaters.
Introduction to the theory and practice of communication in the small group setting. Topics may include group development, conformity and deviation, gender, problem solving, and power and leadership. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.
Examines multiple relationships among gender, communication and culture. Explores how communication creates gender and shapes relationships and how communication reflects, sustains, and alters cultural views of gender. Honors version available.
The material, processes, and procedures of audio, video, and film production; emphasis on the control of those elements of convention that define form in the appropriate medium. Lecture and laboratory hours.
Historical exploration of the sociocultural import of communication technologies, from the introduction of the telegraph in the mid-1800s through current implications of the Internet and various digital devices.
This course builds from COMM 150 to explore computational and generative media. Taking the position that "computation" is defined by information that is formatted, communicated, and generated by machine languages, we will use the language JavaScript and the library "p5.js" to explore how color, motion, time, light and sound are compressed and formatted as information and digitally expressed. Moreover, we will explore how the syntax of JavaScript, that is its formal structure, communicates not just information, but a structure and position for knowing - that is, a computational epistemology.
An introduction to some key connections between American film history and cultural history since 1965, most of which remain backbones of United States film culture to this day.
This course addresses the relationship between performance and power, focusing on topics concerned with the potential for performance to contribute to social change. Students discuss who the intended audience is for their performances, which can range from groups who already share a perspective with the performer to those that need to be persuaded or lack knowledge/experience that would inform their engagement with the work.
Introduces students to performance as a way of studying culture in all of its creative, dynamic forms, including family stories, joking, rituals, and practices of everyday life. The course emphasizes field methods and experiential research. Honors version available.
Introduction to the study and practice of performing literature. Students will create, rehearse, and stage performances that draw on fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and/or memoir. Honors version available.
This course introduces Japanese thoughts and culture through the lens of media cultural studies, and studies socio-cultural issues of Japan through media productions and trends. We will learn about Japan's nationalism and imperialism, gender and family ideologies, post-Bubble economic misery and homelessness, memories of war, feminist and minority struggles, working culture, technology, and post-Fukushima philosophy of survival in film, commercials, print media, news, and TV shows.
Instruction is a path to deep understanding. This ULA is for the student interested in pedagogy and media production. In assisting students currently enrolled in COMM 130 labs, the intern extends and complements the skills they acquired in introductory Media Production classes. Typical tasks include equipment and software instruction, as well as conceptual and aesthetic consultation. ULA model themes: pedagogy, content, and practice.
Examines contemporary theory and practice of influencing others' attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Focuses particularly on analyzing and developing persuasive messages. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.
Introduction to basic paradigms of thinking about cultural difference, encouraging students to examine how these paradigms shape how we think, act, and imagine ourselves/others as members of diverse cultures.
The course explores the historical and theoretical developments in the research and practice of organizational communication. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Honors version available.
Conflict is a challenging communication process with potential for positive outcomes. We will examine the possibilities of constructive conflict across communication contexts: interpersonal relationships, organizations, and communities. Utilizing scholarly and professional literature, students will develop a theoretical frame and skillset around conflict.
An introduction to screenwriting for film and television with strong emphasis on the scene.
Students practice and learn the craft of narrative, short film writing by conceptualizing, outlining, writing, and rewriting three short film scripts. They include one three-minute silent, one five-minute script with dialogue, and one 15-minute script with dialogue.
Students in this class will live the life of a writing staff on a just-picked-up, fictional, one-hour television series. As if on a real series, they will individually and cooperatively create story ideas, treatments, and outlines, as well as write scenes, acts, and entire scripts.
A variety of feature films (both domestic and foreign) are screened in class and analyzed from a storytelling perspective. Emphasis is on the range of possibilities the screenwriter and film director face in the process of managing the audience's emotional involvement in a story.
Priority given to majors. This course instructs students on how to tell stories in a visual manner. How do the words on a page get translated onto a screen and how will the writer collaborate visually with a director? It is designed for writers to better understand how their scripts are interpreted and to improve visual writing.
This seminar-style class invites students to learn about the world through objects. What stories can "things" tell us about the culture, economy, and politics of the societies that produce and consume them? What can we learn about ourselves by studying objects and their histories? Through a range of case studies, students will learn about how the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of things structures and animates the worlds we build and occupy.
This course examines the representations of women in contemporary American film and also considers women as producers of film.
Society, we're told, is increasingly subject to automated decisions rendered by algorithm. What effects do algorithmic classifications have on social, cultural, and economic life? When, how, and why do institutions use algorithms? Are they really more "objective" than human decisions? How are the costs and benefits of algorithmic systems distributed? What does it mean to say we now live in an "algorithmic society"?
Technological systems permeate our lives. They facilitate communication, transportation, commerce, and governance. In order to actualize a more fair, just, and equitable society, it is essential that we hone an awareness of the "political" dimensions of technological systems and work toward the design of better ones. The goal of this course is to foster just such a critical technological literacy.
Introduces students to the history, methods, and central intellectual questions of cultural studies.
This course is a multi-disciplinary analysis of the phenomena of terrorism and political violence, their history, causes, the threat they pose, and what steps the United States can take in response.
This class examines the relationship between society and computer-mediated communication technologies known as "social media," including Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and more. It aims to break down the mythologies of social media and develop methods of analysis and critical understanding. Drawing from communication, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies, students will understand social media's role within a larger social context.
This course examines the theory and practice of argument and deliberation in communication studies, drawing from resources in rhetorical studies, informal logic, and argumentation. Intended for pre-law, public policy and other students interested in argumentation.
Explores the discourse of dissident voices in American society, particularly as they speak about grievances pertaining to race, gender, the environment; focuses on rhetorical strategies that initiate and sustain social movements.
This class provides students with a critical vocabulary for analyzing the visual, material, and political elements of memorials. Through an examination of commemorative debates, you will walk away with a better grasp of public memory - the ways that groups use memories of the past to influence the present. This course is not just a history of memorial politics, it is also a space to strengthen your oral communication skills to engage in deliberation over commemorative issues.
Examines recurrent themes in the rhetoric of significant Southerners and important campaigns. Considers both the rhetoric of the establishment and the rhetoric of change.
Explores rhetorical means of citizen influence of practices affecting our natural and human environment; also, study of communication processes and dilemmas of redress of environmental grievances in communities and workplace.
A workshop to study and create non-fiction films about the environment. The course examines aesthetic, narrative, and representational strategies with an eye to how these films can contribute to critical conversations about our species' impact on the natural world. Special attention will be paid to questions of environmental justice and the disproportionate effects of environmental hazards on communities of color and low-income communities. Previously offered as COMM 622.
This course offers an introduction to the history and practice of East Asian martial arts. We will explore the social, political, and cultural contexts of the martial arts, from the classical period to the present. Integral to this course is a practical component involving embodied experience with martial arts training.
A special topics course on a selected aspect of communication studies.
Permission of the department. Majors only. 2.5 cumulative grade point average required. Individualized study closely supervised by a faculty advisor and by the departmental coordinator of internships. Cannot count toward the COMM major.
This research-based course is framed by two broad questions: What does science tell us about the natural and changing environments? How do politics and popular culture interpret and present this crisis?
Permission of the department. Majors only. 3.0 cumulative grade point average and 3.5 communication studies grade point average required. For communication studies majors who wish to pursue independent research projects or reading programs under the supervision of a selected instructor. Intensive individual research on a problem designed by instructor and student in conference.
An introduction to European modern and contemporary philosophy, from the enlightenment to contemporary postmodernism.
Growth in technologies, more frequent travel, and movements of products and people across the borders of nation states change concepts of family and community. Foregrounded by these realities, this course combines theories of family and communication with documentation of lived experience to interrogate family communication patterns in contemporary culture. Honors version available.
This upper level seminar develops a critical perspective on work, labor, and professional life within the global context. Throughout, we will engage in moral and philosophical debates about the status of labor and the meanings of work in our daily lives.
Together, APPLES Service-Learning & Communication Beyond Carolina will let us learn deeply how to be in community well with others. This course requires 30 hours of service beyond the classroom and the ability to travel to a school in Orange County. The ideals of community are often utopian and high-minded. The work of community is often small, steady, consistent, and scrappy. This semester we use our in-class time to examine the communication basis of communication and community ideals, and examine how those ideas intersect with our semester-long experience of serving as a community member in a local school.
This viewing and research-intensive course examines the history of American narrative film through the screenwriter's experience, using a decade-by-decade approach to examine the political, social, global, psychological, religious, and cultural influences on the art, process, and careers of screenwriters.
Advanced analysis and application of the principles and methods of audio production.
Course provides an overview of theories of visual culture. We apply these theories to better understand contemporary visual media and technologies, along with the everyday media practices they support.
Open only to students in the writing for the screen and stage minor. Conceiving and outlining a feature-length screenplay.
This course approaches TV structure and genre from a screenwriter's point of view. Through weekly screenings and writing exercises, students learn to analyze episodic storylines and story beats, and to recognize the "genre goods" for eight different TV genres.
Advanced introduction to foundational work in memory and performance studies, emphasizing theory and practice of various forms of remembering. Honors version available.
Examines how the United States Black experience is constituted in and through performance across a range of cultural contexts including the antebellum South, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Aesthetic, and contemporary urban life.
Examination of communication processes and cultural significance of film, television, and other electronic media. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.
The starting point for this course, chronologically and conceptually, is the emergence of popular media technology. Our purview includes transformative innovations in mediated communication, such as telephony and e-mail, alongside familiar media technologies such as televisions and computers.
A study of the electronic media as a feedback mechanism for community organization and social change. A variety of broadcast and nonbroadcast uses of the media are studied.
This course is about sound and the auditory dimension. In a society dominated by images and spectacle, sound and listening have been remarkably under-appreciated. Sound is physical-the vibration of molecules according to frequencies, pitches, and intensities-and biological-our ability to hear is an evolutionary trait. But sound is also cultural (what qualifies as signal or noise?), technological (how is sound recorded and reproduced?), and historical (how has the soundscape changed and how have we listened differently).
This course examines processes of creating and performing solo work. Students engage a variety of performances: autobiographical, representation of the lives of other/s, and exploration of cultural or political ideas.
Theory and practice of collaborative performance, emphasizing image, intertextual adaptation, site-specific and installation work, avant-garde traditions, and the play of time and space. Honors version available.
This course engages the theory and embodiment of prose fiction, poetry, and other kinds of literary texts, including nonfiction. Students practice adaptation and script preparation, solo/group performance, and performance critique.
A course covering the relationship between communication and political processes and institutions. Topics include media coverage and portrayal of political institutions, elections, actors, and media influence on political beliefs.
Takes up the fundamental assumptions of contemporary memory studies and the centrality of rhetoric to memory. Research focus on how constructions of the past respond to the present and future.
Approaches to the analysis and assessment of rhetorical practice with a focus on how rhetoric reflects and shapes public culture.
This course provides hands-on experience in public communication, focusing on real-world impact within the Chapel Hill community. In partnership with a local nonprofit dedicated to youth mentorship, students will use their public speaking skills to increase awareness of the organization's mission and support recruitment efforts for new mentors. Through this collaboration, students will explore the structural challenges facing the local community, develop tailored communication strategies, and create deliverables to enhance the nonprofit's outreach. In addition to preparing public presentations, students will represent the nonprofit in public speaking engagements, gaining practical experience in advocacy and community engagement.
People are finding it increasingly difficult to reason with anyone outside their political affiliations. Must that be the case? This course is founded on the belief that democratic participation begins with earnest conversation and, given the right tools, we can do democracy better. The course is committed to the promise of shared reasoning and aims to foster student capacities for robust deliberative practices, rooted in the rhetorical tradition and tackling the most challenging public issues.
Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. A special topics course on a selected aspect of communication studies.
The "dark side" of communication is a metaphor describing the study of disruptive, dysfunctional, distorted, distressing, and destructive aspects of communication. This course explores humanity's darker side that allows us to reject, exclude, stigmatize, exploit, objectify, misguide, lie, and cheat. The course examines various theoretical perspectives and applies them to everyday problems in interpersonal encounters. A sample of topics discussed include: prejudice, stigma, marginalization, bullying, ostracism, resistance, manipulation, conformity, deceit, gossip, rumors, infidelity, and revenge.
This course explores the use of rhetorical criticism as a way to understand how the visual and material are used for symbolic and political purposes. Examples ranging from news images to public art will be studied.
This course examines the historical and current development of social entrepreneurship as a field of study and practice, with particular attention to successful organizational communication strategies designed to solve community problems.
Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. An investigation of psychological aspects of communication, particularly the perceptual and interpretive processes underlying the sending and receiving of messages.
Critical examination of alternative theories of leadership and trends in the study of leadership; focuses on the communicative dimensions of leadership. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.
Course examines the speeches and other texts that announced and embodied the goals and political strategies of multiple branches of three waves of feminist activism in the United States.
Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Provides a critical exploration of organizational communication theory, research, and application, examining the factors involved in the functioning and analysis of complex organizations.
The study of organizational culture operates on a set of assumptions distinct from traditional management perspectives. This course explores the cultural perspective as an alternative approach to understanding organizational communication processes.
A critical examination of the theory, research, and practice of organizational ethics.
This course will explore communication models for collective leadership involving youth and adults in vulnerable communities. Partnering with local youth-focused organizations, students will work in teams to research and design community-based change projects.
Introduces students to approaches for creating performance from screenplays and other texts for electronic media forms, focusing on scripts as literature and the tensions between live and electronically delivered performances.
The course examines the aesthetic and technical elements at work and play in cinematic storytelling. The student is required to complete three projects and will gain hands-on experience in narrative filmmaking.
Students practice the craft of screen adaptation by conceptualizing, outlining, and writing scenes based on material from another medium (both fiction and nonfiction). Work is presented, discussed, and performed in a workshop environment.
Open only to students in the writing for the screen and stage minor. Students will write and workshop a full-length feature film screenplay. Students will learn about the film and television business through a combination of research, in-class discussions, and interactive interviews with industry insiders.
Examines questions about sexuality and how it has changed over time, through various media of visual communication.
Explores through performance contemporary poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and feminist thought by women of color in the United States. Honors version available.
This course combines readings and field work in oral history with the study of performance as a means of interpreting and conveying oral history texts. Honors version available.
Critical examination of the operation of performance as a cultural phenomenon, with an emphasis on meaning, power, and resistance in cultural events, social practices, and media spectacles.
This course introduces students to practices in adapting and directing literary texts for live ensemble performance. Students will create original performance work, engage in collaborative critique, and discuss the development of aesthetic value.
Examines the historical emergence of work as a defining feature of contemporary life. The course asks, What is a "career"? How have neoliberalism and post-Fordism influenced understandings of work and career? How have changing conceptions of work influenced other aspects of life, including family, leisure, consumption, and self-identity?
Investigates the theoretical definitions and uses of rhetorical interpretation and action in spoken, written, visual, material practices, discourses, and events.
Analyzes argument in a variety of contexts with an emphasis on public policy and exploring tensions involved in addressing both expert and public audience in the political sphere.
Examines public discourse from the colonial period to the present. Discourses, critical perspectives, and historical periods studied will vary.
Examines American cultural myths about war generally and specifically about the causes of war, enemies, weapons, and warriors, and the way these myths constrain foreign and defense policy, military strategy, and procurement.
The power of the presidency depends in part upon the president's ability to rally public opinion, which depends upon the president's ability to use the "bully pulpit." This course examines the hurdles presidents face and the steps presidents take to shape opinion.
This course examines the role of symbols, speech, and trope in the invention of race, the perpetuation of racism, and anti-racist resistance through a historical, global, and intersectional lens. The course provides an introduction to rhetorical scholarship on topics such as the voices and vernaculars of marginalized communities, cultural and political racial representations, and racialized public discourse linked to borders and national identity. The course investigates topics through case studies tied to subjects such as social movements, branding, entertainment industries, protests, economic crises, presidential speeches, court cases, legislation, fashion, debate, standup comedy, documentaries, scientific inquiry, and digital media.
This course will explore the complex ways in which Black aesthetic forms and creative expression function as public discourse.
Permission of the department. Majors only. 3.0 cumulative grade point average and 3.5 communication studies grade point average required. For the communication studies major who wishes to pursue an advanced independent research project under the supervision of a selected instructor. Intensive individual research on a problem designed by instructor and student in conference.
This course is designed to take the completed feature screenplay written in COMM 537 and prepare the re-written final draft for production companies and agencies. It will begin with a complete structural review, character analysis, and dialog polish. A logline, synopsis and one sheet shall be developed. Critical analysis will be given, received, and addressed, resulting in a final screenplay package that is prepared to be submitted to professionals. Students must be in WSS program.
In this course students will explore the possibilities of making political performances, or making performances political. We will be particularly concerned with how performance may contribute to processes of social change.
This course examines the question of what characterizes "Blackness" as it manifests through experience, history, and symbol in the United States, as well as the impact of African practices and identities upon blackness in the United States. The course is concerned with what has been termed the "black literary imagination".
Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Course focuses on how communication is used to build and sustain interpersonal relationships. Forms and functions of communication are examined as a means of testing and defining relationships.
The primary focus of hate speech is on the ways that interactants manipulate hatred to accomplish a variety of social and personal goals. The pursuit of this focus will allow the student to appreciate the operation of hatred in a variety of contexts. Often taught as a service-learning course.
Introduces students to the opportunities, challenges, and rewards of participation within the nonprofit/NGO sector. The course also equips students with the skills needed to design and conduct engaged scholarship.
Students will be engaged with multimedia, music, dance, and theater performances. We will explore the creative processes and cultural contexts of these performances and will compare the arts as a way of knowing the world to the creative processes of academic scholarship.
A workshop in the production of video and/or film nonfiction or documentary projects. The course will focus on narrative, representational, and aesthetic strategies of documentary production.
Explores interactive media through creative projects that include sound, video, and graphic elements. Technical information will serve the broader goal of understanding the aesthetics and critical issues of interactive media.
Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. Studio course that explores gaming critically and aesthetically. Practice in game design and production including 3-D worlds and scripting.
Game Studio is a project-based course in the new media track. This course is designed to provide a structured environment, instructor and peer feedback, along with technical and conceptual resources in which to complete a new media project. Students may work individually or on collaborative teams. The class focuses on idea development, design, and experimentation.
Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. This course will explore various specific topics, theories, and methodologies in cultural studies.
Students create documentaries emphasizing the filmmaker's personal perspective and experience: essay, diary, and autobiographical films, and pieces in which the filmmaker performs a role for expressive or political ends. Significant class time is devoted to work-shopping student films.
Historical and theoretical examination of expressions of the documentary idea in different eras and various modes including film, television, and radio. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.
Students use Adobe After-Effects and Adobe Photoshop as their primary image software to create several original animations. Assignments are given weekly, and a substantial final project is expected.
Recommended preparation, several production courses above COMM 230. Course provides a structured environment, instructor and peer feedback, along with production and postproduction resources for completing advanced near-to-graduation media projects. Projects can be narrative, documentary, experimental, or interactive.
Primary subjects will be popular culture and media technology, and guiding questions will be organized around the relationships of each to commerce and/as social change.
This course examines critical and theoretical issues concerning the representation and study of various modes of difference, such as sexuality, race, and gender, in specific media texts. Permission of the instructor for nonmajors.
This course allows students to create video productions that play with forms that lie outside of mainstream media.
In this course students learn a wide range of video post production techniques working mostly with the application After Effects.
This course introduces students to critical television studies. The course emphasizes not television or culture as separate entities but instead "Television Culture." The focus of the class is on the interrelationship between television and contemporary culture.
The aim of this course is to provide students who have an interest in film and video production with an understanding of the technical, conceptual, and aesthetic implications of the motion picture soundtrack, with a special emphasis on sound-image relationships. Students who have already developed a basic proficiency in the use of video cameras, audio recorders, and editing software will be asked to cultivate an understanding of and appreciation for the expressive and artistic possibilities.
This projects-based seminar will introduce students to the fundamental optical and technological principles of motion pictures. By using the Maker Space to design and fabricate pinhole cameras, zoetropes, and 16mm film strips, students will gain a deep understanding of the material and technological foundations of the cinema, and the operating principles that are behind not only the classic films of Hollywood's past, but the high-definition digital imaging technologies of the present.
We live in surveillance societies. Just about every element of our lives is affected by surveillance: workplaces and schools, social media sites and mobile phone use, police encounters and security screening. Surveillance practices shape how institutions operate and how people see themselves and others. The goal of this course is to develop a critical awareness of surveillance and its implications for society.
Course provides a workshop setting for the process of creation, dramaturgy, development, analysis, and critique of graduates' and undergraduates' original performance work, focusing on the needs of each project in progress.
Examines race and ethnicity in specific geopolitical contexts as discursive formations, performative identities, and lived realities. Studies disciplinary/political boundaries that are produced and maintained through acts of performance.
Recommended preparation, COMM 160. Relying on critical race theories, colonial and postcolonial theories, and theories of performance, this course engages comparative discourses of Black/African diaspora citizenship through the literature, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, and cultural performances of people of African descent, particularly in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
This course is a arts-based inquiry into the ways in which performance and theatricality structure contemporary politics, culture, and everyday life, as well as the ways in which artists utilize performance as mode of political engagement.
Required preparation, one performance studies course above COMM 400. Permission of the instructor for students lacking the required preparation. Project-based class where students acquire skills and critical approaches to create collaborative, professional, multimedia works.
History and practice of performance in contemporary social movements. Practical exploration of direct action, guerilla theatre, and performance interventions.
Permission of the instructor for undergraduates. Intended for students from various majors, this course provides a foundation in the history, theory, and practice of developing live, technologically-intensive, multimedia performance works. The course analyzes new media masterworks, addresses techniques of interdisciplinary collaboration, and offers workshops in specific software/technology applications.
Attention fuels our curiosity, deepens our empathy, and invites us to step outside of ourselves. Re-presenting what we pay attention to is the art and practice of documentary. We will use video/sound, photography, and creative writing to document and then represent the people, behaviors, environments, and living species that co-exist alongside us. Students will strengthen their attention-paying capacities, develop research skills, and learn how to refine their chosen methods of documentation. Class discussion, readings, film screenings, creative assignments, site visits, and in-class exercises will provide an opportunity to experiment, ask questions, and collaborate with peers.
Overview of poststructuralist, or "contemporary" film theory. Traces its development, its techniques, fierce critiques lobbed at it since the early 1980s, and its points of continuing importance.
Theories of moving images and imaging technologies--from the primitive to the not-yet-existing--that focus on their multifaceted relations with various registers of time, memory, flux, and futurity.
Permission of the instructor for nonmajors. A special topics course on a selected aspect of communication studies. May be repeated. Honors version available.
Permission of the instructor. Required of all senior honors candidates in cultural studies. First semester of senior honors thesis.
Permission of the instructor. Required of all senior honors candidates in cultural studies. Second semester of senior honors thesis.
Permission of the department. Majors only. Cumulative grade point average must meet University standard. Individual projects designed by students and supervised by a faculty member.
Permission of the department. Majors only. Cumulative grade point average must meet University standard. Individual projects designed by students and supervised by a faculty member.
Recommended preparation, COMM 562 or 841. A bridge course designed to offer graduate students and advanced undergraduates a practicum in fieldwork methods and performance ethnography.
Considers the emergence of modern and contemporary social and cultural theory. Surveys major paradigms of modern and contemporary philosophy.
Admission to graduate program or permission of the department. Considers theory and philosophy in the study of communication. Surveys major paradigms of contemporary social/cultural theory (and their roots in modern philosophy) in relation to examples of communication research and practice. Second of two semesters.
Communication studies graduate students only. An introduction to teaching at the university level for new teaching assistants and graduate students hoping to have teaching-related responsibilities in communication studies. It is designed to encourage us to have intellectually rigorous and personally meaningful conversations about our teaching.
This course is designed for students to start thinking, in a historical and foundational way, about 'the political' as defined by formative thinkers from contrasting philosophical perspectives, as well as from necessarily different social positions within the field of power.
This course focuses on the various ways that the problem of discourse is rendered inside and outside of Communication Studies. It examines the various modes at our disposal for thinking about discourse as a field of articulation: for example in theories of representation, mediation, and meaning making.
This class theorizes the Social by drawing on resources inside and outside of communication studies, thinking through the implicit and explicit investments that communication scholarship has in the concept of the social.
Course introduces graduate students to performance practice as a way of knowing, an aesthetic expression, a form of pedagogy, a method of research, and a means of presenting findings. Students will develop and perform original work that creatively engages various research contexts.
This course will explore through performance the various ways the human body is 'marked' or signified in culture.
Course introduces graduate students to key texts that have informed the emergence of Performance Studies as a mode of inquiry into cultural, social, aesthetic, and political practices.
Explores theoretical, methodological, and practical issues encountered in ethnographic, case study, and field research on communication phenomena in organizations.
Critical examination of key feminist arguments about science and communication scholarship as conventionally defined; exploration of alternative goals, assumptions, and practices for research consistent with feminist theories and methodologies.
Focuses on the theory and practice of interpretive organizational communication research, including organizational phenomena such as culture, metaphor, symbolism, ritual, and narrative.
Focuses on the theory and practice of critical organizational communication research, including organizational phenomena such as power, discourse, and culture.
This seminar explores how we come to understand what places are and how they are meaningful. We will look at places "rhetorically": how they were designed to persuade those who inhabit them, how we actually experience them, and how we make sense of them in our individual lives.
Qualitative research offers an exciting way to discover the world. In this course, students will gain focused training in qualitative research methods, learn how to analyze qualitative data, design and perform qualitative research studies, and report research findings.
Graduate standing required. Introduction for graduate students to the current literature and critical perspectives in the areas of media and cultural studies.
This seminar inquires into the range of relationships between media and social life, with a particular emphasis on media's role in movements for social, economic, and/or cultural transformation.
This course offers a sustained analysis of the ways in which the media, audience, and/or public have been variously conceptualized historically, in critical theory.
A detailed analysis of the relationship between government, policy making, corporate and business interests, and various theoretical approaches to their impact on media and culture. Fall.
This class introduces cultural studies through its British 'origins,' especially but not only the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Open University.
Explores the economic, social, ideological, technological, and aesthetic development of film and television as international, transnational, transcultural, and global entities, questioning the viability of the concept of national cinema/media in the 21st century.
Graduate introduction to the study of film, television, and video. This course traces the theoretical and methodological development of media studies.
This seminar recognizes and applies narrative theory in understanding texts, lives, and cultural practice broadly.
Second-year graduate students and/or permission of the instructor. Special problems in performance studies.
A critical survey of the history of rhetoric, focusing on Classical theories of rhetoric from Greece and Rome through the Medieval period.
A critical survey of the history of rhetoric, focusing on theories of rhetoric from the Renaissance through the 19th century.
A critical survey of the history of rhetoric focusing on rhetorical theory from the 20th century to the present.
Addresses conceptual and practical issues in the rhetorical analysis and criticism of visual and material objects, practices, and events.
Seminar is an in-depth analysis of the writings of Kenneth Burke, concentrating on primary source materials.
Considers the history of and developments in the philosophy of communication and culture, as well as the role these concepts have played in western philosophy.
Advanced study of selected topics in research methods. Topics vary.
Investigates the function of rhetorical criticism, the critical method, and a variety of approaches to the performance of rhetorical criticism.
Focuses on practice in writing rhetorical criticism and on mid-range theoretical concepts that inform critical analysis and argument.
This graduate seminar will serve as an advanced introduction to critical studies of modern technological systems. Drawing upon the fields of communication studies, science and technology studies, cultural studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, and gender studies, seminar participants will investigate the role of technologies in shaping social worlds and producing political orders. Attention will be given to the social construction of technological systems, the politics of mediation and resistance, and the encodings of power relations.
This course provides an applied introduction to food politics by adopting a critical organizational communication lens on our globalized food system. We explore food system labor practices, the role of multinational companies and global commodity chains, the status of hunger and food deserts, the role of food marketing and consumption practices, and the growth of local and sustainable movements devoted to food justice.
This course is devised to provide graduate students interested in theoretical interdisciplinary work with a sense of prevailing questions and critiques important to CES. CES takes on the more difficult questions of intersectional work, as it thinks through sovereignty and emancipation, identity and ontology, place, space and temporality. Each iteration of the course works itself through new perspectives in the field, challenging students to create new methodologies for their own work.
This course is an advanced seminar in which students may study family communication and produce original research.
This course compares and critically evaluates the work of major feminist scholars in the field of communication. Spring.
A variable topic seminar that permits faculty and graduate students the opportunity to explore significant historical and emerging issues in the field of communication.
This seminar is designed to introduce early-career students to the role that networks play in contemporary global societies. We will examine key ways to think about network societies by taking up the idea of the network in social, political, economic, cultural, and technological terms.
An introduction to the history, culture, and politics of "zines," self-published, small-circulation, noncommercial printed work. In this hands-on course, students will read, discuss, and create a wide variety of zines that explore a multitude of forms and genres. Students will be visited by local zine makers and participate in zine-making workshops; create a collection of their own zines; and participate in the Zine Machine: Durham Printed Matter Festival.
This seminar focuses on methods of ethnography and fieldwork ethics. Performance as theory and practice informs methodological inquiries as well as the analysis of specific ethnographic texts and case studies.
This course focuses on performance-related issues in the emergent field of cultural studies.
An advanced graduate seminar, this course will address recent developments and problems in performance theory. It will consider cross- and multidisciplinary approaches to performance as sites for consideration and debate.
This course explores diverse relations among performance and history, including the performance of life histories, the use of spectacle in history, everyday performances of historical protocols, and performance itself as an historical construct.
This course examines social relations, particularly power relations, by focusing on resistance as performance and the performance of resistance arising from the dynamics and conflicts within specific locations of a political economy.
Draped in the political, economic, and domestic histories of western culture our current pedagogies still point out the world that matters to each new generation. We will study these pedagogies from the perspectives of institutions, economies, and human relationships they simultaneously reflect and work to transform.
This course looks at issues of the representation and production of identity, subjectivity, and agency - in various forms - in the practices of media.
This is a course in learning to think more critically, speak more persuasively, and argue more effectively by focusing on practical skill development in reasoning and debate.
Selected problems in media aesthetics. Exact topic to be covered is announced before classes begin.
Graduate standing required. Introduction to the issues, methods, and materials of research in media and cultural studies.
Application of historical research techniques to problems in the mass media. Exact topic is announced before classes begin. May be repeated.
This course will look at special topics in the study of popular culture. Designed for advanced graduate studies, it will consider critical responses to existing scholarship with original research.
This seminar explores critical theories of difference and puts them into dialogue with media representations of difference.
This class explores the impact of some developments in postmodernism - as an interpretive, historical, and philosophical discourse on the possible development of cultural studies.
Examines new communication technologies, their spatial and social diffusion, and how these relate to theories of culture, politics, and technology and the real-world contexts in which technologies are received. May be repeated.
This course will focus on specific topics, issues, or queries of popular culture as these have been or can be studied within cultural studies.
Graduate standing required. This graduate seminar explores theoretical and practical points of contact between feminism, film, and television using psychoanalysis, narrative analysis, ideological analysis, and cultural studies.
This course, designed for advanced graduate students, will explore specialized topics in interpretive, critical, and cultural research in media studies.
How are surveillance technologies altering social life? This course will explore this question by mapping the complex ways that technologies and societies interact to produce security, fear, control, vulnerability, and/or empowerment.
Explores how theories of aesthetics have struggled with notions of beauty, value, pleasure, and pain in the human communicative experience.
This course will examine the manner in which Black aesthetic and intellectual expressions and controversies function as public discourse in cultural politics.
Considers place in relation to space and time. Primary concentration on implications of theorizing place as communicative practice rather than communicative context.
Addresses the fundamentally rhetorical character of public memory. Analyzes theoretical presuppositions about memory. Openings for rhetorizing memory.
Special problems in rhetorical and cultural studies. May be repeated.
This seminar takes an historical approach to the relationship between popular culture and technological change. We will explore how artists and other workers (including audiences) in the TV, smart phone, and especially music industries have incorporated new technology into the production, distribution, and consumption of cultural commodities and experiences.
Special topics course. Content will vary each semester. Honors version available.
Permission of the internship coordinator. Individualized practical experience supervised by a faculty advisor and by the departmental coordinator of internships. May be repeated.
Permission of the instructor. Individual research on a problem defined by the graduate student and graduate faculty member in conference. May be repeated.
Individualized practical research.
This course advances graduate students' exposure to academic resources and common norms, practices, and procedures related to academic professionalism in Communication Studies.
Focuses on the development of a master's project or a major paper other than a thesis.
Source: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's catalog, linked per course · table learning_unit · CourseShelf publish 61
