Communication Studies Courses

Description: This seminar offers an introduction to communication theory, by situating media theories and technology in their historical and cultural contexts. Through lectures, discussions, and selected readings from the works of key theorists, this course explores and evaluates major historical and contemporary approaches to communication theories.

Component(s): Lecture

Prerequisite/Corequisite:  The following course must be completed previously: COMS 505.

Description: This course offers an introduction to communication research methods and provides an interdisciplinary approach to the interaction of media, technology, culture, and society.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This full-year course meets bi-weekly to introduce students to the following topics: communication organizations and their public identities, internships and professional development opportunities, emerging trends in communications research methods and practice. Representatives from industry and faculty are invited to discuss their work and future trends in media studies and practice.

Component(s): Seminar

• This course is graded on a pass/fail basis.

Description: This course is designed to provide the student with a basic working knowledge of audio systems, both natural and electronic, to understand the various affective and psychological qualities of sound, and how sound may be structured into imaginative aural form. Lectures and Laboratory: average 6 hours per week.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course provides a foundation in the creative, critical and technical aspects of moving images, including an introduction to non-linear editing software.

Component(s): Lecture; Laboratory

• Students who have received credit for COMS 567 (Television) or COMS 568 (Film) may not take this course for credit.

Description: This course provides an introduction to new and developing digital technologies (primarily computer-based media) through historical, theoretical, and critical perspectives on media, culture, and society and includes basic concepts in software operating systems, communication design and digital media creation. Lectures and Laboratory: average 6 hours per week.

Component(s): Lecture; Laboratory

Prerequisite/Corequisite: Students must submit of a sample of creative writing by June 30,to be approval by the instructor prior to enrolling.

Description: This course provides an in-depth approach to writing for specific media. Emphasis is placed upon structure, story-telling, research, and the interplay of character and action. Different paradigms for both fiction and non-fiction are considered.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines the forms and tactics of public discourses directed toward social change. Forms of public discourse that may be considered include speech, images, audiovisual works, as well as web-based sites or forms of communication. Emphasis is placed upon political protest, conflict and controversy, and mobilization. Themes explored include the development of speaking positions, the use of unconventional tactics, and the appropriation or rejection of received values.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: Drawing on a range of recent field studies exploring the creative workplace (e.g. television production, the fashion industry, ad agencies, graphic design companies, the music business), this course frames commercial cultural production as a site of active agency, negotiation, and constraint through readings, discussion, and the design and execution of field research projects.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course focuses on the language, skills and strategies necessary for producing media projects and events. Administration, organization, permits and permissions, fundraising, liability and contracts, team building, distribution and writing are just a few of the areas that are examined as students learn the skills necessary to be a producer.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course provides an in-depth study of selected film and video documentary genres. Specific topics for this course will be stated in the Class Schedule.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines the significance of communication technologies to the process of globalization, which has increased and accelerated the movement of people and commodities across the world. The resulting transnational networks of cultural, economic, political, and social linkages and alliances are considered, as is the role of media in engendering new forms of community and identity.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: Focusing on Canadian First Peoples territories in the North and South, as well as selected circumpolar regions, such as parts of Australia and other areas of the world inhabited by indigenous peoples, this course examines from a global perspective the historical, theoretical, and cross-cultural content and contexts of aboriginal media and financing, audience research, product development, distribution issues, and policy formation. Broadcasting, print, and digital media case studies and materials are central components.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: Feminist theories of communication technologies are used to critique the impact and meanings of these technologies in various spheres of cultural activity. Topics include the mass media, technological mediations in organizations and institutions, and the re-articulation of domestic and public spaces, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web. Special attention is paid to these electronic and digital technologies - or new media - and the communicational and representational possibilities they enable or foreclose. The class is conducted as an intensive seminar. Completion of a prior course in women’s studies or gender studies at the university level is recommended.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course critically examines the political, social, and ethical dimensions of the information society within Canada and throughout the world. The development of the information society is placed in a socio-historical context. The significance of information and communication technologies is considered and the role of global information and communication policies is examined.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines the aesthetic principles pertinent to the analysis and creation of works within communication media. Topics may include the field of perception, the role of cognition, the elements of composition, and the interplay of form and meaning. Both the static and dynamic aspects of visual and aural elements are considered.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines various alternatives to mainstream media. These alternatives may include community radio and video, independent film, the internet, and other emergent cultural forms such as the pastiche and parody of “culture jamming”. The concepts of mainstream and alternative are explored and the relationship between alternative media and social practices is considered.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines trends in film, sound, television, and other media for future applications. The course includes theory of media effects. Representatives from industry and government are invited to discuss future trends in media utilization. The course demands a theoretical and practical model for original or novel use of a medium or media mix.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course offers an advanced examination of popular culture. With attention to such phenomena as hit films and television shows, stars, fans and pop art, this course focuses on the formation of hierarchies of value in cultural forms. This course examines how some cultural products come to be celebrated while others are dismissed. It also considers social and political consequences of divisions of high and low culture.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course provides a detailed introduction to the semiotics of communication. The course considers the formal characteristics of signs and codes and examines how signs or texts produce meaning. Central to this course is the notion that sign-systems are fundamental to the production of knowledge and ideology. The course proceeds through lectures, an analytical reading of assigned texts, and student discussion and presentations.

Component(s): Seminar

Component(s): Lecture

• Students who have received credit for this topic under COMS 517 may not take this course for credit.

Description: This course discusses the role media can play in indigenous and international development. The concept of development communications is examined in the context of debates within neo-colonial and post-colonial theories.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course addresses practical and theoretical issues of race and ethnicity that have become focal points for current debates in public cultural expression and media studies. The following themes are discussed: cultural/racial difference and its implications for media studies; the (mis)representation of multicultural and multiracial minorities in mainstream and alternative media; questions of access to arts and other cultural funding sources; implications of employment equity legislation in light of media budget cuts; and cross-cultural awareness programs vs. anti-racist training for media professionals. Theoretical readings which frame issues of cultural and racial representation are an integral part of this course.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course considers major approaches to organizational communication in relation to shifting patterns of power, inequality and technological change. Topics include communication networks, organization culture, bureaucracy, systematically distorted communication, gendered communication, the impact of new communication technologies, and patterns of organizational dominance and resistance. Case studies of particular organizations are examined.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: The relationships between forms of communication and political structures and processes are examined. Topics include freedom of expression, the role of communication in mediating conflict, the place of deliberation and debate in democracy, political campaigns and advertising, and the relationship between styles of communication and models of governance.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course investigates contemporary theories of acoustic communication and design, such as Attali’s concept of noise, Schaeffer’s theory of the sound object, Schafer’s concept of soundscape, Chion’s cinema for the ear, and Augoyard’s repertoire of sound effects. Students engage in critical analysis of selected sound texts from various media.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course analyzes and explores the ways sexuality circulates in, and as, public discourses. Through a variety of conceptual formations and critical conceptualizations of ‘the public’ and ‘sexuality’, this course analyzes conceptually and critically how sexuality and the notion of the public are mutually constitutive. The seminar is interdisciplinary and draws upon works in feminist studies, queer theory, political philosophy, history, cultural studies and communication theory.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course explores the themes and concerns associated with particular photographic practices. Through class discussion, visual materials, readings and writing projects, students develop a critical understanding of the history, language and aesthetics of the photographic image.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course provides an introduction to the assumptions, methodologies, and vocabularies implicit in important schools of popular and academic film criticism.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines recent theory and research trends in the area of media reception studies and audience agency. Topics may include discursive, institutional, observational and ethnographic approaches through readings, discussion, and the design and execution of field research projects.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course examines recent research focusing on television. Topics may include technological and industrial changes, audience activity, new genres, and representational conventions.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course focuses upon communication as persuasive or as producing identification. Emphasis is placed upon the role of communication in civic affairs. Classical and contemporary approaches to rhetorical theory and criticism are examined.

Component(s): Lecture

• Students who have received credit for this topic under a COMS 530 number may not take this course for credit.

Description: This course explores historical and current parameters of international communications within the context of current global shifts in power/knowledge relations. Discussion topics are selected from among the following: key development and neo-colonial theories, cultural/media imperialism, globalization, the UN infrastructure, the Right to Communicate debates, national sovereignty issues, international broadcasting, cross-cultural audience reception research and effects theories, telediplomacy, the World Wide Web and the Internet, women as an international constituency group, and others.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course acquaints the student with the historical development of media policy in Canada. It examines the government regulation of media as well as the strategies that have been put in place to foster and guide the development of media and cultural industries. It also considers the present state of broadcasting, telecommunications and internet policies in Canada, focusing on current problems and exploring alternative solutions.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course allows students to confront issues of creative responsibility and ethical dilemmas in media practice. Emphasis is placed upon the relationship between production and theory at the level of ethical responsibility. Specific issues include ethical theories as applied to media, communication and information; the relationship of human values and technologies of information reproduction; the possibilities of critical media practice; identification of challenges emerging from experience in Communication Studies.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines how media can be used in order to intervene in social and cultural issues. Emphasis is placed on the performative character of interventions: they occur at a particular time and in a particular place, they are addressed to and seek to move particular audiences. Topics may include the history of performance strategies, the social and political character of aesthetic interventions, and the forms of such performances in relation to various media of communication.

Component(s): Lecture

Component(s): Seminar

Prerequisite/Corequisite: Permission of the Graduate Program Director is required.

Description: This course makes it possible for students to observe, study and work in the communications media field of their choice under the supervision of a Communication Studies faculty member and a media professional in the field.

Component(s): Tutorial

• There is no remuneration for students participating in internships, which involve 120 hours on site.

Description: Students may enrol in a directed study under faculty supervision in order to undertake a specialized study of research-related topics. Permission of the Graduate Program Director is required.

Component(s): Tutorial

• This course may be repeated as COMS 586.

Prerequisite/Corequisite: The following course must be completed previously: COMS 585. Permission of the Graduate Program Director is required.

Description: Students may enrol in a directed study under faculty supervision in order to undertake a specialized study of research-related topics.

Component(s): Tutorial

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course proposes to engage first-year students in an epistemological conversation concerning different approaches to the conceptualization of communication and to the range of research problematics elaborated in the field and in the program. The expected outcomes include: a broad understanding of the relations between different domains within the discipline; the ability to recognize the links between epistemological assumptions, theory construction, the formation of research problematics and methodological approaches; a familiarization with the main fields of strength within the program; and the development of the ability to engage in dialogue with colleagues in different domains of research.

Component(s): Lecture

Prerequisite/Corequisite: It is compulsory to finish the COMS 815 Doctoral Examination before registering in the Doctoral Pro-Seminar.

Description: In order to promote the growth of an intellectual community within the program, Communication Studies PhD students are required to register in the theory and research pro-seminar known as the Doctoral Pro-Seminar. Students registered in this seminar engage in research design by workshopping their thesis proposals through iterative presentations with seminar participants, and through multiple written drafts. Students are then required to present a first draft of their thesis proposal.

Component(s): Seminar

• Students typically register in the Doctoral Pro-Seminar in Year 2 of their studies.
• Students who have received credit for COMS 830 may not take this course for credit.

Description: This research workshop is supervised by the student’s thesis director and is intended to respond to a particular need unfulfilled by the program. It can take various forms, namely a directed readings program, a specific project within a research group, an elective course (including a masters level course) or a research or creation internship. The research workshop must be defined in a specific agreement between the thesis supervisor and the student, which is approved by the program director and added to the student’s file.

Component(s): Tutorial

• Students who have received credit for this topic under a COMS 805 number may not take this course for credit.

Description: This course provides an in-depth analysis of methodological problematics. Major contemporary methods of analysis are considered. Possible themes include research design, data-gathering techniques and instruments, and qualitative or quantitative procedures for data analysis. Specific topics may vary from year to year.

Component(s): Lecture

Component(s): Lecture

• Topics vary and are determined by the Joint Program Committee.

Description: This course examines commodification and industrialization processes as well as the dissemination and consumption of culture within contemporary social formations, while focusing on one or more sectors of the cultural industries. The analytical approach considers themes such as characteristics of merchandising cycles, work and market organization, symbolic and cultural specificity of cultural-industries products, and relationships between technological innovation and cultural form.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course examines media reception. It explores different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of individual group practices and cultural consumption. The course looks at case-study material drawn from specific media or media genres (e.g. popular music, soap operas, children’s programming). The seminar considers such approaches as media ethnography, focus-group research, audience research, life histories, and other context specific micro-social approaches.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course examines the history and development of state intervention and regulation of the media. It may focus on communication policy nationally or internationally. The course considers such issues as the role of public policy in the development of public media and the public sphere, models of regulation and deregulation, the relations between regulatory agencies and interest groups, and the position of communication policies within larger governmental structures.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: Observing usage of information and communication objects and technical devices allows us to understand the effect of technologies within society. This course explores different theoretical and methodological approaches pertinent to analyzing ICT usages. With respect to course discussions and papers, particular attention may be paid to the interaction between user and technical device; articulation between artifact user and creator; usage situation within the organizational context; embedding of political dimensions in technological design; usage micro-situations and macro-sociological issues. Some major research traditions may be introduced, namely, dissemination of artifacts, sociotechnical innovation, common practices and significations, pragmatic approaches, social and socio-political appropriation of usages.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines discourse as action. Forms of discourse considered may range from interpersonal communication to public address. Possible theoretical approaches include ethnomethodology, conversational analysis, rhetorical theory, and performance studies.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: The course examines discourse with respect to representation. It focuses on the structuring of knowledge and identity within sign systems. Emphasis may range from the cognitive and psychological to the social and cultural.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course examines discourse as social mediation. Possible themes include the interrelation of power and knowledge, the organization of culture through signifying practices, and the production of discourse and social institutions.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course examines how cultural analysis can be brought to bear in understanding organizational life. To this end, a range of theoretical approaches are drawn upon, including conversational analysis, ethnography, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, enactment theory, and socio-linguistics. Aspects of organizations such as norms, rituals, folklore, traditions, common ideals, ideologies, shared symbols, core values and interaction are given particular attention.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course addresses a major question within organizations at both theoretical and practical levels. It focuses on issues of innovation or transformation in an organizational framework using various approaches (functionalist, critical, post-modern, constructivist, interpretative). This perspective is pertinent for analyzing the context and process of change within cultural or development organizations as well as private, public or charitable undertakings.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: Within the context of electronic, information, and market-globalization forces, traditional geopolitical borders have become porous and easily penetrable. This course focuses on the hybrid identities emergent and negotiated from cross-cultural engagements and transnational communication at the beginning of the 21st century. Curricular materials include theoretical readings, case studies, and audiovisual materials focused on bridging cultural and political gaps.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course examines the emergence of a global communication system. Possible topics include international information flow, the circulation of communication products and communication issues as they are reflected in international accords and debates, and the role of media in issues of cultural development, democratization, and resistance to globalization.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course analyzes and critiques various theoretical approaches which account for the relationship between technology and organization. It also provides the grounds for a communicational reflection on phenomena associated with the presence of information and communication technologies within organizations.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course examines relationships between theory and practice in the work of individuals and groups of media practitioners across a range of genres and working contexts. Analysis can focus on the organization of the workplace, the creative process and social forces influencing media praxis.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course traces the history of the different paradigms related to communication and development. It proposes a critical analysis of the theoretical perspectives suggested in both Southern and Northern contexts. The topics considered include Canadian and foreign institutions, policies, and programs, the role of international fora, as well as globalization and development. Case studies may focus on a specific region of the world.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course examines the various ways in which discourses of war, conflict, and peace are constructed and relayed through the mass media and other forms of technologically-mediated communication. In particular, how do the inherent properties of different modes of communication intersect with larger discursive formations to reproduce dominant definitions and unquestioned categories of social knowledge related to issues of peace and conflict? What role do the media play in shaping our understanding of war and warfare? How does the internet contribute to promoting both conflict and peace? How is peace represented as an end state that is desirable; for whom is peace being constructed; and what are the kinds of actions being promoted or encouraged in the name of peace?

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This seminar examines human-computer interaction models and research in various fields of media communication; virtual worlds, e-commerce, distance education, sharing of knowledge and resources, adaptive technologies, systems intelligence and customization. Other topics include principles of interface design and assessment in cognitive ergonomics.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course examines and analyzes communication networks in a constructivist perspective with respect to two main “social-networks” traditions (anthropological and structural). It considers communication networks according to the themes explored by scholars in the field such as diffusion, social support and capital, organizational phenomena, social movements or ICTs. The seminar also includes methodological aspects of the study of communication networks, their emergence, and their transformation.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course considers the communicative structure and performance of democracy within modern society. Attention is paid to the discursive resources available to perform and affect democracy, the constitution of democratic agents, the role of media in constituting and maintaining a public sphere, communicative strategies, norms of regulation and power, the performance of difference and various aspects of public culture.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course examines the development of communication technologies and the media in comparative and historical perspective. Themes of time, space, place and power and their reconfiguration in relation to media and communication are given particular attention. Class members are encouraged to think about how they might engage in research on the history of media as part of their dissertation projects. To this end, historiographical issues are examined throughout the course, along with methodological consideration given to how one works with documentary and archival records.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course introduces students to cultural studies and its entwinement with the development of the field of communications. Key readings in Marxist approaches to culture, British Cultural Studies, and its US and Canadian variants are covered in the first half of the course. The remaining weeks expand the national and conceptual specificity of the “cultural studies tradition.” Topics include cultural and representational politics, issues of identity, resistance, hegemony, and ideology.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course focuses upon the political dimension of popular culture and the intellectual challenges it poses to scholarship. It concentrates upon the conceptual and historical aspects of the study of popular-cultural forms, their production and consumption, as well as their assessment. The course introduces key ideas and issues in popular-cultural studies, beginning with the rise of interest in mass culture during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. It also encounters modes of examining and understanding popular texts and sites of popular consumption. Issues of subjectivity, community, ideology, cultural hierarchies, and mass society are addressed.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This course examines the array of alternative communication practices that inform social movements emerging from the margins. It focuses on the conditions of their effectiveness and mechanisms that facilitate or impede their success, such as the external social forces that influence their cooptation, commodification and evacuation of revolutionary potential.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course considers the strategies and styles of communication as intentional symbolic activity. Communication is examined as a practice that responds to and transforms situations and contexts. Emphasis is placed on the form, manner, and consequences of such practices, as well as on the major paradigms informing different approaches to the study of discourse and mediated messages.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: Critical theorists have identified the body as a site of competing and multiple discourses. The course examines some of the ways in which different bodies have been constructed in the media and how these both constrain and provide latitude for the expression of identities. A central area of inquiry is the context of the historical and contemporary terrain that informs the expression and categorization of these identities.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course surveys and juxtaposes how some of the main approaches to organizational studies have dealt with issues related to communication. Paradigms considered may include scientific management, human relations, cybernetics, political economy, rational decision making, cultural studies, feminism, and post-modernism. An effort is made to examine how these various approaches emerged historically in relation to shifting patterns of power, inequality, and technological change. Issues such as the nature of bureaucracy, domination and resistance, systematically distorted communication, and public relations/external communication are addressed.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: This course introduces students to and contextualizes the main paradigms with respect to research on social, economic and cultural aspects of information and communication technologies. Critical analysis focuses on their epistemological assumptions and premises, main categories of analysis, and privileged issues. Attention is paid to the political economy of the information system.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: : This seminar seeks to develop a position of poiesis (production) and to differentiate it from the position of aisthesis (reception). In order to define the multiple aspects of media creation, the following themes are discussed: creationistic accounts and theses; the spectacle as ritual, achievement and imitation of reality; agents, machines and living organisms; functions of transmitting information and storytelling. Operational concepts considered may include granularity, linearity, interactivity, diegesis, spatialization, indexicalization and enunciation.

Component(s): Seminar

Description: This seminar permits the in-depth examination of particular special topics in media and communication. Topics vary from year to year.

Component(s): Lecture

Description: Students must successfully pass an examination based on the student's research areas and interests. The committee for the examination is composed of three professors, including the student's supervisor. Under normal circumstances, students enrol in the Doctoral Examination in Year 2 of the program. Normally, the written portion of the examination is defended orally by no later than the end of the Fall Term in Year 2. It is also compulsory to finish the examination before completing the thesis proposal. Students who fail this examination are permitted to take it a second time in the following term. Students failing a second time are obliged to withdraw from the program. Students should consult the program regarding specific examination procedures and requirements.

Component(s): Thesis Research

• It is compulsory to finish the examination before registering in the COMS 835 Doctoral Pro-Seminar.

Prerequisite/Corequisite: Students must have completed COMS 815 doctoral examination before registering for the thesis proposal.

Description: In the term following the completion of course work (usually the sixth term) students should submit a thesis proposal to their thesis director. The thesis proposal should be completed within three years of the student's first enrolment. The proposal must be defended orally before a committee of three professors appointed by the program. Students must demonstrate the viability of their project and their capacity to undertake doctoral thesis research. The proposal may be accepted, returned for modifications, or rejected. The rejection of a proposal results in the student being withdrawn from the program. A student whose proposal is accepted is admitted to candidacy for the PhD.

Component(s): Thesis Research

Description: Thesis must be based on extensive research in primary sources, make an original contribution to knowledge, and be in an acceptable literary form. The traditional research thesis is ideally no less than 225 pages and no longer than 350 pages. It must be written in an acceptable literary form and represent a contribution to theoretical or empirical knowledge in the field of communication. Students also have the possibility to produce a research–creation thesis which is to meet the same standards of rigour as the traditional research thesis. The research-creation thesis includes a practical component of creation or innovative production in the field of media/communications or digital/computerized communications, as well as a written component of approximately 150 pages demonstrating the contribution to the advancement of knowledge in the field. A digital reproduction of the practical component must be attached to the manuscript at the time of submission.

Component(s): Thesis Research

• All degree requirements, including the thesis, must be completed within six years of the student's first enrolment for full-time studies and eight years for part-time studies.