Independent study in special subjects.

This course provides an introduction to argumentation theory and research with specific focus on communicative approaches (e.g., pragma-dialectics, conversational argument) and examines conflict in relation to language, processes of human interaction, and the rich settings where people conduct their lives. We will pay special attention to disagreement management in dispute mediation and study interventions to shape interaction from a communication design perspective.

This course examines how technological artifacts remain integral to dreaming up futures, particularly in moments of uncertainty and turmoil. Students will read scholarship on temporality, globalization, post/de colonial studies, social construction of technology, among others, and examine sources from literature, art, film, etc. Primary focus is on people and places outside the United States and Western Europe, particularly postcolonial Africa and Asia.

This class examines how intersectional regimes of anti-Blackness, misogynoir, settler colonialism, and heteropatriarchy are constitutive features of the global capitalist order, urging critical attention to the varied and historically contingent ways that "capitalism is racial capitalism." This seminar focuses on significant but thus far underexplored links between media cultures, both historical and contemporary, and formations of racial capitalism.

This course is a practice-intensive seminar to rethink ethnographic methods as our social lives are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. What does fieldwork entail when we center digital technologies in our research? How should ethnographers negotiate access, trust, and proximity as they vacillate between the online and the offline? How should we retool ethnographic tools and techniques (e.g., fieldnotes, participant observation, interviewing, and multimodal ethnography) as we navigate the materiality and politics of digital media?

This course examines sociotechnical problems with existing modes of social media and works towards building new, affirmative visions for social media through technical and policy means. Students will examine interventions to address problems with contemporary social media and design and develop possible interventions.

Introduction to the structure, process, and logic of quantitative empirical research in communication. Topics include research design, measurement, descriptive and inferential statistics, and basic multivariate analysis. Students acquire an ability to critique various methodological approaches and techniques. Preparation for more advanced courses. Required of all Communication graduate students.

This course is a survey in performance studies. As such, we will overview the history of the field, major tenets, paradigms, theories, methodologies, and directions. As a field of study, performance studies is interdisciplinary, practiced across fields, and specifically as a subfield and tradition in Communication. Beyond the field, we will look to the ways theories are produced as and through performance, how theories analyze as and through performance and how performance as a methodology is practiced as aesthetic communication, ritual, everyday life, ethnography, and more.

This class introduces students to actors, institutions and public interest battles fought nationally, regionally, and globally for the control of the Internet. It considers the interaction between law, technological design, and policy solutions in shaping infrastructure, code, and content of the global web.

The Commonwealth Honors College thesis or project is intended to provide students with the opportunity to work closely with faculty members to define and carry out in-depth research or creative endeavors. It provides excellent preparation for students who intend to continue their education through graduate study or begin their professional careers. The student works closely with their 499Y Honors Research sponsor to pursue research on a topic or question of special interest to them in preparation for writing a 499T Honors Thesis or completing a 499P Honors Project.