Communication Studies

COMM 5250. Communication and Technology Research Methods. (4 Hours)

Presents an in-depth introduction to ethical quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods approaches in communication, media, and technology-related research. Offers practice in concept explication and analysis across levels of society—from the individual to the organization. Covers designing and analyzing survey and content data, unstructured and semi-structured interviews, focus groups, ethnography, community-based research, and comparative case studies.

COMM 5510. Technology and Strategic Communication. (4 Hours)

Provides a current, integrated, and strategic approach to digital media practice and scholarship applied to strategic communication. Examines research literature on social media, search engine optimization, extended reality, and artificial intelligence and applies concepts studied to a real-world project or campaign. Students critique how digital technologies have been used strategically and develop their own goal-based strategy, content, format, and evaluation plan. Discusses ethical implications and impacts on diverse audiences.

COMM 6102. Health Communication Campaigns. (4 Hours)

Offers an in-depth look at how persuasive health campaigns are designed and executed. Discusses how campaigns are intentionally designed to influence awareness, knowledge gain, and attitude/behavior change. Offers students an opportunity to obtain skills to design and evaluate campaigns through the completion of their own campaign projects and to learn about visual and verbal arguments and the unique ethical and other considerations of health campaigns.

COMM 6304. Communication and Inclusion. (4 Hours)

Explores the relationships between communication, social identity, and social inclusion. Focuses on how communication shapes perceptions and positions of social identity categories and how individuals and groups resist and transform identity and promote inclusion through communication. Examines communication and inclusion in the contexts of gender, race, sexual identity, social class, ability, and age. Course topics cover a range of theoretical and practical issues, including diversity in organizational settings and the social construction of identity.

COMM 6320. Political Communication. (4 Hours)

Covers the major theories about the role of communication in U.S. politics, public opinion, and public policy. Discusses how to formulate and evaluate your own theory-based hypotheses on the influence of media in American democracy. Emphasizes the role and place of the media in a democratic system devoted to the proposition that the government should be responsive to the "will of the people." The course is organized around five subjects that are central to the study of political communication: communication systems and practices; communication effects: media, politics, and society; the politics of entertainment and the changing political information environment; elections, accountability, and the mass media; and media and political institutions.

COMM 6500. Environmental Issues, Communication, and Media. (4 Hours)

Analyzes major debates over the environment, climate change, and related technologies such as nuclear energy, wind power, natural gas “fracking,” and food biotechnology. Studies the relevant scientific, political, and ethical dimensions of each case; the generalizable theories, frameworks, and methods that scholars use to analyze them; and the implications for effective public communication, policymaker engagement, and personal decision making. Offers students an opportunity to gain an integrated understanding of their different roles as professionals, advocates, and consumers and to improve their ability to find and use expert sources of information; assess competing media claims and narratives; write persuasive essays, analyses, and commentaries; and author evidence-based research papers.

COMM 6605. Youth and Communication Technology. (4 Hours)

Examines how meanings of “youth” and “communication technology” shift in relation to one another and to broader changes in society, culture, politics, and the economy over time. Analyzes how communication technologies (and the content they deliver) positively and negatively affect the social, emotional, and cognitive development of young people and how these changes are influenced by the particular family, school, community, and institutional contexts in which children grow up. Examines how young people differ individually across the life span as well as collectively by class, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and disability. Requires a final paper at the end of the term in which students articulate and defend positions about youth and communication technology.

COMM 6608. Strategic Communication. (4 Hours)

Offers students an opportunity to complete a semester-long, intensive research and writing capstone project related to the field of strategic communication. Research topics can span business, politics, advocacy, entertainment, public health, the environment, and other societal sectors. Building on previous course work, students have an opportunity to gain a deeper scholarly and professional understanding of strategic communication; cultivate professional and academic contacts; and demonstrate mastery of relevant theoretical concepts, professional principles, research methods, and writing approaches. Encourages students to share and translate their findings for relevant academic and professional communities.

COMM 6631. Crisis Communication and Image Management. (4 Hours)

Examines literature related to crisis communication—including theories, models, and strategies—and establishes ethical principles in terms of what, how, and when essential elements must be employed for effective and ethical crisis communication. Offers students an opportunity to learn how to distinguish between an incident and a crisis; to analyze communication practices and methods applied during a crisis; to apply social scientific theory to explain how and why a crisis occurred; and to draw upon theory to develop effective crisis communication plans. Assesses responses to crises using ethical principles such as transparency (the what element), two-way symmetrical communication (the how element), and timing (the when element). Designed to prepare communication professionals who appreciate the need for responsible advocacy when responding to crises.

COMM 6962. Elective. (1-4 Hours)

Offers elective credit for courses taken at other academic institutions. May be repeated without limit.

COMM 6995. Research Project. (4 Hours)

Offers students an opportunity to complete and present a high-level research project. Requires the framing of a significant question or set of questions, the research to find answers, and written communication skills to convey the results to a wide range of audiences. Projects bridge theory and practice and are intended to have an impact on the professional life of students.

Prerequisite(s): COMM 5250 with a minimum grade of C-

COMM 7962. Elective. (1-4 Hours)

Offers elective credit for courses taken at other academic institutions. May be repeated without limit.

MSCR 5300. Media and Technology Ethics. (4 Hours)

Studies technology ethics from the perspective of media and technology studies. Case studies raise specific issues such as selfhood, autonomy, privacy, as well as the implications of such technology for important moral concepts such as agency, responsibility, and privacy; inclusion and opportunity; surveillance and security; and truth, deliberation, public rationality, and disinformation. Offers students an opportunity to identify and distinguish ethical challenges particular to information and media technology.

Attribute(s): NUpath Ethical Reasoning

MSCR 6100. Digital Media: Theory and Practice. (4 Hours)

Introduces the practice of media making for graduate students with little to no experience producing media. Covers the foundational language of images, movement, editing, and sound by creating work in stand-alone media such as short fiction and documentary, serial (multipart) media, and sound editing for podcasting. Examines the theories of power and representation that are integral to media making. No previous experience with media production is necessary.

MSCR 6310. Critical Data Studies. (4 Hours)

Raises critical questions about how society and culture interact with data, acknowledging that data is at the core of our culture and social organization. Emphasizes how data is produced, circulated, and used in different ways, taking an interdisciplinary approach rooted in media studies critiques of technology and power. Case studies discuss what it means to locate the making and using of data within social relations of power, that is, to critically analyze data.

MSCR 6320. Digital Technologies and Global Society. (4 Hours)

Presents key empirical and conceptual foundations to provide tools to address the complex challenges that digital technologies pose in a global context of social relations of power. Emphasizes the origins of the contemporary internet in imperial and military history and explores alternative possibilities that never came to be realized. A series of case studies, drawn primarily from the Global South, analyze power dynamics to highlight the pressing ethical and political questions raised by cutting-edge technologies.

MSCR 6330. Democracy, Technology, and Equality. (4 Hours)

Considers via an interdisciplinary approach how the development and use of digital technology by different political actors shapes and transforms democratic societies. Uses case studies to emphasize debates about the type and quality of information in democracies, as well as concerns about polarization and a general fraying of social cohesion.

MSCR 6340. Race and Technology. (4 Hours)

Investigates how individual and collective beliefs about what it means to be a human of a particular race, ethnicity, or caste is reflected in contemporary and emergent technologies. From biometric scanners at the airport to social media interfaces, the tech tools people use every day are shaped by the sociocultural constructs of race and racial hierarchies, with an array of consequences. Grounded in the theories of communication and media studies, it is an expansive interdisciplinary investigation of how our understanding of who we are shapes what we create and how what we create, re-creates us.