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Upcoming Topics Courses

Fall 2018

MDIA 470 - 01, Digital Policty in the U.S. 

  • Instructor, Dr. Brian Dolber
  • Explores the questions around the regulation of media in the digital era. Particular attention will be paid to transformations in laws and policies surrounding ownership, copyright, privacy, hacking, and network management. Consideration will be given to how these changes impact media industries and the public, and how they connect with larger political, economic, and cultural trends. 

COMM 420 - 6, Communication, Culture, and Illness

  • Instructor, Dr. Andrew Spieldenner
  • Explores the interconnectedness of health and culture through critical engagement of narratives and media coverage. Through a rhetorical, media and critical theory perspective, students will analyze media and narratives with the intent of discerning how culture frames how people understand and engage in their health, illness, healthcare, and end of life processes. Particular foci will be: infectious disease, chronic and hereditary conditions, and end of life

Spring 2018

COMM 420 - 01, Interpreting Art as a Communicative Experience  

  • Instructor: Dr. Michael Huspek
  • In this class, we begin with the idea that things in this world have an aesthetic dimension - e.g. sculpture, music, poetry, literature - invites us to interpret the world in ways that take us beyond all that it thought of as rational, or scientific, or pragmatic, or even that which typically is grounded in 'common sense'. 

COMM 420 - 04, Border Rhetorics 

  • Instructor, Dr. Antonio De La Garza
  • This class examines the U.S./ Mexico borderlands as a discursive phenomenon. Students will learn to apply rhetorical theory and criticism to unpack the histories, artifacts, and narratives that shape the physical and ideological line between citizen and outsider. Students will also be asked to produce and theorize narratives about the cultural and legal borderlands.
  • Prerequisite: COMM 200, Argumentation & Dialogue

COMM 450 - 05: Communication and Transnationalism 

  • Instructor: Dr. Gloria Pindi
  • This course examines the communication practices that occur accross transnational borders as well as the multiple ties and interactions linking peoples and/or institutions across the borders of nation states in the context of globalization. Students will use transnational/ intercultural communication theories to explore experiences of transnational subjects, and particularly identity performances that emerge as people become transnational and locate themselves in new imagined and/or real communities as well as the power dynamics shaping these types of identities
  • Prerequisite: COMM 330, Intercultural Communication

MDIA 470 - 05: Mobile Media Cultures

  • Instructor: Dr. Cecilia Uy-Tioco 
  • Explores the history of mobile media technologies, convergence of old and new media, the shift towards a mobile society, mobile technologies and intimacies, the different uses of mobile media around the world, and much more. 

MDIA 470 - 06: Media Policy and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy, 1776-1996

  • Instructor: Dr. Brian Dolber
  • Explores the history of media policy in the U.S. from the nation's founding to the birth of the modern Internet. While free expression is typically considered central to American principles, there have been longstanding struggles over who has the right and ability to participate in U.S. democracy. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between media policy and movements for racial, gender, and economic justice. 

Spring 2017

COMM 450: Communication and Transnationalism

  • Instructor: Dr. Gloria Pindi
  • This course examines the communication practices that occur accross transnational borders as well as the multiple ties and interactions linking peoples and/or institutions across the borders of nation states in the context of globalization. Students will use transnational/ intercultural communication theories to explore experiences of transnational subjects, and particularly identity performances that emerge as people become transnational and locate themselves in new imagined and/or real communities as well as the power dynamics shaping these types of identities
  • Prerequisite: COMM 330, Intercultural Communication