Communication

A broad historical and theoretical introduction to the study of human communication in the context of face-to-face and small group interaction. Homework and classroom participation put a strong emphasis on writing and speaking.

This lecture/lab is an introduction to the concepts and techniques necessary to record, edit, mix, and master quality audio for cinema, radio, television, and the web. Emphasis on basic audio signal flow; the evolution of audio art and technology; and how dialog, sound effects, ambience, and music serve the narrative process.

This course examines the relationship between pop culture texts, the media used to propagate them and the dominant culture in which both exist. Using critical theoretical tools, students examine media content and pop culture formations. Topics include an historical overview of critical social theory, and the ways identities are formed in and in reaction to popular music, film, and television.

This course examines current research from a critical cultural theoretical perspective on the role gender plays in communication, and how communication works to construct the notions of masculinity and femininity. Considering gender construction particularly in relation to power, we look at, for example, how language helps enshrine ways we talk and think about the sexes, how gendered behaviors like masculine violence and feminine submission become institutionalized, how pop culture and advertising circulate the messages of appropriate gendered behaviors throughout the media, and how cultural institutions like family, schools, sports, religion and the workplace reinforce gendered communication.