Teaching
CARGC faculty and postdoctoral fellows teach courses in Global Communication at the Annenberg School. Find out what courses we are offering this semester and view the archive of previously taught courses below. If you would like to request a syllabus for any of the courses, please get in touch with the instructor.
Spring 2025 Courses
Media, Infrastructures, and the Environment
COMM 2015
Instructors: Ennuri Jo, Ph.D., Matt Parker, Ph.D.
How does the environment factor into the production, design, and use of media technologies and infrastructures? How does media shape the way we think about the natural environment? How do we make our media sustainable in an era of climate change? This interdisciplinary course explores the relationship between humans, media technologies, and the environment. Students will learn how the more-than-human world shapes communication technologies, from beacon fires and carrier pigeons to telegraph cables, radio, fiber optics, and satellites. We will begin the course by highlighting the role of media infrastructures in today’s global ecological crisis. We will then trace our steps backward, from the endpoint of e-waste, through the applications and impacts of media on and in the environment, to the elements and minerals that are the foundation of media technologies. Classes will combine short lectures, student-led discussions of the readings, local field trips, and demonstrations of multimodal scholarship, critical art practice, and activism that interrogate the concerns of each week’s theme. These alternative ways of thinking, organizing, and doing will enable students to consider the role of media in the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch defined by human impact.
Before Netflix: The Past and Present of Latin American Television
COMM 2900
Instructor: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, Ph.D.
Since the mid-20th century, the telenovelas, newscasts, and variety shows produced by Televisa in the capital city of Mexico have traveled across the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas. In the first half of the course, we analyze this history by considering how technological developments, industry practices, and programming trends resonated across different countries, as well as how audiences created (or resisted) a sense of “Latin American” identity through their television consumption practices. In the second half of the course, we look at the current state of television as it has been shaped by globalization, digital media, and new social movements. In particular, we are concerned with how streaming platforms such as Netflix have (and have not) disrupted longstanding practices while introducing new ideas into the television mediascape. Course content will consist of reading economic, social, and cultural studies of television and analyzing the content of a few historically significant TV shows and some newer Netflix original series. This course is a Penn Global Seminar, which includes a travel component.
Past Courses
CARGC faculty and fellows teach a wide variety of courses on global communication topics.