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.
Fall 2024 Courses
Re-reading Canonic Texts in Media Research: Whose Canon? Which Texts? Why Now?
COMM 6500
Instructor: Aswin Punathambekar, Ph.D.
Can a field of study as cross-disciplinary as media studies have a set of canonic texts? Should there be a canon? And if so, which texts and scholars would we regard as canonic to the field? In 2002, Elihu Katz et al. answered these questions with a book that mapped five schools of thought - Columbia, Frankfurt, Chicago, Toronto, and Birmingham (British Cultural Studies) - and explored how they came to define areas of research and shape the formation of distinct scholarly communities. Yet two decades ago, media and communication studies scholars were only beginning to take seriously the critiques and interventions being developed by scholars of race, gender, and postcoloniality. Now, students and scholars in media studies and other allied disciplines in the humanities and interpretive social sciences are grappling with the epistemic, ideological, and moral flaws of Eurocentric thought and in the process, re-vitalizing keywords, concepts, and theories. In this seminar, we will read and engage with canonic texts, delve into the historical conditions of the production of those texts, their afterlife and varied impact(s) on the field, and engage with critical responses that help recast their theoretical and analytic value for us today. Scholars who have done this work of re-imagining canonic texts/schools of thought - for instance, Armond Towns on Marshall McLuhan, Roopali Mukherjee on the Frankfurt School, and Paula Chakravartty on critical political economy - will join class sessions as guest speakers.
Games, Globalization, and Social Justice
COMM 2160
Instructor: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, Ph.D.
How can playing games intervene in socioeconomic and cultural systems at a global scale? By engaging with critical scholarly readings and gameplay sessions, students in this course will become familiar with the methods and theories for investigating both gaming cultures and theories of globalization. Class discussions will explore the political stakes of communicating and simulating global issues (such as colonialism, migration, warfare, or climate change) through the medium of games. In addition to weekly assignments, students will pursue a semester-long project that includes choosing a social issue of importance to them, researching it in-depth, and producing a creative intervention that explains how that issue could be addressed through games. No prior experience with gaming is needed, but a willingness to spend several hours of the semester playing games and thinking critically about them is necessary.
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.
Past Courses
CARGC faculty and fellows teach a wide variety of courses on global communication topics.