Undergraduate Course Descriptions

When we move through urban spaces, we are always both “reading” and “writing" the city. We read the built environment and the social uses of space within it, decoding messages about where and how to move, about who or what is (un)welcome and (un)valued, about historical trajectories and future possibilities, and about identity and power. A multitude of actors co-write the city and its messages, from powerful players like municipal governments, corporations, and cultural institutions to grassroots organizations, residents, and visitors, and onward to platforms, algorithms, and global flows of capital, goods, and ideas. This course invites students to 1) explore the practices and organizations that communicate about and through cities (e.g. city diplomacy and city branding, urban planning and place-making, sports and mega-events, local journalism, community organizing); 2) interrogate how the urban built environment itself communicates (e.g. through architecture, (in)accessible design, signage and murals, the aesthetics of gentrification); and 3) examine how communication networks shape city life (e.g. platform urbanism, smart city tech, policing and surveillance). Power, inequality, and the opportunities for challenging them will be core themes throughout. We will study key theories for thinking critically about cities and for imagining more just urban futures. And we will learn from the practical, timely insights and experiences of guest speakers from Philadelphia and beyond.

This course examines children's relationships to media in their historic, economic, political, and social contexts. The class explores the ways in which "childhood" is created and understood as a time of life that is qualitatively unique and socially constructed over time. It continues with a review of various theories of child development as they inform children's relationships with and understanding of media. It reviews public policies designed to empower parents and limit children's exposure to potentially problematic media content and simultaneously considers the economic forces that shape what children see and buy. The course also provides a critical examination of research on the impact of media on children's physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development. Students in this course produce a proposal for an educational children’s media product as their final project.

This course is an introduction to the field of political communication and conceptual approaches to analyzing communication in various forms, including advertising, speech making, campaign debates, and candidates' and office-holders' uses of social media and efforts to frame news. The focus of this course is on the interplay in the U.S. between media and politics. The course includes a history of campaign practices from the 1952 presidential contest through the election of 2020.

Advertising, it has been observed, is capitalism’s way of saying “I love you” to itself. In this discussion-based course, you will explore what that might mean, for you and for society—to live in a culture that puts buying and selling at its center. Together we will trace how, over a hundred years ago, advertisers began to pair a vision of the good life with a promise to grow the economy. In the century since the advertising industry has co-evolved with, and underwritten, the media we consume—from radio to the internet—helping to drive, even shape, the technologies and businesses that entertain and inform us. In the course, you and your classmates will study advertisers—who they are, what they make, and how their business has changed—alongside the rest of us, in our roles as consumers and (more recently) proprietors of our own self-brands. Along the way we will consider how advertising and consumer culture has spilled over into politics, activism, and the environment. Is there a logic of promotion that connects how we think of ourselves with the lifestyle dreamscapes packaged by the industry? What, if anything, do colorful 1920s magazine ads have to do with the link-in-bio self-selling of our contemporary social media culture? We will consider such questions against the backdrop of recent developments, including data-driven target marketing and the rise of programmatic ads.

How does the brain shape what we value, how we make decisions, and how we communicate and connect with others? This course explores the neural systems that influence our sense of self, our understanding of others, and the choices we make. Students will examine the brain’s default tendencies—why we sometimes act in ways that align with our long-term goals and values, and why we sometimes don’t. We will also investigate the forces that shape whether our brains synchronize with others when we consume media, engage in conversation, and collaborate, and whether that is desirable. Finally, we will learn how the brain motivates sharing and cooperation, how culture influences neural processes, and what brain patterns make for good conversation. Through hands-on activities, students will explore how we can apply these insights to improve personal and collective well-being. By the end of the course, students will have a deeper understanding of the neuroscience behind decision-making and social connection—and how to use that knowledge to make more intentional choices.

Have you wondered why people undergo religious conversion, change their political affiliation, suddenly endorse conspiracy theories, alter their taste in music, or seek hypnosis to quit smoking? What is common to these processes of change, and how does resistance to change play out across these seemingly different contexts? In “Why We Change,” we will ask unique questions such as how religious change might highlight methods of transforming public health communications or how the study of attitude change might yield new theories about the impact of life experiences on personality. Broadly speaking, the class will provide an opportunity for students to learn theories of belief formation, attitudes and persuasion, normative influence, and behavioral change. For example, we will work to understand how specific beliefs, such as group stereotypes, or specific attitudes, such as trust and values, change in response to variations in the environment and communication with other people. We will cover culturally based and professional approaches to change, from fear appeals to motivational interviewing, to hypnosis. Students will read empirical studies and conduct observational projects about potential sources of social, cultural, or psychological change and resistance to change in Philadelphia. This is an SNF Paideia Program course.

In this hands-on course students will work with active researchers in the Communication Neuroscience lab at Penn to gain experience in how research works. Students will have the opportunity to interact closely with a mentor and will gain experience conceptualizing research questions, designing experiments, and collecting and analyzing data. Prerequisite: COMM 2100 or HSOC 2002 or INTR 3500 or MKTG 2120 or SOCI 2000 or URBS 2000 or permission from the instructor.

Policy makers, entrepreneurs, and marketers frequently rely on common sense when planning for the future; yet their predictions are often wrong, and their plans fail for reasons that seem obvious after the fact. In this course you will learn about the nature of common sense, when it should be expected to work effectively, and why we are tempted to use it even when we should not. The course will also introduce a data science perspective on explanation, understanding, and decision making, covering topics such as experiments, predictive analytics, forecasting tournaments, scenario planning, and epistemic humility. The course will be conceptual rather than methodological and so is equally appropriate for students with technical and nontechnical backgrounds.

This course is designed to explore the role of public health communication in the digital age to influence health behavior change in several areas: infectious disease pandemics, tobacco and substance use, mental health, cancer, nutrition and physical activity and others. Throughout the course, we will discuss a number of important considerations when designing and implementing public health communication interventions. Students will be introduced to theories of health behavior change, models of persuasive communication, practical issues in the design of effective health communication programs, countering misinformation, community engagement, audience segmentation, cultural tailoring to specific audiences, evaluation approaches, ethics, and communication inequalities. We will also explore the use of digital technologies and social media platforms, entertainment education, popular media, and social marketing in delivery of public health communication interventions. This is an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) Course.

How are adolescents represented in media and what effects do these portrayals have on developing teens, including in the context of climate change? What makes adolescents a “jackpot market” to be targeted by advertising, and how can they be swayed by mediated efforts to encourage health-promoting and pro-climate behaviors? What does the increasingly mediated nature of everyday life mean for adolescents, their friends, and their families during their journey into adulthood amidst a climate crisis? We will explore these questions by reading key empirical studies and by critically analyzing film, public service announcements, and climate change-related media portraying and/or targeting adolescents from the 1950s to the present day.

Communication technologies, including the internet, social media, and countless online applications create the infrastructure and interface through which many of our interactions take place today. This form of networked communication opens new questions about how we establish relationships, engage in public, build a sense of identity, promote social change, or delimit the private domain. The ubiquitous adoption of new technologies has also produced, as a byproduct, new ways of observing the world: many of our interactions now leave a digital trail that, if followed, can help us unravel the determinants and outcomes of human communication in unprecedented ways. This course will give you the theoretical tools to critically analyze the impact that networked technologies have on social life and inform your assessment of current controversies surrounding those technologies.

This seminar will examine American attitudes toward globalization and the role of the media in shaping public opinion toward events and people beyond our borders. Students will participate in original research on attitudes toward issues tied to globalization such as immigration, international trade, support for international organizations, isolationism, and so forth. Students will also spend time systematically studying the implications of American media coverage of these issues.

The phenomenal expansion of digital media infrastructures and platforms are transforming the production, promotion, and circulation of films, television programs, music, video games, and other media entertainment and popular cultural forms. Moreover, media artifacts routinely move across national borders with audiences playing an increasingly participatory role. This course focuses on the operations, discourses, and logics that drive contemporary media industries in major media capitals around the world including Mumbai, Seoul, Istanbul, Mexico City, Dubai, and Los Angeles. Taking a historical approach, we will examine the economic, political, and socio-cultural factors that shape developments in the media industries, relationships between powerful centers of media and cultural production, and the ways in which industry professionals respond to the challenges and opportunities of digitalization and new geo-political alignments in the 21st century.

Considerable resources are devoted to constructing mass media campaigns that persuade individuals to change their behavior. In addition, individuals powerfully influence one another without even knowing it. Still, our ability to design and select optimal messages and interventions is far from perfect. This course will review investigations in social and cognitive psychology and communication sciences that attempt to circumvent the limits of introspection by using biological and implicit measures, with particular focus on neuroimaging studies of social influence and media effects.

This course will focus on understanding the multiple ways in which climate science is communicated to publics and how they come to understand it. In the process, we will explore ways to blunt susceptibilities to misconceptions, misconstruals, and deliberate deceptions about climate science. Forms of communication on which the class will focus include consensus statements, manifestos, commentaries, court briefs, news accounts, fact checks, op-eds, letters to the editor, speeches, and media interviews. Students will have the opportunity to interact with guest lecturers, among them leading journalists, climate activists, and climate survey analysts. Students will write letters to the editor and fact checks and will participate in mock interviews designed to increase their understanding of the nature of the interactions between journalists and climate scientists. As a class project, students will collaborate on a white paper on climate discourse fallacies to be distributed at the April 3-7 Society for Environmental Journalists annual convention (hosted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and Media). Students will interview attendees at that conference as part of the class project.

This course explores the nature of diffusion through social networks, the ways networks are formed and shaped by social structures, and the role they play in health behavior, public policy, and innovation adoption. Topics include: the theory of social networks; the small world model of network structure; constructing models to represent society; the social bases of the adoption of innovations and the spread of new ideas; the role of social networks in controlling changes in public opinion; the emergence of unexpected fashions, fads, and social movements; and the connection between social network models and the design of public policy interventions. Students will learn how to use the agent-based computational modeling tool "NetLogo", and they will work directly with the models to understand how to test scientific theories. We will examine the basic theory of social networks in offline, face-to-face, networks, as well as the role of online networks in spreading new ideas and behaviors through social media. Long standing debates on the effects of social networks on changing beliefs and behaviors, their impact on social change, and ethical concerns regarding their potential manipulation will be given careful consideration throughout. Students will be taught new skills that will enable them to use and develop their own agent-based models.

This course will explore the ways in which media companies, advertisers, and the ratings and/or analytics firms they hire (Nielsen, ComScore, Liveramp, 84.51°, Experian etc.) count, track, estimate, and label the people who make up their audiences. The descriptions they present are industrial constructions in the sense that they are portrayals of population segments and individuals that are based on data; they may or may not reflect the views that the populations or individuals have of themselves. The class will explore how internet giants such as Google, smaller internet firms such as The New York Times, multimedia companies such as NBC-Universal, connected TV manufacturers such as Vizio, and supermarkets such as Kroger construct their audiences. We will discuss the controversies such activities engender, and the possible implications the industrial constructions of audiences have for society as well as media industries.