Course Topic & Description:  Media & The Environment - There are few topics, beyond communication itself, which better reflect our interconnected humanity than “the environment.” Mediated environmental messages surround us, whether about expansive issues like climate change or the newest, organic or sustainable product. These mediated messages often come together or diverge around conceptualizations of our environment hinging on risks and uncertainties about the fundamentals of contemporary society. This course will look at the study and practice of the environment and media through a range of concepts, ranging from the “sacrificial landscape” reflected in television shows such as the first season of HBO’s True Detective to the “growth machine,” as a persistent framework to understanding risk amid the imperative of economic growth in contemporary capitalism. 

Course Description: In the past century, communication and transportation technologies connected the world as never before. As people and ideas move with increasing ease, how are traditional notions of culture being reinforced or broken down? How do ideas about culture make inequalities appear between different nationalities, socioeconomic classes, and racial and religious groups appear natural and inevitable? How can we distinguish between mutually beneficial cultural exchange and exploitative forms of appropriation? This course uses theory and contemporary case studies from news, social media, and popular culture to shed light on the construction of culture and cultural difference from classical theories to contemporary ideas of global cosmopolitanism and hybridity. This course does not provide a definitive definition of what culture is, but rather explores the political and economic entailments of mediated ideas of culture, including its relationship to race, class, and transnational inequities. Indeed, one of the first goals of the class is to question the existence of the discrete social units that we commonly call “cultures.”  We will look at how social value and inequality are constructed using ideas about culture and identify the new currency of cultural difference in global times.

Course Topic & Description: Communication and the Body - The human body is a rich and complex communicative resource. In this class, we will examine how the body, in coordination with talk, contributes to meaning making in face-to-face interaction. We will look closely at the movements of the eyes, face, hands, head, torso, and legs, as well as the use of objects and space, for their role in the moment-by-moment accomplishment of a range of activities: opening and closing encounters, telling stories, aligning to an interactional partner, and so on. Although we will mainly draw on interactionist studies of the body, we will also consider cognitive, cultural, developmental, and even evolutionary themes in our investigations. The class will center around the use of videotaped data to examine embodied behaviors in interaction.