Graduate Courses
Catalog descriptions frequently lag behind course development, especially in a department with a dynamic program. This list has been prepared to give prospective graduate students a description of course offerings more complete than that which is available in printed catalogs. Not every course listed here is offered on a strictly regular rotation, though one can expect that most of these courses will be offered in any two-year period. Special attention is called to the variable topic courses (i.e., 496, 529, and 538); some of the variable topic classes listed here may be one-time-only offerings, but others are likely to be given independent status in future catalog revisions. Courses that are cross-listed with other departments (e.g., 408, 415) are described here only if taught by Speech Communication department faculty.
Courses numbered 400-499 are typically open to advanced undergraduates as well as graduate students. Courses numbered 500 and above are open only to graduate students.
400-Level Courses | 500-Level Courses
400-Level Courses
408 Cultural Analysis of Screen Media. Introduces current issues in critical and cultural analysis of film and television. Topics include role of media industries, media technologies, audiences, narrative genres, and culture in the production of stars. Attention to ways of conceptualizing and analyzing stars and star system as features of contemporary media and cultures. 4 hours.
410 Workplace Communication Technology. Examines how new communication and collaboration technologies (e.g., teleconferencing, electronic mail, computer conferencing, on-line information systems, desktop publishing, expert systems) affect the creation, content, and flow of communication and information in organizations. Special attention to characteristics of communication technologies, potential organizational applications and constraints, and implementation of new technologies. 4 hours.
411 Organizational Communication Assessment. Applies organizational communication theory to the assessment of communication practices in organizations; systematic procedures for diagnosing communication problems and facilitating effective communication in organizations. 4 hours.
412 Advanced Organizational Communication. Advanced study of theory and research in organizational communication; considers such topics as communication networks, superior-subordinate communications, task-related and social information processing, and communicating with the external environment. 4 hours.
413 Advanced Small Group Communication. Advanced study of theory, research, and training methods in group communication. 2 or 4 hours.
415 Classical Rhetorics. Same as Classical Civilization 415. Examines the development of rhetorical theory, criticism, and pedagogy in Western thought; analysis of the contributions of major figures and works from Homer to the Renaissance. 2 or 4 hours.
416 Early Modern Rhetorics. Describes significant movements in the development of rhetorical theory in England, France, and America from 1500 to 1900. 2 or 4 hours.
417 Contemporary Rhetorics. Study of the major contributors to rhetorical theory in the 20th century. 2 or 4 hours.
421 Persuasion Theory and Research. Focuses on competing theoretical accounts of the processes underlying persuasion and on research evidence concerning the effects of various factors on persuasive effectiveness. 2 or 4 hours.
423 Rhetorical Criticism. Surveys of interpretative approaches to analyzing and evaluating public discourse; extensive critical practice. 2 or 4 hours.
424 Campaign Messages and Strategies. Considers factors central to the sustained persuasive campaign or movement; special attention to the nature and functions of persuasion in the political campaign. 2 or 4 hours.
427 Children and the Media. Examines the role of the mass media in the lives of children. Special attention is given to developmental differences in how children process media. Topics include children’s responses to media violence, media advertising, stereotypes in the media, and educational content. 4 hours.
432 Gender and Language. Considers actual and perceived differences and similarities in the use of language by women and by men; emphasizes the social contexts of speech. 4 hours.
435 Advanced Interpersonal Communication. Advanced study of the interactive processes and social contexts of interpersonal communication. Specific topics include self-disclosure and secrets, conflict in personal relationships, social support, and routine talk in close relationships. 2 or 4 hours.
450 Advanced Topics in Public Discourse. Study of selected periods and genres of public discourse in historical context. 2 or 4 hours. May be repeated with different content to a maximum of 16 hours.
462 Interpersonal Health Communication. Focuses on connections between interpersonal communication and health, including ways in which doctors, friends, family, and peers affect how people manage health and illness. Topics include health-care decision-making, social support, and coping with stress and illness. 4 hours.
474 Introduction to Research Methods. Introduces descriptive and experimental methods in speech communication; intended to produce understanding and critical evaluation of research designs. Background in statistics is not necessary. 2 or 4 hours.
496 Advanced Topics in Communication. Special topic course. 2 or 4 hours. May be repeated to a maximum of 8 hours. Recent offerings have included:
- Communication and Conflict. Examines how people experience and manage conflict within public and private arenas. Focuses on the intersection of communication and conflict within interpersonal, small group, and organizational contexts.
- Communication Development in Childhood and Adolescence. Discusses the development in childhood and early adolescence of the cognitive, social, and behavioral processes involved in the development of varied communicative functions (intelligibility, persuasion, relationship-management, etc.).
- Communication and Governance. Describes the role of communication in political processes, including campaigns and democratic processes of legislation.
- Health Communication: Organizational Issues. Focuses on the organizational aspects of health communication. Introduces students to basic issues in provider-patient communication and in the context in which this communication takes place.
- Communication Training and Development. Introduces students to basic concepts. principles, and skills employed in effective communication training and development programs. Emphasis on theories of adult learning, instruction, and communication in professional settings.
- Globalization, Empire, & Post-9/11 Democracy in America. Studies the relationships among markets and militaries, trade deals, and terrorist strikes, public speeches and secret dealings, force and forgiveness, and democracy and deception. The focus each week will be on seminal speeches, thus tracking the ways globalization and empire are debated in public.
- Internet Policy. Examines the role of the state and public policy in the regulation of communication systems. Provides a historical, technical, and societal context for the policy problems related to media convergence.
- Media and the Body. Explores the way the human body is portrayed within, and affected by, the mass media, including a wide range of corporeal issues that have been linked to identity, such as ability and disability, race, age, sexuality, social class, athletic prowess, and health.
- Health and Media. Provides an introduction to health information portrayed across different media channels and formats, including entertainment programming, Internet, news, advertisements, and planned campaigns.
- New Media Law and Policy. Addresses “new media” scenarios.
- Play and Technology. Considers play and interactive media technology by examining electronic games. Topics include play as communication, competing social scientific and philosophical theories of play, the history of mediated games, and the societal consequences of mediated play.
- Race and the Media. Presents an overview of racial stereotypes in the mass media and the effects of stereotypical imagery on viewers. Explores intersections between race, ethnicity, class, and gender in the media.
- Communication in Personal Relationships. Examines theory and research focused on interpersonal communication in personal relationships, including friendships, romantic associations, and family relationships.
- The Rhetoric of Punishment; or, Hangings, Whippings, Cartings, Torture, and Other Useful Tools of State. Theorizes the function of the death penalty and other forms of corporeal punishment, to historicize their uses and to politicize their current manifestations.
- Communication and Leadership. Examines theories and research evidence for leadership in small groups, organizational, and institutional settings as well as a practicum on leadership in which students assess their own behaviors and preferences. Specific topics include leadership and gender, diversity, ethics, teams, and culture.
- Video Games: Content, Industry, and Policy. Presents a broad introduction to the medium and history of video games that will draw from a wide variety of disciplines.
- Virtual Communities. Considers the community-level impacts of communication technologies from the telegraph to the digital age, with a heavy emphasis on modern Internet-based virtual communities.
500-Level Courses
529 Seminar in Speech Communication. Special topic course. 4 hours. May be repeated. Recent offerings have included:
- News Media and the Political Process. Acquaints students with recent and traditional research on the relationship between politics and the news media.
- Family Communication. Focuses on research and theory that helps explain the connections between family interaction and important family outcomes (e.g., satisfaction, solidarity, competence in children).
- Communicating Identity in Health and Illness. Examines the diverse theoretical approaches to understanding the ways in which one's enactments of identity shape the experience of health and illness and the ways in which one's health status may constrain or enable identity performances.
- Methods of Message Effects Research. Provides background for a variety of message-centered research methods, including experimental message effects research, content analysis, interaction analysis, and discourse analysis.
- Persuasion in Health Contexts. Provides a general introduction to theorizing and research concerning health-related persuasion, especially (although not exclusively) in the context of health communication campaigns.
- Language, Culture and Identity. Examines the complex ways in which language and culture are related including how talk is culturally situated, and how culture is communicated (and constituted) through talk.
- Health Communication. Examines the nature of influence in interactions between patients and health care professionals, with attention to such issues as the bases of power that health care professionals and patients have, communication behaviors that signal attempts to gain control and exercise influence, the interaction of mutual influence, and reasons for the acceptance or rejection of influence attempts.
- Communication in Health Care Organizations. Examines the communication implications of health care delivery organizations viewed as complex decision-making environments often marked by a high degree of uncertainty, turbulence, role specialization, and interdependent networks. Considers how interpersonal and organizational communication theories can facilitate understanding of health decision-making processes at the individual, dyadic, group and organizational levels.
- Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Organizational Communication. Reviews organizational theory and research, and its application to the function and character of communication in organizations across multiple levels of analysis. Discussion of selected theoretical approaches to the study of organizational communication: open systems and information processing perspectives, ecological and environmental perspectives, cultural and interpretive perspectives, and political perspectives.
- Ethnography of Communication. Provides a basic grounding in the terms, theories and methods of study associated with the ethnography of communication, a field that addresses the variety of ways in which people use language within and across speech communities, as well as the variety of beliefs or ideologies they hold about the categories and functions of communication.
- Ethnographic Research Methods. Provides “hands on” experience for advanced graduate students who are conducting or have conducted ethnographic or interpretive studies. Reading of how-to texts and models, and work with students’ own materials. SPCM 429, Ethnography of Communication, is recommended as a prerequisite (but not absolutely required).
- Dynamic Processes in Organizations. Discusses conceptual and analytic issues associated with the treatment of organizations as complex dynamic systems. Introduces basic elements of dynamical-systems approaches; considers examples of dynamic models in organizational communication; explores computer-assisted simulations of dynamic processes.
- Theory and Research on Collaboration Technologies. Reviews theories and empirical research on the design, adaptation and use of collaboration technologies by individuals, work groups and organizations. Multi-disciplinary perspectives from communication, psychology, sociology and organizational theories.
- Intercultural Communication. Includes survey and critical discussion of theory and research concerning intercultural communication processes.
- Language Socialization. Examines the role that language plays in socializing children into culture. Contrasting cultural cases are surveyed, ranging from non-Western cultural groups (e.g., Chinese in Taiwan, Kaluli of Papua, New Guinea) to communities in the United States (e.g., working-class Euro-American, African-American, mainstream). Students will gain an appreciation for the wide variety of ways in which caregivers around the world communicate with children and for the important contribution that children make to the creation of communicative practices.
- Communication Networks. Considers conceptual and analytical issues associated with the study of communication networks. Examines network formulations of selected communication, social-psychological, organizational, and sociological theories, but with an emphasis on communication patterns, processes, content, influences, and impacts.
- Qualitative Methods in Communication Research. Study and practicum in the use of qualitative research methods in various domains of communication research.
- Theories of Communication Context. Provides a basic grounding in theories of language and communication in context, including, for example: Vygotsky, Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Goffman.
- Communication in Personal Relationships. Surveys various theoretical approaches to the role of communication in the development, maintenance, and decline of personal relationships. Emphasis on the distinctive contribution of communication theory to interdisciplinary research on close relationships.
- Media Violence. Focuses on the impact of media violence in society, with an emphasis on social science research and theories. The course covers major theoretical perspectives on the impact of media violence, including social cognitive theory, priming, excitation transfer, cultivation, and desensitization. The course also explores public policy implications of the research.
- Conflict in Interpersonal and Organizational Contexts. Draws on multi-disciplinary research on conflict in interpersonal (e.g., conflict in close personal relationships) and organizational settings (with an emphasis on micro-level conflict).
- Theories of Interpersonal Communication. Emphasizes interpersonal conflict as it occurs in various contexts.
- Organizational Communication. Provides a broad survey of the foundations of study of communication in organizations, including issues of complexity, communication technologies, culture, decision making, distributed knowledge, external communication, leadership, networks, and power.
- Communication and Uncertainty Management. Focuses on the theoretical bases for understanding how people manage uncertainty, including how people seek or avoid information, how psychological and emotional responses affect uncertainty management, and what role others play in uncertainty management.
- Measurement in Communication Research. Develops the conceptual and statistical skills for operationalizing communication constructs. Examines the theoretical reasoning and statistical principles that govern measures of communication.
- Public Opinion and the Public Sphere. Examines problems in the conceptualization of public opinion as a social phenomenon, in the communication of opinions from the mass publics to the political elites, and in the interpretation of public opinion as the “will of the people.”
- Communication Technology. Addresses accounts and theories of communication technologies as systems with focus on influential books investigating entire systems of communication from competing theoretical perspectives.
- Mass Media and the Individual: Introduction to Mass Communication Theories. Introduces theory and research on mass communication and the individual. The primary focus will be on communication and social psychological research conducted within a social scientific framework.
- Mass Media and Democratic Theory. Examines the institutions, practices, and effects of political communication from the standpoint of democratic theory. Considers the critical tensions between the requirements of democratic institutions, the supply of political information provided by news media, and the public demand for such information.
536 Seminar in Group Discussion. Examines selected problems in group communication, including group decision-making, influence in groups, and group structuring processes; discussion of methods of small group research, including analysis of interaction and field methods. 4 hours.
538 Seminar in Rhetorical Theory. Special topics in rhetorical theory. 4 hours. May be repeated. Recent offerings have included:
- Current Issues in Rhetorical Theory. Studies the flow of ideas (and goods) between Europe and America, reviews the old World and New World debate competing versions of Enlightenment, and considers the ways these conversations contributed to revolutions on both continents.
- Modernity and the Rhetorics of Violence. Covers three areas of inquiry regarding violence: (1) theories of political sources of violence, (2) secondary history of its uses, and (3) primary case studies of how Americans have argued about violence in general and the death penalty in particular.
- The Rhetoric of Postmodernism. Addresses three broad groups of readings: (1) the early works that brought postmodernism to America and critical responses to them; (2) exemplary postmodern works from the fields of political theory, philosophy and historiography; (3) critical responses to postmodernism by scholars of rhetoric and communication.
- Feminist Theory, The Media, and the Politics of the Popular. Examines major areas of theoretical debate in feminist media theory. The course aims to develop an understanding of historical, psychoanalytic, interpretive, and social scientific approaches to the study of film and television texts, their reception, and in some cases their production.
- Methods of Critical, Cultural Analysis. Examines the contested definition of “research” in cultural studies, with particular attention to debates about the epistemological status of “empirical” work and definitions of “methodology” in both humanities and social science research.
- Style and Argument. Inquiry into the argumentative roles played in rhetorical discourse by figures and modes of composition, and examination of their importance in both rhetorical criticism and argumentation theory.
- Burke’s Rhetorical Theory. Examines Kenneth Burke’s work, concentrating on his early books and papers, emphasizing the social-political background against which they need to be read.
- The Problem of the Public. Examines a range of literature on the public sphere, from traditional conceptions of the public to feminist and postmodern approaches, so that students may develop a relatively deep yet broad acquaintance with this fundamental issue in rhetorical and political theory.
- Rhetoric and Visual Culture. Examines the privileged historical status of vision; the relationships between images and the institutions of their production and circulation; revolutionary technological developments in visual culture; the question of the evidentiary force of images; visual argument; the complex relationships between “images” and “texts”; surveillance; spectatorship; and spectacle.
- Political Rhetoric, Public Culture, and Democracy in Antebellum America. Examines various forms of political persuasion produced by Americans in the antebellum period (circa 1826-1860). A goal of the course is to understand how Americans constructed their nation, law, culture, and sense of self and to situate these rhetorics within their historical, institutional, and political contexts.
- Theories of Communication and Power. Reviews contemporary theories about the relation between communicative practice and power. The primary focus will be upon current writing.
- Theories of Screen Media. Concentrates mostly on “new media” (personal and organizational computing and telecommunication systems that rely upon screens) and the major screen media of the twentieth century—television and cinema; however other historical examples are included in order to think about the relation of theory and media to different contexts, and about how explanations of “media” have developed out of or against earlier kinds of reasoning.
- Cultural Studies: “Why Here, Why Now?” Considers projects in Cultural Studies over roughly the last forty years, with a focus on how these projects have considered issues of knowledge/power, the nation, globalization, media, technology, commodification, labor, representation, reproduction, criticism/critique and alternative analytics of knowledge/power, race, diaspora, gender, sexuality, place/space, education, medicine, sport, disciplinarity, activism, governmentality, everyday life, economies, policy, and culture.
- Cultural Technology and the Production of Social Space. Examines recent and classic works about Place, Space, and Environment in order to foster an inter-disciplinary understanding about Place and the place-bound and space-producing conditions of Cultural Studies, disciplines of knowledge, and academic work. Issues include modernity/postmodernity, the public-private sphere, social relations (interaction, separation, diaspora), identity politics, media practices and formations, the City, Land/landscape, the Nation, Globalization, Suburbanization, Home, and “everyday life”.
- Kenneth Burke. Includes reading and discussion of Burke’s work from the 1920’s up to the publication of A Rhetoric of Motives in 1950.
- Style and Argument. Focuses on assisting students, as readers and critics, to pay attention to the “surface” features of discourse.
- The Rhetorics, Politics, and Histories of Capitalism, from Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) to the Free Trade Area of Americas (2004). Studies the history of international capitalism and the rhetorical means of justifying it.
- Visual Rhetoric. Addresses the question of visual rhetoric by learning how to apply the methods of rhetorical criticism to the artifacts of visual culture and by reflecting on the implications for rhetorical theory of sustained attention to the visual.
595 Special Problems. Individual investigation of special projects not included in theses. Open to master’s candidates for a maximum of 4 hours, and to doctoral candidates for a maximum of 8 hours.
599 Thesis Research.