Courses

This graduate seminar examines issues of interpersonal dynamics when talking about health and healthcare. Discussion centers on the role of communication in healthcare interactions and examine how communication can facilitate, hinder, or create inequities of care that occurs among patients. The course will review communication among clinicians, patients, and significant others and families. Themes of discussion include patient-provider communication, culture in healthcare, medical mistrust, health literacy, and the role of close others in managing healthcare.

Upon the successful completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Identify important healthcare issues in interpersonal communication.
• Analyze health-related interpersonal communication through multiple lenses.
• Discuss main healthcare themes that emerge from empirical research and their implications.
• Recognize the multiple functions interpersonal communication contributes to managing health and healthcare contexts.
• Develop presentation material and activities.
• Evaluate empirical research about an interpersonal health issue.

This class focuses on the foundational and contemporary research that makes up the study of interpersonal communication. Its primary goal is to give students an understanding of the origins and the current directions of much of the scholarship on interpersonal communication.

(Below is one sample course that has been offered in the last few years)

Studying talk in social interaction
This course takes up the question of how we use language to communicate and introduces students to the methods and findings of a particular qualitative way of analyzing social interaction called "Conversation Analysis." We will examine video- and audio-recorded, naturally occurring conversations to learn how to look beyond the taken for granted answers to questions about how and why we talk and behave as we do. You will learn about the underlying structures of conversation that make it possible for us to accomplish mundane (and not so mundane) activities of everyday life - agreeing and disagreeing, complaining, complimenting, teasing, telling stories, etc. We will also discuss how we construct our identities and relationships through our ordinary talk.

This course examines the process of evaluating the public relations function. It provides students with practical guidelines for evaluating and analyzing the effectiveness of public relations campaigns. 

Students will connect communication measures of effectiveness to business results, including being able to calculate ROI. By implementing best practices for conducting research methodologies, students will be able to interpret and report findings to determine campaign effectiveness. Students will also analyze historical, award winning PRSA case studies, to thoroughly understand the Barcelona principles and apply contemporary measurement tools to current case studies. The analysis and discussion of real-world case studies will serve as context for the applied understanding of how and why to evaluate a public relations campaign.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Describe the fundamentals of strategic evaluation and measurement in the public relations function.
• Use research to identify realistic and measurable objectives. 
• Analyze case studies and/or real-world situations to gauge the effectiveness of the public relations function.
• Apply strategic thinking skills and analytical tools to evaluate the success of messaging/campaigns/channels. 
• Use well-written, professional communication to convey thoughts and ideas about public relations measurement and evaluation in all course assignments.

Changing beliefs about the role of business in society in the past thirty years have increased the pressure on organizations to define how it addresses higher purposes beyond financial gain.  This is particularly relevant as companies are making long-term commitments to improving the world through mechanisms like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The success of an organization depends on the quality of its relationships with different stakeholders including NGOs and governments. More specifically, an organization develops its activities through a stakeholder network, which affects and is affected by the organization’s behavior. 
Therefore, the concepts of sustainability, organizational purpose and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are becoming more and more crucial. The course aims at defining CSR and how organizations create social impact.  The course will look at new managerial solutions and new performance evaluation and reporting methodologies capable of integrating and improving traditional economic measures.

The purpose of the course is to build a new vision of social impact based on a stakeholder framework. Whether CSR is understood as organizations taking responsibility or society holding organizations accountable, the underlying issues are how about the environmental, social, and governance opportunities and risks that have emerged in today’s globalized, networked world will be explored. 

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Discuss basic concepts and vocabulary related to CSR and Organizational Communication.
• Interpret NGO governance and management.
• Discuss the ethical and social issues/decisions in CSR communication.
• Integrate CSR/Social Impact perspective into organizational communication strategy. 
• Assess an organization’s CSR initiatives.
• Assess corporate performance in a comprehensive way.

Through a comprehensive discussion of sustainability communication strategies, media and messaging, this course focuses on how organizations communicate corporate social responsibility to their publics. 

This course examines the powerful new trends in public-private partnerships and new models of private sector interventions in society including responding to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The course explores the intersection of communication, stakeholder engagement and social impact. This course will help students understand how organizations behave in society and the role of the citizen as stakeholder and consumer in helping to influence organizational behavior.

Topics covered include: 1) Crowdfunding; 2) Social Impact Bonds; 3) Competitions and Prizes; 4) Philanthrocapitalism; 5) B-Corporations and Social Enterprises; 6) Pro-bono contributions from the private sector; 7) Use of AI in social impact efforts; 8) Circular Economy; 9) Sustainability investing, and (10) Communication across diverse stakeholders.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Discuss basic concepts and vocabulary related to emerging social impact strategies and how leaders communicate emerging and innovative models of social impact.
• Discuss ethical and social issues/decisions in communicating CSR.
• Integrate the CSR perspective into organizational communication strategies.
• Assess an organization’s social impact initiatives.
• Discuss Sustainable Development Goals and their evolving role of organizations in society.

What is social impact? How does social impact further the work of NGOs/organizations seeking to do good? What is the benefit in terms of corporate reputation? How is it measured? What are the most appropriate ways to communicate about social impact? This course provides an overview of social impact from the perspectives of both the corporate world and NGOs/organizations that are enabled by corporate social impact engagement. Through publications, case studies, interviews with those involved in social impact activities and team projects, we will assess the influence – positive and negative – social impact can have on the reputation of a corporation. Students will come away with a clear understanding of what social impact is and what it is not, how it can be measured in terms of reputation, and the criticality of appropriate communications related to social impact activities.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Describe the concept of social impact.
• Discuss what social impact looks like from the corporate perspective and from the perspective of the NGOs/organizations that are enabled by corporate social impact engagement.
• Assess how social impact can impact the reputation of a corporation - positively and negatively.
• Assess how social impact activities can be measured in terms of noticeable changes to corporate reputation.
• Apply practical skills as they relate to communicating about social impact - particularly from the perspective of a large, multi-national corporation.

This course focuses on various elements of crisis and issues management. In an age when a company’s every move is subject to instant scrutiny and attack, the necessity for effective crisis management is greater than ever and more complicated. The structure of the course revolve around the crisis management process: prevention, preparation, response and long-term. Emphasis will be placed on practical application of crisis communications theory, with the use of real-life case studies, role playing and guest lectures by crisis expert practitioners. This course examines a variety of communication techniques and principles used when an organization faces issues, and or incidents that negatively impact the organization’s reputation. Major aspects of this course will include: the definition of crises in its various forms, the stages of a crisis, the role of the spokesperson and the impact of social media and the crisis response, among others.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Describe the full nature and types of crisis and how crisis impacts various publics.
• Describe how crisis effects communication.
• Effectively communicate with the media and differentiate between “what makes News,” and the seven news values.
• Determine the use and impact of social media during and after a crisis.
• Apply the C.A.P (Concern, Action, Prevention) rule to communication messages.
• Describe the importance of empathy, honesty and placing “people first" throughout a crisis and Implement coping mechanisms when in “the eye of the storm.”

This course demonstrates the importance of reputation management as a practice to better ensure organizational health and mitigate risk by augmenting crisis/risk management work. Often environmental scanning – a key reputation management practice – can make strategic communications professionals aware of potential crises, so they can head them off before they occur.

Of particular significance is understanding how the advent of digital media presents a new reputational risk where anyone with a social media account or website can attack or support an organization.

This course explores reputation management through an ethical lens. Not only are ethics an important human quality, but if organizations behave ethically, they are more apt to steer clear of reputational dilemmas. We also approach this course taking diversity and inclusion into account and working to incorporate these important values into reputation management practices.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Discuss the fundamental theories and concepts of reputation management.
• Assess their understanding of the relationship between organizations and stakeholders.
• Analyze the role of the spokesperson and of effective media relations approaches to support and advance organizational reputation.
• Discuss how digital media has altered the reputation management landscape.
• Examine reputation management through an ethical lens.
• Demonstrate how to engage in reputation management in an inclusive and diverse manner, including at a global level.
• Compare and contrast reputation management efforts across for-profit and non-profit sectors.
• Describe reputation management’s connection to crisis communications and risk/crisis management.

Digital Journalism is a hybrid hands-on and conceptual course designed to help masters-level students develop introductory-level skills in multimedia reporting (using text, still images and video) while gaining an understanding of the foundational philosophical, ethical and legal principles underlying the practice of journalism in the 21st century.

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Share news from a “beat” or area of expertise as it breaks, through email bulletins, text alerts, and Twitter posts.
• Report and write more substantive textual accounts of breaking news for the web.
• Take and edit still photos to enrich news alerts and web stories.
• Combine text and still images, using software, to create photo galleries and tell stories visually.
• Record and edit audio at an introductory level.
• Combine text, still images and audio, using software, to create audio photo galleries and tell visual stories that also use text and sound.
• Use text, still images, audio and video to develop multi-layered news or feature stories for the web.

In the conceptual component of the course, which will be integrated with the hands-on work, students will develop an understanding of the broader philosophical traditions of journalism. By the end of the course, they will be able to:

• Explain the development of digital journalism and how it can be contextualized within the broader scope of journalism history.
• Identify practical and theoretical differences between “analog” and digital journalism.
• Identify and explain digital journalists’ ethical responsibilities, including truth-telling, accuracy, fairness, independence, attention to justice, and transparency and how those are reflected in their own work.
• Identify characteristics of digital journalism that can lead to unethical conduct — including the ease of  plagiarism and fabrication; the temptation to favor speed over accuracy; the lack of a accuracy “safety net” for digital journalists working alone; and the developing nature of digital journalism standards — and explain strategies for avoiding missteps related to these characteristics.
• Recognize the legal problems digital journalists sometimes face — such as libel, copyright violation and invasion of privacy — and identify and explain strategies for avoiding those problems.

Marketing communications pervade nearly every aspect of modern life in consumer society, from broadcast commercials to public relations to product design and packaging to online search marketing. As our economy shifts from a manufacturing base to an information base, this process is accelerating; with the increasingly capacity to track, profile and target consumers across media, we ourselves have become the product, the medium, and the message. This fact, in turn, has influenced the very nature of the human experience. Friendships, identities, and even the most intimate of relationships are now mediated through channels in which marketing is not only present but central. In short, you might say we live in a hyper-commercial society.  What are the political, economic and social implications of this change? How are new technologies contributing to, and changing, this process? How can we, as citizens of this consumer society, navigate these complex issues? What costs and benefits accrue from the increasingly commercial environment in which we live?   In addition to addressing these issues in readings and online class discussions, we will collectively develop and maintain a public blog dedicated to discussing, dissecting and critiquing marketing communications of all kinds.

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Explain the business practices and basic economics of a range of marketing communications, including broadcast, print, and online advertising.
• Utilize a range of social critiques to analyze consumer culture.
• Describe the role of emerging technologies in re-shaping the marketing landscape.
• Recognize the ways in which artists, regulators and everyday people have responded to, resisted, and embraced marketing communications.
• Intelligently critique marketing communications, from both a theoretical and executional perspective.
• Formulate critique and discussion in a public blog format.

This course explores how political, economic, and social actors leverage emerging communications media to pressure and persuade one another.  Participants will gain a deeper understanding of how to use new media tools for digital advocacy and persuasion, and will also develop a critical perspective on how these tools are changing society.

Upon successful completion of the course, students will:

• Have a clear understanding of how the media environment has changed. 
• Gain hands-on experience in evaluating the tools and tactics used for digital advocacy and persuasion.
• Develop a critical perspective on the dangers and challenges posed by the new media environment.

The last thirty years have seen a fundamental transformation in society. Characterized as a transformation from industrial to informational, this new system is marked by the increased velocity and fluidity of capital, goods, people and ideas. Facilitated by new information and communication technologies (ICT), the increased flows of both objects and ideas have led to shifting notions of identity, nation, democracy and society among others.   In this class we seek to more fully understand the shifting nature of society today particularly as this new and complex world intersects with media and communication. We pay particular attention to considering the different causes for change in society, as well as the new complex human and at times computer mediated configurations. Finally, we focus on how these shifts are both impacted by and impact media and communications.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Demonstrate an understanding of approaches to, and debates surrounding, globalization.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the role of technology and media on contemporary society.
• Apply these theories to everyday life, interrogating the real-life implications of globalization.
• Analyze and reason critically when discussing globalization and social change.
• Analyze and critically evaluate different theories of globalization, demonstrating independent thought.
• Analyze the complex interdependent relationship of media, technology and society.
• Evaluate complex ideas and develop a clear perspective.
• Create a thesis statement and write a reasoned analytic paper.

Exploring the process of moral decision-making—that is, doing ethics—is an inescapable part of life. We routinely make ethical judgments, assess our values, and interrogate our moral outlooks, whether or not we think much or put names to this process. Many of us start our professional careers more or less accepting the beliefs and values we’ve inherited from culture, society, and/or family. But only through a deliberative critical examination of our decision-making processes do we make our ethical frameworks truly our own.

This course raises the questions and requirements associated with autonomous ethical action but with no ready answers. The overriding goal is, through using various theoretical frameworks to reach logically defensible answers instead of reacting with your gut or anecdotal evidence, to spur you to continuing reflection on your moral approaches in professional settings and in your broader “digital lives.” The process of doing ethics is nothing if not devoted to serious, careful reflection and application. As such, this course emphasizes both the theoretical underpinnings of how we come to a given moral philosophy and case studies specific to digital media. We will
consider how different moral philosophies apply across cultures and across different contemporary media practices and platforms in areas such as advertising, promotional marketing, big data, software and interface design, and fake news.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify and explain key ethical theories.
• Articulate current codes of behavior for media professionals working in digital media environments.
• Apply ethical models across communications professions.
• Discuss and deliberate on moral dilemmas involving digital media practices and forms, using various ethical frameworks.
• Logically justify their ethical decision-making process in a given scenario.
• Retroactively apply theories of ethics to better understand their decision-making processes in past real-life dilemmas.

Social or community-engaged storytelling is rooted in empowering a community to lead the telling of its own story. This class looks at ways in which those stories facilitate a community or constituent messaging outcome. Those who practice creative engagement serve as stewards for a greater narrative.  Students will have the opportunity to work with local advocacy organizations and artists around issues of houselessness and economic vulnerability, racial justice, and environmental resiliency. The culmination of the class will task groups of students to develop the full design of a new project proposal in response to one of these advocacy issues.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
• Develop a vocabulary around community engagement and creative engagement.
• Design the messaging, narrative, and measurable impact for a creative intervention.
• Understand the difference and intention between live and reproduced (digitally-distributed) work - what role each serves within a creative intervention.
• Assess the roles live and reproduced (digitally-distributed) work serve within a creative intervention.
• Articulate ways creative engagement can be applied or observed to fail.
• Design a project that applies the principles as outlined above, inclusive of producer plan, intervention outline, and community outreach and partnership plan.

Below are some sample topics courses offered in the last few years.

Explorations in Play and Creativity
The course examines the last 100 years of social scientific research on creativity in well known creative individuals and in the creative life of "so-called" everyday persons. We will take "life themes" approach to the development of creativity in famous creators (Darwin offers a classic case study, for example). We will also explore the important of creativity and innovation in business and industry. Of relevance also is how our everyday communication, media, and information practices are actually experienced, and how they can be studied using naturalistic or quasi-naturalistic methods that put the researcher in situ.

History of the News Media in 20th Century America
The course looks at the news media not as freestanding institutions but as a part of American politics and culture in the 20th century. It explores several periods of major change, including the Progressive era, the Depression, the Red Scare, the civil rights movement, and others. During these moments, journalists and news institutions interacted in complex ways with political actors - while at the same time both expressing and helping to shape public attitudes about key events and policy decisions. The class examines these interactions of political actors and the public with the media in an effort to understand the underlying ideological and cultural currents of American life.

Media and Politics

Audience Studies
The audience remains elusive, despite many attempts to understand, study, and measure it. Each week we will explore one of these methods and concepts, examining its contributions and limitations to understanding media and culture. While we will occasionally discuss what audiences/ do/ (in their various guises as readers, viewers, writers, citizens, and activists), the main focus of this course is to examine how the object "audience" has been constructed through a variety of research methods and theoretical frameworks. The course is roughly divided into two parts: The first part will be a survey of canonical debates and problematizations in media studies. After establishing this base of knowledge, we will explore how recent political, economic, and technological transformations have produced new forms of media practices (especially interactivity and collective participation) that once again challenge the notion of a self-identical audience.

This course examines the exciting world of law and policy relevant to digital media: the Internet, mobile media, and social media.

The course will address such timely questions as:

• Why have you been getting all those emails telling you that websites or apps “value your privacy” and want you to click “OK” on a statement about your data?
• Why did a federal court rule in May ‘19 that President Trump violated the First Amendment rights of Twitter users when he blocked them?
• What was behind the “delete Facebook” movement of spring 2018?
• Can you successfully sue someone for libel if that person said something false and reputation-harming about you on social media?

And others.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify and discuss key issues in digital media law.
• Evaluate timely digital media law viewpoints.
• Locate and understand statutory law and court opinions about digital media law.
• Outline a framework or frameworks for thinking about current and future issues in digital media law.

The purpose of this course is to provide a critical understanding of popular culture’s role in society. The course introduces a range of theoretical approaches to study popular culture, exploring the intersections between everyday life, media, and broader political and historical contexts within (mostly) the United States.

We will examine the history of mediated pop culture, the commercial and social aspects of its texts, and the cultural industry's influence on social relations and values. Drawing on theoretical concepts and concrete examples, we will delve into cultural texts and practices in an attempt to reveal the social processes that exist beneath the surface

Ultimately, this course will provide the tools to study media and popular culture (e.g. television, music, games, film, advertising, and social media). The course will expand notions of popular culture by focusing on digital media dimensions via examples and approaches.

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Identify what makes an element of culture part of popular culture.
• Decode what a newly encountered popular cultural text/practice is trying to say about the world.
• Analyze the limitations and possibilities of that perspective on the world.
• Identify particular ways in which popular culture representations throughout history reflect those times and places.
• Identify how other individuals use popular forms and practices to construct identities and social relationships that are different than theirs.
• Deploy analytic strategies for interpreting texts.
• Acquire and improve their media literacy skills.
• Reason critically when discussing popular culture via a thorough understanding of historical and social contexts.

Students who must interrupt their studies may, with the approval of a program director, register for Matriculation Continued (leave of absence). There is no tuition fee for this registration, although a student fee is charged. Students who do not register for Matriculation Continued will be charged a reactivation fee upon their return to the program. (Students on temporary visas who interrupt their studies must in most cases leave the United States during such periods.) Matriculation Continued is available only to students not enrolled in any coursework and not using faculty time and university facilities, except to complete previous coursework from classes with incomplete or temporary grades. Students may enroll in Matriculation Continued for a maximum of two consecutive semesters.