COMS Special Topics 2022-23 – Course Descriptions | School of Journalism and Communication

Fall Term 2022

COMS 3800A: Communication and Disability Studies
Online Asynchronous

Description: Free Britney. Hannah Gadsby. A Quiet Place. What do they have in common? They are all prominent media representations of disability. In this course, we will explore many facets of disability, considering many of the ways our culture conceives of disability and what it looks like in media. We will take an intersectional approach to the study of disability and think about topics such as mental health discourse, autism in the media, Deaf culture, sex work as a disability issue, and the mental health epidemic of COVID-19. We will analyze how disability is represented (or missing) through television, film, music, news and other aspects of media.

COMS 3800B: Communication and Social Spaces
Mondays: 8:35 -11:25

This class examines the role communication plays in the experience and structure of social spaces. Topics include housing, GPS technologies, data storage, COVID-19, and differences such as class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify and articulate the political effects of media on how our social spaces are constructed, controlled, and lived.

COMS 4800A: Media and Crime
Thursday: 8:35 – 11:25

This course explores historical and contemporary mediations of crime and justice from a critical, interdisciplinary perspective. The class considers how media cultures work to construct popular understandings of criminal action, victimhood, identity, violence, justice and truth. Crime and Media interrogates the political and social function of the communication of crime (both real and imagined) by turning to a variety of media sites, such as: News, true crime books, TV and film dramas, photography, online forums, magazines, podcasts, and courtroom art. This seminar takes an intersectional and interdisciplinary approach by looking to concepts in cultural criminology, film, journalism, visual culture, new media and gender studies, among others, to understand how popular media and their users and audiences configure crime.

COMS 4800B: Communication and Time
Wednesday: 14:25 – 17: 25

In this seminar we will consider how media technologies are intertwined with different lived experiences of time. Other themes include a consideration of how the pandemic intersected with ideas of time; how different digital technologies have an impact on personal and collective memory, and how a range of different media forms— from television series to internet memes — fit within the rhythms of everyday life.

COMS 4800C: Canadian Television in the Digital Age
Online Asynchronous

This course will explore the past, present and future of the TV industry in Canada as politicians, policy makers and regulators toil to rewrite the rules for the Internet Age to face a business in the thralls of cultural, technological, and economic disruption

Winter Term 2023

COMS 4800E: Media and Crime
Monday: 11:35 – 14:25

COMS 4800F: Communication and Music
Tuesday: 18:05 – 20:55

An investigation of music from a communication studies perspective, with an emphasis on questions of power. Investigation of key issues and concepts include the emergence of, and relationships between actors in the music industry; the evolution of music distribution, production, promotion and consumption models; the effects of music and its creators on individuals and global communities. We’ll study scholarly texts and popular literature; and we’ll listen to and discuss diverse music genres and formats from the 1500s to 2023. Other activities may include attending a live concert; a field trip; and/or a guest lecturer from the music industry.