Undergraduate classes
CMS 348 K
Social Interaction and
Visual Culture
This course explores a broad
range of visual media and the ways in which they facilitate, shape, and constrain
human activities. “Media” in this course does not refer to “the
media”—mass-media such as television, radio, and the press—but
rather to all kinds of artifacts that humans have invented to extend their natural
abilities and to enable modes of action and interaction that would be impossible
without it, for example action and interaction across time and space or between
humans and technological objects and structures whose workings they do not (and
do not need to) understand (e.g. the Internet). These are media in Marshall
McLuhan’s sense, who has called them “human extensions”: they
allow human beings to extend the range of their natural biological functioning.
Focusing on visual media, we will explore the relationships between their visual
design-features and the actions and interactions that are mediated by them.
Media of this kind are indispensable complements to spoken communication: no
modern workplace of any kind is conceivable that is not to a large extent dependent
upon visual media. Visual media become ever-more important in international
communication, and new communication professions are emerging that are devoted
to creating them (e.g. web-designer, information designer). Understanding how
visual media work and being able to assess their quality are important skills
for communication professionals.
CMS 355 K
Intercultural Communication
This is an unconventional
class whose main goal is to provide you with a space in which to explore what
it means to be a young American in the world at the beginning of the 21st century
and what it could be like for you to communicate with people abroad, especially
those who consider Americans to be their enemies. How can you still be friends?
What obstacles are there to finding common ground in communication with people
abroad that may in many ways be just like you (for example, college students
in Pakistan or the Middle East)? How can these obstacles be removed, in the
context of a human relationship and face-to-face communication?
Popular textbooks and training materials on intercultural communication almost
always present intercultural communication as if it happened in a political
vacuum, as if, as a citizen of the United States you would not be perceived
as a member of the world’s superpower, as if IC were a technique or skill
that anyone could apply anywhere, under any circumstances, in the same fashion.
After 9/11, it would not only be unsound, but also quite risky to do so. It
is imperative to take into account how as an American you are seen in the world,
and the data for finding out are available. The difficulties of intercultural
communication that have to do with differences in culture (e.g. differences
in norms for how to communicate under various circumstances) occur within this
global political, economic, and ideological context.
CMS 367-
Language, Culture, and Communication in the
Hip-Hop Nation
Hip-hop is many things to many people. In this course, we will primarily study it as a new way of using language, of turning language into music and poetry, and of building community through language use and communication. Hip-hop is a creative revolution of communication media that has put young black Americans, previously one of the most neglected groups in U.S. society, onto the cultural map (and given quite a few of them money and jobs); their invention has rapidly grown from a small, local phenomenon which many critics predicted would quickly disappear, into the global Hip-Hop-Nation: there probably is no country on earth (other than North Korea) where rap is not listened to, loved, and practiced at least by a handful of kids and adults; in many places it is the dominant form of popular music.
The program for this course is densely packed and includes a large number of themes: we begin by trying to understand the revolution in communication that hip hop is, looking first at graffiti writers in New York City, and by learning about the social context in which this happened; we will closely study the meaning-making methods of rappers and how these relate to other modes of meaning-making with language: poetic methods (rhymes and metaphors); relationships between language and music (beat, rhythm, intonation) and how these have changed over time; similarities between M.C.’s and those performers that rapped the epic poems from which the Iliad and Odyssey developed in ancient Greece. We will consider what “orality” means and how memory is preserved in societies without writing; how rappers distinguish themselves from one another through their skills and styles and how they achieve identity; how rap is related to other African-American genres of language use and what speech acts rappers perform to build community; what slang and Ebonics are; what rap’s predecessors were, and how it has sparked the new mass movement of slam poetry. What “sampling” is and what is accomplished by it. And we will finally discuss various political agendas that hip-hop artists have, as well as what happens, both musically and culturally, when rap becomes global and is adapted to local communities in other parts of the world.