Dissertation Proposal Seminar
Tuesday 3:30 - 5:30 pm
Brett Gary
Call number: 40852 (1 point)

In this course, you will scrutinize and critically evaluate some of the authoritative texts by leading figures in this field between the 1930s and the 1960s. By the end of the course, you should develop a solid understanding of a foundational moment in the history of communication research.

Politics of the Gaze
Monday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Allen Feldman
Call number: 40859 (4 points)

The mediation and technological development of vision and its dominance over the human sensorium is integral to the emergence of the modern, including experiences of urbanism, consumer desire, gender/sexual identities, race and ethnicity, trans-cultural image systems, aesthetic production, and the making of power and political truth claims. This seminar will focus on introducing participants to the core theories and analytic methods of visual culture, and the socio-political history of the human sensorium in a variety of disciplines, including ethnography, social history, urban studies, cinema studies, social geography, material culture studies, and media studies. Politics of the Gaze Course Reader at New University Copiers 11 Waverly Place between Mercer & Greene. Tel: 212-473-7369.

Topics in Digital Media
Thursday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Aram Sinnreich
Call number: 42686 (4 points)

The course primarily concentrates on the ways in which "new media" such as the Internet have transformed our culture, business, and society. The class will have a significant amount of reading, and it will be discussed in a seminar environment focused on discussions, rather than lectures.

Transnational Communities and Media Cultures
Monday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Juan Piñon
Call number: 42688 (4 points)

The Spring, 2008 course will be a research-oriented course that will utilize the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign as a foundation for exploring various aspects central to the study of political communication. As such, course content will include both lecture-based, scholarly material as well research-based seminar format discussion. Students will be introduced to prominent methods used to analyze a variety of forms of political campaign discourse and conduct team research projects that aim to understand the communication processes at work during the 2008 presidential election cycle. This will include analyses of the content and persuasive development of candidate speeches, the construction of candidate's political advertisements, the content and tone of coverage by the news media and public opinion about the candidates and their reception of candidate's campaign messages. Special attention will be paid to the role of race and gender within these various campaign dynamics. Students can expect to complete bi-weekly research assignments, and an average reading load of 1-3 book chapters/articles per week. A team summary of research findings will be the culminating assignment for the course.

Likely Reading: In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns by John G. Geer, Sneaking Into the Flying Circus: How the Media Turn Our Presidential Campaigns into Freak Shows by Alexandra Pelosi, Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South by Thomas F. Schaller.

Communication Processes: Gender, Race, and Cultural Identity
Wednesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Deborah Borisoff
Call number: 42687 (4 points)

Students examine the processes and approaches to the study of communication theories, language and aspects of verbal and nonverbal communication with a particular focus on gender, race, and cultural
identity. These processes are examined in both personal and professional contexts, across relationships (e.g. friendships, romantic, marital, and work settings) and are connected to current local and global media representations.

S. Douglas & M. Michaels (2004), The Mommy Myth; S. Keen (1991) Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man; L. Arliss & D. Borisoff (2001), Women & Men Communicating: Challenges & Changes; S. Hewlett (2002), Creating a Life; A. Hochschild (1997) The Time Bind. Course readings include also works by Julia Wood, Cheris Kramarae, Marsha Houston, Ronald Jackson, Frank Wu, Judith Butler, Fern Johnson, Pepper Schwartz and others who have written widely on the topic.

The Languages of Communication: From Cave Painting to Print
Tuesday 4:55 - 7:05 pm
Terence Moran
Call number: 42689 (4 points)

In this course we will be exploring the "roots" of the human family and the cultures we have created through the agency of symbols and media. Generally speaking, our explorations will have three major objectives. One is to attain a greater understanding and appreciation of the role of symbols and media in the evolution and divergence of consciousness, cultures, and social arrangements over the long course of human history. A second is to construct theories that may explain why symbol systems and media change over time, and how they change us in the process. And a third is to abstract from our past experience with media some generalizations and questions that will give us direction in thinking about the consequences of media change in our own cultures of the present and the future.

Steven Pinker The Language Instinct
Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Though, and Reality
Randall White, Prehistoric Art
John Pfeiffer "Was Europe's Fabulous Cave Art the Start of the Information Age?"
Andrew Robinson The Story of Writing
Walter J. Ong Orality and Literacy
James Burke "Communication In The Middle Ages"
Sigfried Steinberg and John Trevitt Five Hundred Years of Printing, 4th Revised Edition

The Electronic Media: Television
Tuesday: 2 - 4:10 pm
Susan Murray
Call number: 42790 (4 points)

This course will survey the cultural and industrial history of American television. Students will come to understand how technological innovation, regulatory bodies, advertisers, network heads, creative producers, audiences have interacted with economic, social, and political forces to shape television over time. In addition to their reading and participation in class discussion, students will be expected to screen television programs both in and out of class, write one 15 page historical research paper, and to complete one exam.

Decolonization and its Aftermath
Tuesday: 3:30 - 5:30 pm
Arvind Rajagopal and Robert J.C. Young
Call number: 42857 (4 points)

The advent of 20th C. decolonization challenged the way in which world history had been conceived for four centuries, as centered upon the tiny landmass of Western Europe, rather than say, as plural and polycentric. The former view made it difficult to understand how the majority of the world's population mattered to history at all. With the onset of decolonization after the end of World War I, the world began to be seen, first through the lens of the nation, and secondly, as an extensive set of interconnections, where seemingly remote events could have major effects across countries. This course will combine a survey of select decolonization movements with analyses of the transformations from anticolonial nationalism through postcolonial developmentalism to the contemporary new world order. The course will consider decolonization in two senses: as the historical achievement of independence in former colonies, and, as a communicational concept illuminating socio-political change.

Therefore, in addition to historical and theoretical literature, this course ill draw on literature, cinema and other media sources to explore the significance of decolonization in the 20th C and beyond. The aftermath of the Cold War and the failure of non-alignment in the global South have been marked by the rise of religious and market fundamentalism as well as the emergence of a New World Order. It is increasingly obvious that decolonization has not brought all the freedoms it promised. Rather, it has enabled a deeper infusion of metropolitan technologies of governance, that would have been inhibited if erstwhile colonial structures had remained in place. Nevertheless, there are numerous unforeseen outcomes of the partial but increasing deinstitutionalization of regulatory systems. These are conventionally referred to in terms of democratization, consumer choice and the new mobility of goods and persons. At the same time, questions of politics begin to move beyond the purview of the state, and pose problems that are also opportunities for democratization.

This course will address a) the persistent legacies of colonization, as well as b) the political status of decolonization, as an initiative that inaugurates new futures, while remaining agnostic about its material outcomes. We will consider decolonization in the historical context of postcolonial development as well as retrospectively, in terms of the new world order, the clash of fundamentalisms, and rise of political violence that we witness today. The secondary literature is as yet sparse; we will seek to construct it from primary documents, political speeches and tracts, literary and other media texts including films, accounts of the developmental enterprises involved, as well as critiques of developmentalism and of the technocratic forms of governance it required.

David F. Poltrack is Chief Research Officer, CBS Corporation and President of CBS VISION. Poltrack oversees all research operations at CBS encompassing audience measurement, market research, program testing, advertising research, and monitoring of the national and international video marketplace. He designed and oversees TELEVISION CITY at the MGM GRAND, Las Vegas, CBS' state of the art Research Center. CBS VISION is a new research unit designed to explore and offer insight on emerging technologies, media consumption patterns, and advertising value in the media marketplace. Poltrack is past chairman of the Media Rating Council; trustee of the executive committee, Marketing Science Institute; past president, Market Research Council; past chairman, Advertising Research Foundation. As Adjunct Professor, New York University, he teaches in NYU's business and communication schools; and is a visiting professor at Cheung Dong Graduate School of Business, Beijing, China. He is author of Television Marketing: Network, Local, and Cable (McGraw-Hill) and has many articles published in professional journals. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame (B.A., magna cum laude, History), and NYU (M.B.A., Marketing).

Communication and Political Propaganda
Thursday 7:15 - 9:25 pm
Salvatore Fallica
Call number: 40870 (4 points)

In this course, students examine some of the major historical moments in political propaganda as well as current propaganda campaigns. We start with a brief analysis of the Nazi Party propaganda system and then examine the political propaganda tools and techniques that contemporary political parties, government officials and candidates use in their quest to manufacture political consent. Students should leave this class with an intellectual overview of the field of political propaganda as well as the various analytical methods that will help them recognize, describe and explain the propaganda techniques of contemporary political actors.

Readings will include (subject to change): Noam Chomsky, Media Control: the Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda; Leonard W. Doob, "Goebbels' Principles of Propaganda," in em>Propaganda; Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes; Jackal and Janice Hirota, "America's First Propaganda Ministry: The Committee on Public Information During the Great War," in Propaganda; Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman, The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists and the Stories That Shape the Political World; Darrell M. West, Air Wars: Television Advertising in Election Campaigns, 1952-2000. Students should also access "The Living Room Candidate," at http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/election.

The course objectives are: 1. Understand the ways in which communication permeates our interpersonal relationships in terms of initiating, maintaining, and terminating relationships. 2. Encourage the application of these ideas to current and future interpersonal settings. 3. Understand the ways research is conducted in the field of interpersonal communication and the strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of this research. 4. Be able to critically analyze and argue for and against approaches to interpersonal communication theories.