Chairperson: Melissa Click
Professor: H. Crandall, T. Osborne, J. Rossing,
Associate Professors: M. Click, J. Gordon, J. Mora, K. Petruska
Assistant Professors: J Favara, J. Flores
Senior Lecturers: G. Frappier, K. Morehouse
Lecturers: R. Donaway
The department offers one major and one minor:
Bachelor of Arts, Communication Studies major
Minor in Communication Studies
The mission of the Communication Studies Department at 91Թ University is to cultivate a sophisticated understanding of the process of communication as symbolic action. The department provides a theoretically-grounded and experiential education that prepares students to analyze, produce, deliver, and critique human communication in its many forms. The department prepares students with rhetorical skills (eloquentia perfecta in the Jesuit rhetorical tradition), a refined sense of judgment and discernment, and the ability to carefully adapt communication practices to any given context and audience.
The power of communication is inescapable; it affects us everywhere and is central to all aspects of our daily, social interactions. The Communication Studies department teaches students to embrace communication as the central means of creating, maintaining, and transforming social realities. Communication Studies equips students to carefully analyze the way people co-create social realities and cultures through communication and to discern how these social realities affect our communities, for better or worse.
Majors and minors gain experience analyzing and proposing solutions to complex problems confronting the human condition because a deep understanding of communication creates limitless possibilities to improve the world. We interrogate the consequences of our communication processes and discover and produce knowledge about communication practices. We teach students to leverage the power of communication to create more just and equitable social worlds.
The department is committed to nurturing a diverse, inclusive community of scholars who think critically and engage responsibly with the problems and issues of our communities through exemplary, ethical communication via multiple modes of address. We build on an ethos of social justice to prepare graduates to address contemporary issues and challenges as leaders in the community, the public arena, and the world. Research shows that the most successful people in any profession are exceptional communicators.
Communication Studies courses help students develop the skills employers demand such as the ability to work effectively in team settings, analyze information necessary to make decisions and solve complex problems, communicate with people inside and outside an organization, and influence others. We prepare students for a broad range of careers spanning advertising, marketing, public relations, government, non-profit organizations, and other leadership positions. Our graduates also pursue advanced graduate studies in media research, law, business, education, medicine, cultural studies, and other humanities and social sciences. Communication Studies is also home to the University’s nationally renowned intercollegiate Debate Program, which has its own facility, Conway House.
In short, Communication Studies provides students with a critical understanding of the reasons why people think, feel, and act in particular ways; the leadership know-how necessary to make a difference in the world; and the skills that employers seek.
Lower Division
Communicating thoughtfully and ethically for, with, and among others is vital to becoming the leaders 91Թ hopes students will become. This course introduces students to the theory and practice of rhetoric—how we use symbols to create meaning and understanding between people—with the goal of helping students continue to grow into responsible and thoughtful communicators. Students will learn how communication (including oral, visual, and aural symbol use across personal interactions, media, our bodies, physical spaces, and other material phenomena) shapes our identities, ideas, policies, society, and all aspects of our lived experiences. The course develops skills and ways of thinking about communication needed to analyze, construct, and deliver messages that enrich civic and cultural life. Three central concepts—rhetoric & symbolic action, civic engagement, and audience—provide a common thread throughout the class as we explore the Core Curriculum Year 1 question: “How do we pursue knowledge and cultivate understanding?” The course supports the University mission through alignment with eloquentia perfecta, a Jesuit tradition that references excellence in speaking and writing for the common good to create a more just world.
The First-Year Seminar (FYS) introduces new 91Թ students to the University, the Core Curriculum, and 91Թ’s Jesuit mission and heritage. While the seminars will be taught by faculty with expertise in particular disciplines, topics will be addressed in a way that illustrates approaches and methods of different academic disciplines. The seminar format of the course highlights the participatory character of university life, emphasizing that learning is an active, collegial process.
We make sense of our world and the people in it through the symbols we use to communicate about our experiences. The symbols we use (e.g. language, pictures, film, music, architecture, bodies) matter because they have real effects on us, on others, and on our perceptions and understanding of the world. This course explores the theories and ways of thinking that help us understand how symbols create, maintain, and transform our social worlds. Fall and Spring.
Power is everywhere and influences our relationships with others and our ability to get things done in our societies. Communication and symbolic action is a primary way that people struggle over and effect their power relationships. Power clearly reveals itself in cultural ideologies or values and beliefs that influence our social actions, and these ideologies are embedded in our daily communication practices. This course introduces a cultural studies perspective that helps students build a lexicon and critical capacity for engaging with power, ideology, and cultural influence. Fall and Spring.
Our intersecting identities emerge from an array of communicative, performative, and cultural practices and they are tied up in everyday communication contexts such as interpersonal interactions, media platforms, and social movements. Through communication we align ourselves with common interests and communities, and this course will provide a theoretical foundation for understanding audiences, our performances of self, and our negotiation of the two. The course also invites students to explore how our identities are shaped and interpreted in ways outside our control. Fall and Spring.
This course introduces students to the practice of studying, analyzing, and interpreting public texts, and the work they do in constituting public culture. Students engage with methods to make critical judgements about how rhetorical/communicative texts influence public life. Students will address public texts including written, visual/aural, and embodied forms of communication such as movies and song lyrics, sports broadcasts, maps, museum spaces, political speeches, religious texts, historical writings, comedic performances, YouTube channels, and much more. Students will also engage in ethical communicative practices that produce knowledge about human communication and relationships. Fall and Spring.
Prerequisite:
COMM 100 Minimum Grade: D
or HONS 100 Minimum Grade: D
Topic determined by instructor.
Prerequisite:
COMM 210 Minimum Grade: D
and COMM 220 Minimum Grade: D
This course provides a foundation in attending to, analyzing, and reporting meaningful information about the social world through humanistic communication research methods. The course introduces ethnographic and qualitative research methods, ethics, selection of research topics and questions, ethnographic data collection methods (e.g. participant observation; un-, semi- and structured interviewing; structured observation), managing and coding field notes, and qualitative analysis. In this course, students will create field notes, analyses, and more. Fall and Spring.
Prerequisite:
COMM 100 Minimum Grade: D
or HONS 100 Minimum Grade: D
Equivalent:
HONS 283 - OK if taken since Fall 2023
SOSJ 263 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
SOSJ 263 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
Upper Division
Pulling from the fields of media and cultural studies, this course explores the ways we use and are used by popular culture. This class seriously considers how popular culture influences the ways we think, feel, act, and participate in civic life. Building upon students’ expertise as cultural consumers, we explore popular culture through aesthetic, ideological, social, and industrial lenses. Through our consideration of a wide range of popular culture—including film, television, games, print and social media, advertising, and others—we explore questions of aesthetic quality and cultural value in relation to media texts, audiences, and our experiences of culture. Spring.
Prerequisite:
(COMM 210 Minimum Grade: C
or COMM 220 Minimum Grade: C)
and COMM 275 Minimum Grade: C
Communication is the central means for contesting and reconfiguring structural forms of power relations among social groups, and this class focuses on power dynamics and imbalances across social institutions such as law, education, medicine, economics, media, and religion. Students engage the concepts of hegemony (the production of consent for dominant power relationships) and counter-hegemony (the struggle against dominant social arrangements). As such, the course invites students to consider the interplay of communication, culture, and social institutions in maintaining, resisting, and transforming the persistent inequalities of power and disproportionate distribution of cultural and political capital. Fall.
Prerequisite:
COMM 210 Minimum Grade: C
and COMM 220 Minimum Grade: D
and (COMM 275 Minimum Grade: C
or COMM 285 Minimum Grade: C)
Equivalent:
INST 320 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
Everyday encounters with physical surroundings guide our orientations to the world. As we wander city streets, shopping malls, stadiums, nature preserves, sacred sites, restaurants, monuments, museums, and classrooms, we examine how we move in, and are moved by the material arenas we share. Spatial organization and built environments inform our habits of perception, determine the meaning of a particular place, accent what is worth attention and what might be overlooked, and reaffirm dominant norms and power relationships in public culture. Charts, maps, apps, and other navigational tools dictate where and how we move, and how we understand our roles within a given space. Featuring the experiential dimensions of rhetoric and communication, this course presses us to consider how material spaces and places construct everyday geographies. Spring.
Prerequisite:
COMM 210 Minimum Grade: D
and COMM 220 Minimum Grade: D
and (COMM 275 Minimum Grade: D
or COMM 285 Minimum Grade: D)
Equivalent:
ENVS 328 - OK if taken since Fall 2024
INST 332 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
INST 332 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
Examination of the fundamentals of advocacy including argumentation theory, techniques of persuasion, refutation, and cross-examination. This course is open to both debate team members and anyone interested in improving their argumentation skills. Spring.
Prerequisite:
COMM 210 Minimum Grade: D
Equivalent:
SOSJ 363 - OK if taken since Fall 2015
Everyday communication practices, conventional public deliberations, and emergent media technologies shape our public life and affect human and non-human entanglements. This class explores contemporary theoretical conversations about publics and public spheres: what they look like, how they are shaped, how they arrange political bodies, and how we navigate their boundaries and borders of inclusion and exclusion. Students analyze how different modes of communication promote solidarities around common concerns and arrange difference, as well as how we form counter-publics and spaces of resistance and transformation. Topics may include propaganda and censorship, surveillance and privacy, journalism and mass media, spheres of expertise (i.e., science and medicine), roles of rumor, and notions of cultural “buzz.” Fall.
Participation on University debate teams.
The ways we remember our collective past influence our present and shape our futures. This course examines how we rhetorically construct and struggle over social memory through public remembrances of historical events via war memorials, film and documentary, commemorative celebrations, reenactments, monuments, and museum exhibits. Students extend rhetorical and visual theoretical concepts and methods to evaluate sites of public memory and the social and cultural politics shaping the construction of memory. Fall.
Prerequisite:
COMM 210 Minimum Grade: C
and COMM 220 Minimum Grade: C
and (COMM 275 Minimum Grade: C
or COMM 285 Minimum Grade: C)
Equivalent:
INST 351 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
Images and sounds saturate our daily lives and while we often pay attention to content, we may neglect the visual and aural dimensions of these media. As citizens and consumers, we need to develop critical visual and aural interpretive frameworks to make sense of media. This course invites students to sharpen their analytical tools to attend to the sights and sounds that animate everyday life. This course examines media aesthetics through mise-en-scene, camera and point of view, editing techniques, visual style, and sound. From still to moving images, from print to online, students will conduct detailed aesthetic analyses of movies, television, radio, advertisements, podcasts, art, photography, websites, gifs, memes, and other forms of digital media. Additional topics may include industry, genre, power, visual culture theory, and identity. Fall.
Prerequisite:
COMM 210 Minimum Grade: C
and COMM 230 Minimum Grade: C
and COMM 275 Minimum Grade: C
Equivalent:
FILM 320 - OK if taken since Fall 2023
Online communication has both collapsed our communication contexts and expanded our potential identities and relationships. This course applies a cultural lens to understand our digital lives and the various media technologies we interact with on a daily basis. We will examine a range of contemporary theories and issues surrounding digital media including how cultural values are embedded in digital technologies and how we manage identities across multiple digital contexts. We will explore ways to successfully and critically navigate an array of personal, professional, and civic responsibilities in a globally networked world. Spring.
Prerequisite:
COMM 230 Minimum Grade: C
and COMM 285 Minimum Grade: C
A critical examination of the reciprocity between effective communication and successful leadership. Includes an historical examination of leadership styles, theories, and research. Includes an analysis of motivation, power, and organizational culture. Writing and speaking assignments are designed to cultivate leadership skills. Fall.
Prerequisite:
COMM 210 Minimum Grade: D
and COMM 230 Minimum Grade: D
Equivalent:
SOSJ 464 - OK if taken since Fall 2015
This course invites students to integrate their communication studies knowledge with a broad, interdisciplinary conversation on critical theory, and to understand how communication scholars engage with other disciplines and thinkers in struggles for social justice, social change, and solidarity. The course will address a range of critical theories that have influenced and been influenced by the study of communication such as Marxism, the Frankfurt School, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and queer theory. Students explore how critical theory is linked to and emerges from socio-political struggle in different historical moments. In addition, the course invites students to apply critical theory to contemporary social debates and challenges to better understand questions of power, civic participation, identity, and social organization. Spring.
Prerequisite:
COMM 310 Minimum Grade: C
or COMM 320 Minimum Grade: C
The study of communication and culture in a global world cannot and must not be apolitical, ahistorical, or blind to the messy entanglements of power and privilege. Therefore, this course will focus on the intersections between critical race theory, feminist theory, and critical intercultural communication in order to interrogate and examine the ways in which our social identities and locations affect the contexts of our lives including our opportunities, relationships, and overall understanding of the world. Specifically, this course will engage the work of Black Feminist scholars and ongoing scholarly conversations on intersectionality to analyze intercultural encounters and engagement. Fall.
Prerequisite:
COMM 320 Minimum Grade: C
or COMM 340 Minimum Grade: C
Equivalent:
INST 430 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
SOSJ 466 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
SOSJ 466 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
The Core Integration Seminar (CIS) engages the Year Four Question: “Imagining the possible: What is our role in the world?” by offering students a culminating seminar experience in which students integrate the principles of Jesuit education, prior components of the Core, and their disciplinary expertise. Each section of the course will focus on a problem or issue raised by the contemporary world that encourages integration, collaboration, and problem solving. The topic for each section of the course will be proposed and developed by each faculty member in a way that clearly connects to the Jesuit Mission, to multiple disciplinary perspectives, and to our students’ future role in the world.
Public expression and discourse can affirm, complicate, challenge, and even radically revolutionize our shared values and ideals over time. Arguments and symbolic actions in communal spaces prompt individuals and groups to rethink, redevelop, and reestablish potential modes of identity, participation, and interaction within a society. Students in this course will closely examine specific social movements (including, potentially, civil rights, gender rights, indigenous rights, and environmental movements) to better understand the plurality of voices and modes of public expression in dialogue and competition that contribute to, resist, and ultimately shape societal change. Students will then build upon historical knowledge and perspective to engage in an immersive study of an ongoing contemporary social controversy, ultimately creating an informed rhetorical intervention of their own, participating in the social issues and changes of the current day. Fall.
Prerequisite:
COMM 320 Minimum Grade: C
or COMM 340 Minimum Grade: C
or COMM 350 Minimum Grade: C
Equivalent:
INST 440 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
Ethical communication and intentional civic engagement fosters vibrant democratic life. As civic actors, we deliberate and contest policies, advocate for justice, and attempt to foster cooperation among a multiplicity of voices. This course synthesizes theories of ethics that students grapple with to examine relationships between rhetoric, democracy, and justice. Specifically, we will address questions of how we should practice rhetoric in ways that refine our capacities for ethical discernment, build inclusive communities, promote social justice, and ultimately enrich democratic life. Spring.
Prerequisite:
COMM 340 Minimum Grade: C
Equivalent:
SOSJ 465 - OK if taken since Fall 2018
Special topics courses are one time course offerings that include courses that address a current or timely topic or a special interest which will not be made a regular on-going part of the curriculum. Occasionally, a special topics course may be used to offer an experimental or “pilot” phase course before it is subsequently proposed as a regular course. Special topics course offerings vary from term to term. See current semester course listings for topics.
Prerequisite:
(COMM 210 Minimum Grade: D
or COMM 220 Minimum Grade: D)
and (COMM 275 Minimum Grade: D
or COMM 285 Minimum Grade: D)
Special topics with credit to be arranged. On sufficient demand.
Prerequisite:
COMM 184 Minimum Grade: D
In this capstone course for the Communication Studies major, students demonstrate their proficiency in oral, written, and visual communication by adapting their senior thesis to multiple communication platforms. The seminar is also designed to help students reflect on their education and develop a personal philosophy of communication. Fall and Spring.
This course provides transfer credit for students who have arranged an intensive experience studying abroad and will be taking a humanities-based communication course that explores themes of rhetoric, media, and cultural studies that deepens their understanding of the foundation they’ve received at 91Թ. Prior permission from the Department Chair is required.
In this course, students connect their communication studies knowledge and skills with their civic and professional goals during and after college. Students compose narratives highlighting their proficient use of communication skills within their personal organizational experiences, at school, at work, and within their communities. Building this portfolio of materials helps students translate and articulate their skills and ambitions into new organizational contexts post-graduation. A series of professional speakers, including alumni, will model communication in developing a career path. Students apply a social justice perspective to professional life and consider how to integrate a Jesuit, Catholic, humanistic educational experience in a professional context. Fall and Spring.
Directed Study requires completion of a form, department permission and cannot be registered for via Zagweb.
Prerequisite:
COMM 101 Minimum Grade: D
Professional experience in a communication related field. Students must take the initiative to contact an agency or business and find a Communication Studies department faculty member willing to supervise the internship. Fall, Spring, and Summer.
In addition to their major and minor areas of study, all undergraduate students follow a common program designed to complete their education in those areas that the University considers essential for a Catholic, Jesuit, liberal, and humanistic education. The University Core Curriculum consists of forty-five credits of course work, with additional designation requirements that can be met through core, major, or elective courses.
The University Core Curriculum is a four-year program, organized around one overarching question, which is progressively addressed through yearly themes and questions. Hence, core courses are best taken within the year for which they are designated. First year core courses encourage intellectual engagement and provide a broad foundation of fundamental skills. Second and third year courses examine central issues and questions in philosophy and religious studies. The fourth year course, the Core Integration Seminar, offers a culminating core experience. Taken at any time throughout the four years, broadening courses intersect with the core themes and extend students’ appreciation for the humanities, arts, and social and behavioral sciences. Finally, the designation requirements (writing enriched, global studies, and social justice) reflect important values and reinforce students’ knowledge and competencies.
Overarching Core Question: As students of a Catholic, Jesuit, and 91Թ, how do we educate ourselves to become women and men for a more just and humane global community?
Year 1 Theme and Question: Understanding and Creating: How do we pursue knowledge and cultivate understanding?
- The First-Year Seminar (DEPT 193, 3 credits): The First-Year Seminar (FYS), taken in the fall or spring of the first year, is designed to promote an intellectual shift in students as they transition to college academic life. Each small seminar is organized around an engaging topic, which students explore from multiple perspectives. The FYS is offered by many departments across the University (click for list of FYS courses).
- Writing (ENGL 101, 3 credits) and Reasoning (PHIL 101, 3 credits): The Writing and Reasoning courses are designed to help students develop the foundational skills of critical reading, thinking, analysis, and writing. They may be taken as linked sections. Writing (ENGL 101) carries one of the three required writing-enriched designations (see below).
- Communication & Speech (COMM 100, 3 credits): This course introduces students to interpersonal and small group communication and requires the application of critical thinking, reasoning, and research skills necessary to organize, write, and present several speeches.
- Scientific Inquiry (BIOL 104/104L, CHEM 104/104L, or PHYS 104/104L, 3 credits): This course explores the scientific process in the natural world through evidence-based logic and includes significant laboratory experience. Students pursuing majors that require science courses will satisfy this requirement through their major.
- Mathematics (above Math 100, 3 credits): Mathematics courses promote thinking according to the modes of the discipline—abstractly, symbolically, logically, and computationally. One course in mathematics, above Math 100, including any math course required for a major or minor, will fulfill this requirement. MATH 100 (College Algebra) and courses without the MATH prefix do not fulfill this requirement.
Year 2 Theme and Question: Being and Becoming: Who are we and what does it mean to be human?
- Philosophy of Human Nature (PHIL 201, 3 credits): This course provides students with a philosophical study of key figures, theories, and intellectual traditions that contribute to understanding the human condition; the meaning and dignity of human life; and the human relationship to ultimate reality.
- Christianity and Catholic Traditions (RELI, 3 credits). Religious Studies core courses approved for this requirement explore diverse topics including Christian scriptures, history, theology, and practices as well as major contributions from the Catholic intellectual and theological traditions (click for a list of approved courses) .
Year 3 Theme and Question: Caring and Doing: What principles characterize a well lived life?
- Ethics (PHIL 301 or RELI, 3 credits): The Ethics courses are designed to help students develop their moral imagination by exploring and explaining the reasons humans should care about the needs and interests of others. This requirement is satisfied by an approved ethics course in either Philosophy (PHIL 301) or Religious Studies (click for a list of approved courses).
- World/Comparative Religion (RELI, 3 credits): Religious Studies courses approved for this core requirement draw attention to the diversity that exists within and among traditions and encourage students to bring critical, analytical thinking to bear on the traditions and questions considered. These courses carries one of the required two global-studies designations (see below) (click for a list of approved courses).
Year 4 Theme and Question: Imagining the Possible: What is our role in the world?”
- Core Integration Seminar (DEPT 432, 3 credits). The Core Integration Seminar (CIS) offers students a culminating core experience in which they integrate the principles of Jesuit education, prior components of the core, and their disciplinary expertise. Some CIS courses may also count toward a student’s major or minor. The CIS is offered by several departments across the University (click for list of CIS courses).
The Broadening Courses
- Fine Arts & Design (VART, MUSC, THEA, 3 credits): Arts courses explore multiple ways the human experience can be expressed through creativity, including across different cultures and societies. One approved course in fine arts, music, theatre, or dance will fulfill this requirement (click for a list of approved courses).
- History (HIST, 3 credits): History courses are intended to develop students’ awareness of the historical context of both the individual and the collective human experience. One course in History (HIST 101, HIST 102, HIST 112, HIST 201, HIST 202) will fulfill this requirement.
- Literature (3 credits): Literature courses foster reflection on how literature engages with a range of human experience. One approved course in Literature (offered by English, Classics, or Modern Languages) will fulfill this requirement (click for a list of approved courses).
- Social & Behavioral Sciences (3 credits): Courses in the social and behavioral sciences engage students in studying human behavior, social systems, and social issues. One approved course offered by Criminal Justice, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, Sociology, or Women and Gender Studies will fulfill this requirement (click for a list of approved courses).
The Designations
Designations are embedded within already existing core, major, minor, and elective courses. Students are encouraged to meet designation requirements within elective courses as their schedule allows; however, with careful planning students should be able to complete most of the designation requirements within other core, major, or minor courses.
- Writing Enriched (WE; 3 courses meeting this designation): Courses carrying the WE designation are designed to promote the humanistic and Jesuit pedagogical ideal of clear, effective communication. In addition to the required core course, Writing (ENGL 101), which carries one of the WE designations, students must take two other WE-designated courses (click for a list of approved courses).
- Global-Studies (GS; 2 courses meeting this designation): Courses carrying the GS designation are designed to challenge students to perceive and understand human diversity by exploring diversity within a context of constantly changing global systems. In addition to the required core course, World/Comparative Religion (RELI 300-level), which carries one of the GS designations, students must take one other GS-designated course (click for a list of approved courses).
- Social-Justice (SJ; 1 course meeting this designation): Courses carrying the SJ designation are designed to introduce students to one or more social justice concerns. Students must take one course that meets the SJ designation (click for a list of approved courses).
Major-specific adaptations to the University Core Curriculum
All 91Թ students, regardless of their major, will complete the University Core Curriculum requirements. However some 91Թ students will satisfy certain core requirements through major-specific programs or courses. Any major-specific adaptations to the core are described with the requirements for the majors to which they apply.