The Department of Communication integrates theories and criticism with the essential skills for media production, professional engagement, and meaningful research.
Graduates can make a positive, professional, and important contribution to communication theory and research, strategic communication, media production, and communication and media studies. Students will study, research, and analyze the perspectives that will lead to them becoming inclusive, ethical, and effective leaders and participants in global and local communities. They will acquire skills in critical analysis, speaking, writing, and visual presentations across all media. They will learn about the changing world of today’s and future media and the long history of the relationship between communication, self, and society. They will be prepared for a broad array of careers or graduate studies.
Advertising Specialist • Brand Strategist • Business Reporter • Communications Specialist • Content Marketing Manager • Digital Strategist • Journalist • Managing Editor • Marketing Coordinator • News Anchor • Publicist • Sales Specialist • Social Media Manager • Video Producer • Web Producer • Writer
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Students identify, analyze, and apply a broad spectrum of communication theories. Includes traditional and critical perspectives, with emphasis on cultural and diversity issues, and the impact of emerging media technologies.
Interrogate how the social, political, and cultural landscape has changed in relationship to digital media technologies. Develop critical resources to better understand the history and future of these new media technologies and emerging communicative forms.
Examine the role of celebrity in our social/political lives. We explore electoral politics as well as cultural politics and larger global politics as they relate to the phenomenon of celebrity.
Students become critical readers of visual images by employing a variety of communication-based theoretical frameworks and analytical approaches to visual artifacts, texts and acts. Explore how visual images persuade. Students select examples of visual rhetoric to analyze, which culminates in an essay and creative project of their choosing.
Students identify, examine, and apply theories of persuasive communication. The course emphasizes cultural and diversity variables, media, and strategic applications.
Students analyze, critique and create forms of spoken, written and visual communication that engage concepts of “difference”. Topics may include gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexual identity, age, ability, and mental health.