Special Topics Research Seminar (525-0-14)

Topic

Stirring Up Sh*t in the Field of Communication

Instructors

Nathan Walter

Meeting Info

Abbott 1518: Fri 9:00AM - 11:50AM

Overview of class

The goal of this course is to improve students' critical engagement with key findings, theories, perspectives, and moments throughout the history of communication research. In order to achieve this goal, we will center our discussions on controversies, provocations, and polemics that came to define the field of communication. From the collision between administrative and critical research and the debate surrounding the effects of violent video games on aggression, to competing interpretations of cultivation and two-step flow data, calls to retire certain theories and concepts, disagreements between proponents and opponents of open science practices, and, most recently, the remarkably calm and measured scholarly discussion over whether artificial intelligence will improve human life, destroy human relationships, eliminate our jobs, save our jobs, make us smarter, or make us stupider, the course treats disagreement as a central feature of how scholarship develops. As such, this course provides a unique perspective on the history, present, and future of the field while demonstrating several effective approaches for navigating scholarly disagreements.

Class Attributes

PhD Course
Graduate Students Only