Communication

This special topics course covers everything from TikTok trends to influencer politics, this course examines social media as both technological systems and cultural forces that reshape how people communicate, form identities, build communities, and engage in public life. The course explores the interplay between platform design, user behavior, and broader social structures, developing critical frameworks to analyze digital culture's impact on contemporary society.

This course explores how creative advertising can be engaging, exhilarating, and even world changing. Combining conceptual thinking with practical approaches, students will focus on developing the creative dimensions for advertising campaigns related to contemporary problems ranging from low product awareness through to public social issues. Students will engage imaginatively with client briefs and develop advertising concepts all the while exploring the history of creative theory and practice, as well as the storytelling, art direction, copywriting, and pitching aspects of creative advertising.

In this course, students learn to conceptually understand and empirically explore how news content is evolving in response to social media platforms. The first seminar introduces students to key theoretical concepts related to the platformization of journalism, the adaptation of news to TikTok’s affordances, and audience-centered approaches to understanding what constitutes news on TikTok. Students learn to critically engage with current studies on news on social media and develop their own questions for empirical research. In the second seminar, students gain an overview of methods for audiovisual content analysis, ranging from qualitative and quantitative approaches to computational analyses. Students learn about key steps of the data collection and analysis of TikTok content. The coupled seminars are structured around an empirical group project, allowing students to directly apply the concepts and methods related to news content on TikTok.

The Vocal Healing Course is designed to teach active healing methods. Vocal healing greatly benefits human body both physically and spiritually through vocal training methods, which focus on breathing techniques, resonance adjustments, and vocal frequency vibrations, and through auditory guidance in music. This nonverbal form of communication can reach deep into people's emotional core. Some healing techniques can even “massage” the body’s internal organs in ways that are difficult to replicate with other healing approaches.

The course focuses on the significance of rhetoric for human rights and democracy. The course provides tools to communicate opinions in societal contexts in a respectful, authentic, and effective manner, considering different opinions and interests. Students practice effectively listening to, formulating, and delivering messages.

In the age of digital intelligence, how can we coexist and collaborate with machines? What are the boundaries and limits of human–machine communication? This course focuses on five core issues in the field of intelligent communication: human–machine interaction, human–machine trust, human–machine emotion, human–machine value alignment and digital intelligence for good, and cultural and generational differences in human–machine communication. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective and drawing on cutting-edge research cases, the course aims to help students better understand the nature of human–machine communication and human–machine relationships. It also equips students with the abilities to calibrate trust in machines, critically reflect on human–machine relationships, and engage in human–machine communication in a responsible manner.

This course explores the transformative power of media. Through critical analysis and hands-on media design, students examine how media artifacts construct national identities, deploy soft power, challenge gender norms, and transform digital spaces into sites of justice. Bridging theory and practice, students develop ethically grounded media interventions, such as storyboards, TikTok campaigns, and justice-oriented projects, etc. that engage with the tensions between cultural specificity, global algorithms, and neoliberal platforms. 

Organizations are facing a wide range of unexpected challenges of crises, requiring them to develop strategic thinking in order to prepare for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from unexpected occurrences. The aim of this course is to develop strategic skills in mitigating issues and managing crises that organizations encounter. This course places crisis communication in organizational, social, and global contexts. The course emphasizes real-world application of crisis communication concepts, theories, and principles. Thematically, the course covers the foundational of crisis communication, three phases of crisis management, internal and external crisis communication, media and stakeholder relations, and issues and trends in crisis communication.

This introductory course covers theories and research findings in the area of intercultural communication, providing a basic understanding of intercultural communication theories and their relevant issues in global society.  

Topics include Cultural identity and categorization, High vs low-context communication, Verbal codes and intercultural communication, nonverbal codes, Communication accommodation, Intercultural conflict and negotiation, Acculturation and adaptation, Intercultural competence and development, Intercultural relationships and dialog, Group dynamics, Ethics and power in intercultural work, Digital media and global dialog.  

Students can take this course without a prerequisite, but preferably students have taken an Intro to Media course before or while taking this course.  

This course introduces and discusses some of the key areas of media sociology. It looks at important figures of the field and their representative work. The point is to get an overview of the complex relationships between media and society. The course pays particular attention to social aspects of journalism and new media.