Communication

This course examines the close connections of fashion and politics in a globalized world. It covers how fashion circulates as a robust geopolitical, commercial, and personal element of global, national, and local cultures.

This course examines typical communication development in English across the lifespan and in cultures relevant to the Australian context. It covers the sequence of normal communication development from prelinguistic communication development through to adult language; the significance of context and function in the development of language; the universality of communication development, and the effect of gender in communication development. 

This course focuses on the structure and functioning of audiovisual texts. It offers a detailed study of the different elements of film grammar (mise-en-scène, framing, editing, sound) and analyzes a wide range of content from different historical periods. This course discusses topics such as space, time, verisimilitude, and gaze. It also explores narrative models, film genre, and feminist criticism applied to film analysis.

This course begins by prompting students to reflect on what happiness means to them. What is happiness? What is it for? Does it matter? How can we measure it? The course explores a variety of ‘theories’ of happiness, asking students to think about what happiness means to them in their lives and communities. Through discussions, research, and reflection students are exposed to different interpretations and understandings of happiness. 

This course assesses the manner in which Spanish newspapers present the nation's political, cultural, and social spheres. It examines how national and regional identities have been reinforced through the press, and explores the relationship between freedom of speech, press, and history. The course also studies the significance of these relationships in connection with current events as these surface in local, national, and international affairs.

This course enables students to work strategically with sustainability and environmental communication in organizations. It introduces key theoretical approaches of special relevance to the topics of environment and sustainability and applies these in order to critically analyze and assess how organizations use communication both to develop a sense of self in relation to the topic of sustainability and to engage in the public space. Students learn to understand, explain, and use discourses as a strategic and tactical resource in order to establish and put credible messages into perspective which may affect the views and opinions of various target groups in relation to the important themes related to sustainability and the environment. The course addresses current practical issues by focusing on the approaches to sustainability and environmental communication that companies, NGOs, mass media, and political organizations use when they enter into dialogue with different stakeholders, including customers, government agencies and institutions, and the general public.

This course is a study of the aesthetics and social aspects of the business of advertising, with particular focus paid to television ads. Topics of study include: the general characteristics of advertising; advertising in the digital environment; the characteristics of television advertising, including number of channels, audience fragmentation, and saturation; the advertising agency as a company; the most awarded campaigns; and the future of advertising.

This course provides an analysis of the power of social media, such as Facebook, twitter, blogs, mashups, wikis, etc. It examines how social media can facilitate creativity and collective intelligence, through enhanced information sharing and online collaboration among netizens; ultimately building the social pool of knowledge. It also examines the downside of this participatory culture. With the growth of web sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, blogs, and open source development communities, the web is no longer just about delivery of information. It is about participation and collaboration. This course examines the impact of the open and peer-to-peer collaborations that are the underpinning Web 2.0 on which most of us are spending more time than ever before. In addition to learning Web 2.0 enabling technologies, students examine the social and philosophical implications of this phenomenon. Assessment: Assignments (15%), project presentation (8%), project reports (7%), midterm (25%), final exam (45%).