Communication

For Fall/Autumn 2023, students in this course will participate in the Virtual Business Professional Project (https://www.marshall.usc.edu/departments/business-communication/vbp-project) which will be coordinated by the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California (USC). Students will be assigned to a team and will collaborate with students from other universities on a project about major global companies. 

From the VBP Project website: 
The VBP Project is a global student collaboration project created and managed by business communication faculty at the Marshall School of Business at USC. The goal of the VBP Project is to help students develop skills necessary to succeed in a fast-paced global business environment that is increasingly relying on social platforms and virtual collaboration for their internal and external communication.  Every semester, 500 to 700 students participate in VBP. These students collectively represent over 50 countries around the world and study at 17 universities in 10 different countries.
 

This course examines the parts of speech and meanings presented in literature and mass media. Weekly topics include: the factors and functions of semiotics, poetry and rhetoric; verbal versification; meaning, reference, context, situation, and theme; verbal and visual morphology; types of speech and strategy; narration and the effects of narration; manipulations in media, meaning, and speech; figures of speech.

This course explores communication across cultures and languages. It examines concepts of culture, focusing on non-essentialist perspectives and its role in the construction of (self) identity and others' identities. Focusing on both face-to-face and non-face-to-face, including digital communication, the course explores how people with different cultural backgrounds communicate and the issues that are likely to arise in cross-cultural communication.

This course addresses how history has been punctuated by civil resistance and disobedience movements whose characteristics, combats, tools, and arms get more sophisticated, shared, and reinvented as time moves forward. It identifies the news as a marker of movements of citizen protest, social opposition, demonstrations (such as Climate), and other acts of disobedience. From Thoreau to Gandhi, from Martin Luther King to the Extinction Rebellion movement, from Radio London (1940-1944) to the fight for the Larzac or the ZAD of Notre-Dames-des-Landes, this course explores how specific movements are born and fed and how media plays a role in the development or the resonance of these actions, from yesterday's press to modern platforms. The course includes analysis, readings, and deconstruction of what is called “civil disobedience and resistance,” in both democracies and authoritarian countries, from yesterday to today.