Communication

This course provides an introduction to theories of strategic and practical communication and organizational analysis in preparation of communication campaigns and other limited communication efforts with strategic purposes. Topics include crisis communication, organizational communication, communication and change, stakeholders, content strategies, social media, online communication, media and media choice, cross-media, transmedia, storytelling and strategic writing, visual communication, and branding. Throughout the course, students work with self-selected cases and concrete analyses of communication efforts and campaigns.

This course examines Singapore’s media law and policy with socio-legal and socioeconomic analysis, which is essential for good media practice. Students learn about legislation that consolidates the media legal framework in traditional areas such as broadcasting, print, advertising, film and art, etc.; as well as the new areas of concern such as social media, platform media, digital minorities, etc. Students will develop an understanding of the historical, cultural and particular contexts in the implementation and function of media law and policy by studying and contrasting different approaches in other nation-states.

This course focuses on intersections between Holocaust memory and cinema in the digital age. It discusses films from various countries and decades in relation to present challenges of commemorating the Holocaust in the 21st century and various concepts of cultural and collective memory. The course provides interdisciplinary knowledge in cinema studies, media studies, and memory studies. Students analyze visual culture in relation to social and historical discourses and situate current cinema in context of global memory cultures and digital technologies as well as within the film historical context. Students examine topics including the history of Holocaust cinema and other media representation of the Holocaust, contemporary discourses on Holocaust memory, analyzing films and other visual and digital medias and applying knowledge of narrative and stylistic conventions in order to explore media of memory as social and historiographical mediators in the global age, and using and applying theoretical and empirical concepts of Holocaust memory (including memory conflicts) on popular visual and digital culture.

The course introduces approaches and topics rooted in linguistics such as intercultural pragmatics (speech acts and linguistic politeness), sociolinguistics, intercultural semantics (cultural keywords and scripts), non-verbal communication, gender differences, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to understanding how identities and values are reflected and constructed through language and communication. It takes as a point of departure the idea that language is both a resource that enables communication and collaboration within a community, but can also act as a boundary between insiders and outsiders. In this context, paradigms to the study of culture, like the distinction between cultures as rooted in essences or functions and thus more objectivist or constructivist scientific worldview are also introduced and related to questions of the study of intercultural communication.

The course provides a broad overview of how citizens, politicians, and the media interact across Western democracies during both electoral and governing periods. While the course covers key aspects of political communication in the United Kingdom, the focus is mostly on the differences that exist in media-politics relationships across the Western world.

This course introduces common visual knowledge to provide a minimum of visual media literacy. Topics: the basic situation of visual communication development; basic theory and knowledge of visual communication; and entry-level visual communication practice skills.