Communication

This course is designed for students wishing to clarify and/or advance their career goals through a 6-week internship. It provides a structured and guided learning environment to help students make the most of their internship experience in Korea. Course components facilitate students' professional development, focusing on the transition from the role of a student to the role of a working professional. 

Media and popular culture have long played a key role in shaping and reflecting gendered power relations as well as processes of identification. This course provides an introduction to the representations and constructions of gender in contemporary culture and media. It develops students' understanding of gender, media, and culture in a period of time of rapid globalization and digitization. Through this course, students acquire theoretical and methodological tools to study gender in the media, and across a range of contemporary cultural phenomena. They apply a critical lens to the representations of gender in popular cultural media, focusing on the production, circulation, and reception of media representations of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality. The course also explores the ways in which questions of gender and sexuality might shape and inform identities. It adopts an intersectional approach and analyzes the way gender intersects with race, class, and sexuality.

This course provides a study of the development of science and technology and how it has affected the progress of human civilization and cultural heritage. The course covers a variety of complex humanities and technology issues that are facing society today, including information and communication, ecological and environmental protection, biomedical technology, music, art, astrophysics, and more.

The course introduces fundamentals of study in communications and new media, explores ways in which people create and use the variety of emerging networked, mobile, and social media channels to communicate meaning in a globalized world. It explores organizational and societal contexts in such areas as games, health, politics, business, public relations, design and activism, with attention paid to creating applications with social impact. Students explore phenomena such as relationships and social life in cyberspace, activism for social change, performance art, deviant behavior online, communication and community, new business paradigms and economic models of organizing and issues in human computer interaction.

This course introduces theoretical, analytical, and critical-reflexive approaches to cultural and creative industries (CCI) in an international perspective, emphasizing the field’s global implications on cultural, commercial, and media-specific transformations. The course covers various manifestations of CCIs from across the world, how they are structured and function within particular (trans)national contexts, and the production and circulation of cultural artifacts at varying geographic scales. The course examines the characteristics and components of several ‘models’ of CCI practices and interrogates topical issues in CCI research, such as structural challenges in the international division of cultural labor, and national and transnational CCI strategies. This course includes an excursion to a (European) metropolis with visits to relevant CCI organizations as well as related academic and research institutions to gain insights on how CCI practice and research are conducted in a different cultural and socio-political setting.

This course is part of the Laurea Magistrale degree program and is intended for advanced level students. Enrollment is by permission of the instructor. There are two versions of this course; this course, UCEAP Course Number 180A and Bologna course number 81779, is associated with the LM in Language, Society, and Communication degree program. The other version, UCEAP Course Number 180B and Bologna course number 75074, is associated with the LM in Sociology and Social Work degree program.
By the end of this course, students are able to distinguish and analyze the different notions of globalization, and how information technologies affect everyday life, markets, and the process of consumption. In particular, the student is able to: develop an understanding of globalization through a sociological lens; understand the culture of the Internet and the relationship between globalization and web society; analyze the impact on individual behaviors and society at large within Social Networks & Online Communities through the mainstreaming of private information posted to the public sphere; frame the emergence of a new rhetoric of democratization and participation in the web society; understand the changing relationship between producers, consumers, and prosumers in the web society; recognize consequences and effects of the Digital Divide nationally and worldwide.

This course is organized around four interconnected thematic modules that explore the tensions, contradictions, and transformative potential of the digital age within a globalized context. Rather than merely offering a chronological or technical overview, the course engages students in a critical reflection on how digital technologies are reshaping contemporary society—bringing new opportunities for participation and innovation, but also exacerbating inequalities, eroding privacy, and consolidating new forms of control.

Module 1 – Globalization: Histories, Theories, and Social Transformations

Module 2 – Digital Society and Media: Platformization and the Reconfiguration of Social Life

Module 3 – Production, Consumption, and Prosumption in the Digital Economy

Module 4 – Digital Divides and Global Inequalities

This course serves as an introduction to the field of environmental communication: What does it entail, what should it achieve, who are the intended recipients, and what is the intended outcome? The course studies some theoretical texts, addressing “the two cultures,” “framing,” and “technocratic discourse.” The course then analyzes political speeches about environmental policy and a manifesto. Finally, the course looks at the genesis of scientific and literary nature writing and studies extracts from classics such as Henry David Thoreau’s WALDEN or Rachel Carson’s SILENT SPRING as well as more recent texts by British and American authors. The course analyzes how these different texts operate, what they aim to accomplish and whether they succeed.

This course contextualizes digital data to understand its benefits and limitations, particularly with generalizability. Students learn how inequality, institutions, and ideology may influence the transformation of the media, as well as Big Data (and small). The inequality segment examines class, gender, and race intersectionalities in digital data production and impact, such as online harassment. Corporate and civic institutions also influence digital data, so the course unpacks institutional effects, from Facebook to the State. Finally, political ideology shapes how data is created and seen, so political campaigns and movements are analyzed to understand how they produce and distribute digital data. The course interrogates the broader role of technology in society and ties current cases with long-standing sociological debates, methods, and theories.