COMM 050 / EDUC 050: Communication & Culture in Main South

This first year seminar covers the same material as the introductory course in the Communication and Culture major, known as COMM 101. The course is thus a foundation for the study of communication as a cultural process. We will read many of the foundational theorists in the field and examine a wide range of theories and models of communication. The goal is to understand how “meaning making” and communication of meaning occurs — across a wide range of situations. Communication spans a range of communicative media and forms — art, music, television, film, everyday language, journalistic outlets, literary expressions of culture, advertising, interpersonal interaction, and the Internet. We will explore a wide variety of perspectives: psychological, anthropological, sociological, historical, sociolinguistic, technological, aesthetic, cinematic, semiotic, and scientific points of view and methodologies. This class, which concentrates on the “discourse” stream of the major, will place a particular emphasis on how language (talk and text) and culture work to create access, influence, and power in the world.

The course is organized around a set of motivating questions. How is it that in a democracy, the few can dominate the many? This is a question we will ask at the outset and return to throughout the semester, as we explore different theorists’ attempts to grapple with the problem of how language, power, and ideology relate. Another overarching question is how communication shapes us as individuals, members of cultural groups, and as a society? Both of these questions will be particularly interesting because we are in the midst of a presidential election, and we will explore communication and culture issues as they play out in the ’08 presidential election. We will also explore the nitty-gritty details of language, messages, discourse, and communication (both interpersonal and on a mass scale). We will ask how language, communication, codes, and representation are intertwined. In this segment of the class, will examine the model of a sender who encodes a message and sends it through a channel to a receiver who decodes it. What does this model buy us? What does it leave out? We will also ask how language, culture, and thought are related. Do visual, musical, gestural, (perhaps even culinary) messages function like language? We will also ask how communicative styles links up with identity? Are there differences in the ways men and women communicate and if so, what causes these differences? Finally, we will put all of the tools we have been working with together to examine the concept of the individual, ideology, and “the other” (i.e. subjectivity, identity, and power) in communication.

In addition to our regular class meetings, this course includes an important “fieldwork” component. We will meet every week (for 3 hours) with a group of high school students at a neighboring public school (just a few blocks from Clark). Together, we will produce street art, video documentaries, and poetry, while considering issues of voice and representation for residents of Main South, the neighborhood that Clark is located in. Through this fieldwork, we will explore the many abstract questions of communication and culture by participating in some very down-to-earth specifics of “making” messages and creating content for a website http://www.MainSouthSpeaks.com and at the same time working to generate material for a public art exhibit and poetry slam (in December). We will thus be working with a group of high school students in the Main South neighborhood, exploring with them the ways that communication, images, and digital technologies allow us to have a “voice” in society and in our neighborhood. We will thus be exploring abstract academic texts in our seminar and real world issues of communication and culture in our fieldwork. In our collaboration with these students, what communication and culture issues will we have to address in getting to know them and in producing powerful “texts” with them? How does communication and culture influence education, identity, and one’s options in life? How does communication and culture influence how we see and are seen by each other? How do the texts we are reading and discussing in class relate to our work with these students and the messages we produce together?