COMM 10: Introduction to Communication

Fall 2015 | MWF 3:00 - 3:50, Peterson Hall 108

Weekly Schedule:
1  |  2  |  3  |  4  | 5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10

Prof. Brian Goldfarb
Email: bgoldfarbatSignucsd.edu
Office: MCC 241
Office Hours: Wed 2:00 - 2:45 pm; Fri 12:30 - 1:30; and by appt

TA contacts and office hours:

  • Alex Dubee: alexdubeeatSigngmail.com, Fri 12:30-2:30pm in MCC 122B
  • Olga Lazitzki: olgalazitskayaatSignmail.ucsd.edu
  • Louise Hickman: louhickyatSigngmail.com
  • Poyao Huang: poh001atSignmail.ucsd.edu
  • Ben Medeiros: bmedeiroatSignucsd.edu
  • Courtney Tarrant: ctarrantatSignucsd.edu
  • Jonathan Walton: jwaltonatSignucsd.edu
     

      
Discussion Sections and TAs:
  • 847061 A01 M 10:00-10:50a TA: Olga Rm: WLH 2114
  • 847062 A02 M 12:00-12:50p TA: Jonathan Rm: HSS 2152
  • 847063 A03 M 12:00-12:50p TA: Olga Rm: HSS 2150
  • 847064 A04 M 1:00-1:50p TA: Jonathan Rm: HSS 2152
  • 847065 A05 Tu 8:00-8:50a TA: Ben Rm: HSS 2152
  • 847066 A06 W 8:00-8:50a TA:Ben Rm: CENTR 205
  • 847067 A07 W 9:00-9:50a TA: Alex Rm: CENTR 207
  • 847068 A08 W 10:00-10:50a TA: Alex Rm: HSS 2152
  • 847069 A09 W 11:00-11:50a TA: Louise Rm: HSS 2152
  • 847070 A10 W 12:00-12:50p TA: Louise Rm: HSS 1315
  • 847071 A11 Th 8:00-8:50a TA: Jonathan Rm: CENTR 205
  • 847072 A12 F 10:00-10:50a TA: Poyao Rm: HSS 2152
  • 847073 A13 F 11:00-11:50a TA: Poyao Rm: HSS 2152
  • 847074 A14 F 12:00-12:50p TA: Courtney Rm: HSS 2154
  • 858401 A15 M 12:00-12:50p TA: Alex Rm: HSS 1315
  • 858402 A16 F 10:00-10:50a TA: Courtney Rm: SOLIS 110

Weekly Schedule:
1  |  2  |  3  |  4  | 5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10

Course Description: This course seeks to answer five key questions: What is communication? Where does it occur? How does it occur? Why does it matter? How do we study it? In answering these questions the course provides an introduction to major issues in the field of communication, and also to the main areas of focus in this department.

Required Course texts and media:

  • Readings can be found on TED or directly linked.
  • Videos will be placed on media e-reserve through the library (Password: bg10).

Assignments

  • Three-Part Communication Analysis term project: Guidelines (final version due Fri, Dec. 11, 6 p.m)

Course Policies

1.     Courtesy and consideration for others (also required of the professor and TAs). The position taken in this class is that are no stupid opinions, only uninformed ones. Therefore in disagreeing with others' opinions, it is necessary to provide them with information that might persuade them to think differently instead of simply dismissing their views out of hand. All participants in the class are also required to observe the UCSD Principles of Community which can be found at: http://www.ucsd.edulexplore/about/principles.html

2.     You are expected to read course materials before all lectures, sections and screenings. You are also expected to participate in all section discussions.

3.     Attendance at all lectures, sections, and screenings is required. Unexcused absenses will affect your grade final course grade. Missing two sections meetings will result in a course grade reduction of 2 grade points (your maximum course grade will go from an A+ to A-), missing three section meetings will result in a reduction of 4 grade points ((your maximum course grade will go from an A+ to B), Missing 4 section meetings will result in a reduction of 8 grade points (your maximum course grade will go from an, A+ to C-). If you have a legitimate excuse and must miss a class or section meeting, it is your responsibility to: (a) notify your TA, in advance if possible; and provide a written medical excuse when appropriate (b) obtain notes and information on what you missed from classmates (c) complete the assigned readings for the class. Do not ask the professor or your TA about material that you missed before obtaining notes from a classmate.

4.     All assignments must be turned in on the due date indicated on the syllabus. You will lose a grade point for each day that an assignment is late. This means, for example, that if you get an A on an assignment that is two days late, your grade will drop to a B+

5.     Incompletes will only be given for valid and documented medical or legal reasons (e.g. court appearance). There will be no exceptions to this policy.

6.     In managing this class the professor and teaching assistants will function as a team and will consult regularly with each other on all matters concerning the class. In particular, they will use identical criteria in grading student assignments and will make every effort to ensure that grades assigned are scrupulously fair and reflect the quality of the work concerned. Due to this process of consultation and the use of uniform grading criteria, teaching assistants have complete authority in all actions that they undertake regarding the course, and the professor is unlikely to rescind any of their decisions.

7.     You are required to observe university regulations regarding academic integrity. This means no student shall engage in any activity that involves attempting to receive a grade by means other than honest effort; for example:

  • No student shall knowingly procure, provide, or accept any unauthorized material that contains questions or answers to any examination or assignment to be given at a subsequent time.
  • No student shall complete, in part or in total, any examination or assignment for another person.
  • No student shall knowingly allow any examination or assignment to be completed, in part or in total, for himself or herself by another person.
  • No student shall plagiarize or copy the work of another person and submit it as his or her own work.
  • No student shall employ aids excluded by the instructor in undertaking course work or in completing any exam or assignment.
  • No student shall alter graded class assignments or examinations and then resubmit them for re-grading.
  • No student shall submit substantially the same material in more than one course without prior authorization.
  • No student shall sign attendance sheets for another student, or ask someone else to sign in for her/him. Any plagiarism will result in a grade of F for the assignment or exam, will be reported to the Academic Integrity Office, and may result in an overall course grade of F. To view the UCSD Academic Integrity Statement, visit: https://students.ucsd.edu/academics/academic-integrity/ai-and-you.html

    Maintaining Academic Integrity: Students agree that by taking this course all required papers will be subject to submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin.com for the detection of plagiarism. All submitted papers will be included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers. Use of the Turnitin.com service is subject to the terms of use agreement posted on the Turnitin.com site.

8.     All beepers, cell phones, PDAs, and similar devices must be turned off during class. Laptops may only be used during lecture for note taking and web queries relevant to the lecture, NOT for email, social networking, or other coursework.

Assessment

The final grade will be determined as follows:

  • Section participation 25%
  • Weekly reading responses in TED discussions 25%
  • Three-Part Communication Analysis Term project 50%

Disability Accommodations

The professor is dedicated to making this course as accessible to all students as possible. If you require accommodations or services for disabilities, please communicate with the Professor immediately and register with the Office of Students with Disabilities (OSD) in order to obtain a current Authorization for Accommodation (AFA) letter. This letter is required for eligibility for requests. Receipt of AFAs in advance is necessary for appropriate planning for the provision of reasonable accommodations. OSD Academic Liaisons also need to receive current AFA letters.

For additional information, contact the Office for Students with Disabilities:

Course Schedule:

Notes: Weekly topics and readings listed here are provisional and may be updated after the course begins--please check this site weekly for updates. Readings can be found in the content area on TED or directly linked to the syllabus. You can view videos that are on e-reseves you will need the passcode: bg10 . Be sure to refresh your web browser so that you are not viewing an older cashed version of the syllabus. Every effort will be made to ensure that any changes are kept to a minimum and that any such changes are announced well in advance.

week: 1  |  2  |  3  |  4  | 5  |  6  |  7  |  8  |  9  |  10

 

Week Zero

Sept 25 (prezi)

  • Introduction and overview

Week One

  Sept 28 (prezi)

  • Raymond Williams, 1976, "Communication," and "Media," from Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society

  Sept 30 (prezi)

  • Robin Lakoff 1990 “Language, Politics, and Power” Talking Power: The Politics of Language in Our Lives. New York: Basic Books.
  • Pages 554-564 of Aki Uchida "When 'Difference' Is 'Dominance': A Critique of the "Anti-Power-Based" Cultural Approach to Sex Differences"
  • Watch before class: Judith Butler--Your Behavior Creates Your Gender https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc
    • OPTIONAL READING: Pages 482-491 of Deborah Cameron 2005 "Language, Gender, and Sexuality: Current Issues and New Directions" in Applied Linguistics 26 (4): 482-502

   Oct 2(prezi)

  • George Herbert Mead 1929 “The Self, the I, and the Me” from Mind, Self, and Society
  • Erving Goffman 1959 “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Week Two     

  Oct 5 (prezi)

  • Marcel Danesi 1999 “What Does It Mean? How Humans Represent the World” in Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things: an Introduction to Semiotics. St. Martin’s Press.

  Oct 7 (prezi)

  • Scott Kiesling 2003 “Dude” in American Speech Vol. 79, No. 3.
  Oct 9 (prezi)
  • Geneva Smitherman, 1980 “White English in Blackface or Who Do I Be?” The Black Scholar Vol. 4, No. 8/9, The Black Child (May-June 1973), pp. 32-39
  • Gloria Anzaldua 1987 “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.

Week Three  

  Oct 12 (same prezi as Oct 9)

  Oct 14 (prezi)

  • Stuart Hall 1997 “Chapter 1: The Work of Representation,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices Sage Publications.

    OPTIONAL: Stuart Hall, "Encoding, Decoding" in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed Simon During.

  Oct 16 (prezi)

Week Four

  Assignment Part 1 due in section

  Oct 19 (prezi)

  Oct 21 (same prezi as Oct 19)

  • Johnathan Gray, 2008 "Art With Strings Attached" in Television Entertainment

    OPTIONAL: Julie D’Acci “Television, Representation and Gender” in Robert C. Allen & Annette Hill (eds.) The Television Studies Reader

  Oct 23 (prezi)
  • Raymond Williams 1974 “The Technology and the Society” in Television: Technology and Cultural Form.
  • David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins 2003 "Toward an Aesthetics of Transition," in Rethinking Media Change

 

Week Five

  Oct 26 (same prezi as Oct 23)

  • Elizabeth Eisenstein 1980 “The Emergence of Print Culture in the West” Journal of Communication Winter.
  • Jonathon Sterne. “What if interactivity is the new passivity?” Flow, April 2000, http://flowtv.org/2012/04/the-new-passivity/
  • OPTIONAL: view the Frontline documentary Generation Like
 Oct 28 (prezi)

 Oct 30 (prezi)

  • Walter Lippman 1922 “The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads” Chapter One of Public Opinion  TED also online at http://www.the-wow-collection.com/software/pbpnn.pdf
  • Michael Schudson 2003 “Where News Came From: The History of Journalism” The Sociology of News New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

 

Week Six

  Nov 2 (same prezi as Oct 30)

  • Michael Schudson 2003 “Media Bias (Media Effects Part 2)” The Sociology of News New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
   Nov 4 (prezi)
  • Todd Gitlin 2003 “Introduction” and "Media Routines and Political Crisis" in The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left University of California Press.
  • Jane Rhodes 1993 “The Visibility of Race and Media History” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 20:2
 Nov 6 (prezi)
  • Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer 1993 “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” The Cultural Studies Reader Simon During (ed.) New York: Routledge.

    OPTIONAL: Tony Bennett, 1982 "Theories of the Media, Theories of Society" in Gurevitch et al., Culture, Society, and Media

Week Seven

  Assignment Part 2 due in section

  Nov 9: (same prezi as Nov 6)

  • Selection from Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2006. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, Introduction (pages 1-11)

  Nov 11 Veterans Day Holiday (no class)

  Nov 13 (prezi)
  • Vickie Rutledge Shields 2005 “The Less Space We Take the More Powerful We’ll Be.” A Companion to Media Studies, Angharad Valdivia (ed) John Wiley & Sons.
  • Watch: Jennifer Siebel Newsom, (2011) Miss Representation (streaming on digital media e-reserves http://roger.ucsd.edu/record=b8978419~S3)

 

Week Eight

  Nov 16 (prezi)

  • Laura Mulvey 2003 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Amelia Jones, ed. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London; New York: Routledge.

Optional Viewing

  Nov 18 (prezi)

  • bell hooks 1992 “The “Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” Black Looks: Race and Representation South End Press.
  • Lorna Roth, pages 111-126 of “Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity.” Canadian Journal of Communication, Vol. 34 (1) (TED).

Optional

   Nov 20 (prezi)

  • John Sinclair, Elizabeth Jacka and Stuart Cunningham 1996 “Peripheral Vision” New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision Oxford University Press.

OPTIONAL:

  • View Roots of Third Cinema: https://vimeo.com/12888864
  • Sean McBride & Colleen Roach 1989 “The New International Information Order” International Encyclopedia of Communications Erik Barnouw (ed) Oxford University Press

Week Nine

   Nov 23 (prezi)
  • Stuart Hall 2002 “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power” Susanne Schech & Jane Haggis (eds.) Development and Power: A Cultural Studies Reader Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

     

    OPTIONAL:

    • Binyavanga Wainaina “How to Write About Africa” Granta 92: The View from Africa January 2006. http://www.granta.com/Archive/92/How-to-Write-about-Africa/Page-1
    • Horace Miner 1956 “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema” American Anthropologist 58:3, June.
    • Ella Shohat & Robert Stam, 1994. “Stereotype, Realism, and the Struggle over Representation” Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media London: Routledge.
    • Bill Nichols, 1991. “The Ethnographer’s Tale” Visual Anthropology Review 7 (2) Fall.

   Nov 25 (prezi)

 Nov 27 NO CLASS Thanksgiving Holiday

Week Ten

  Assignment Part 3 due in section

  Nov 30 (prezi)

  • Arjun Appadurai 1996 “Disjuncture & Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Pages. Available as e-book through library’s online catalog.

  Dec 2 (prezi)

  • Tim Cresswell 2006 “The Production of Mobilities at Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam” On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World New York: Routledge.

Optional:

  • Akosua Darkwah 2002 “Trading Goes Global: Market Women in an Era of Globalization” in Asian Women Vol. 15.

   Dec 4 (prezi)

  • Merlyna Lim 2012 "Clicks, Cabs, and Coffee Houses: Social Media and Oppositional Movements in Egypt, 2004 – 2011" Journal of Communication 62

Finals Week:

Final/Revised Version of Extended Project Due Fri, Dec. 11, 6 p.m.

 

 

Three-Part Communication Analysis project:
      The purpose of this assignment is to introduce you to scholarly frameworks and methods for examining dimensions of communication. The project is broken down in to three sections aimed at developing and honing your ability to engage in detailed observation and description; formulate meaningful questions and engage analytic frameworks; and consider potential modes of further investigation. Through your work on the project you will demonstrate your grasp of key concepts and terminology that we will be exploring throughout this course.

     You will begin by selecting a specific example of a form or mode of communication and to consider. For the first component you will be developing a detailed analytic description of your example that breaks it down into elements that make up the meanings conveyed. For the second component you will engage with some of the theoretical frameworks discussed in class readings to frame analytic questions and pursue consideration of how your example fits into wider concerns, tendencies or contexts. Finally, in the third component you will consider ways that one could study a form of communication in a more extended manner. An important part of this consideration is researching related scholarship or studies that relate to your proposed study (and cite at least 2- 3 academic sources). For part three you can work with the form of communication that you took up in parts one and two, or select another. Together the three parts of this project serve as an exercise in considering the key questions of this course:

 

  • What is communication?
  • Where does it occur?
  • How does it occur?
  • Why does it matter?
  • How do we study it?

       You will be graded on the effort, creativity, thoughtfulness and the overall the quality of your work—not whether your arguments are "correct."

 Project Guidelines

 

 

Keywords Document (Not a study guide!)