Graduate Courses

This course provides a comprehensive exploration of the key theories and frameworks used to study communication and media industries, with a particular focus on their role as agents of social, cultural, and political power. Taking a historical approach, students will trace how economic, political, and socio-cultural forces have shaped the development of communication and media industries and their relationship to wider structures of cultural production. In the final third of the course, we will bring these frameworks into conversation with pressing issues of the 21st century – platform capitalism, global media flows, and emergent geopolitical realignments – and highlighting their implications for industry practices and social and cultural life. The main assessment requires students to situate their capstone research project within these critical conversations and to curate a focused body of scholarship that will inform sustained research in later semesters.