Advanced Issues in Communication Studies

A capstone seminar that asks you to treat communication not as a settled discipline but as a moving target — algorithms, platforms, digital populism, and TikTok activism all reshape what "the audience" or "the message" even means, and the course gives you the research vocabulary to study that shift rigorously. You'll spend the semester reading contemporary media scholarship, working through methods exercises, sitting two homeworks and a midterm, and developing an original term project that you pitch to the class near the end. Coming at the tail of the COMD curriculum, it's where the theory and production courses you've taken converge: less about learning new topics than about learning to ask researchable questions of the media environment you're about to graduate into.