MY CURRENT COURSES
Food & Communication, COMM 4220
Intensive, online summer course exploring how people communicate about food & through food. We look at how food, eating, and food labor are interconnected with personal identity, social relationships, and cultural meaning. We look at the role that social and other media, family, pop culture, gender, class, foodie culture, and a host of other influences play in how we understand food, nutrition, health, the body, and our selves.
Family Communication, COMM 4210
We examine the family (broadly construed) as a communication system. We explore the multiple functions of interaction in families to illuminate the complexity of family communication and how it works in ways that may have gone unnoticed before. We explore the relationships between family life and social life, language and meaning, public and private, and family rules and values.
Speaking for Social Change, COMM 3346
Advanced-level training in various forms of public address channeled into civic engagement efforts. Our work challenges issues of privilege, power and difference. We discuss and practice how to respond to social issues of exclusion and inequity in mindful, professional, and principled ways. Assignments and grades come from speech planning, speech analysis, and speech presentation.
Qualitative Research Methods, COMM 5200
Students explore of a variety of qualitative research methods in Communication, practice them in a semester-long research project, and become versed in discussing critical issues in conducting research. This course assumes that writing itself is a research method and as such emphasizes writing, and thinking hard about writing, to be a primary focus for the researcher. This course encourages attention to issues of power, privilege, and difference, and encourages creative or artistic modes of research representation.
Communication Theory, COMM 5330
Students practice the application of various theories that inform the communication and performance disciplines through analyses of texts, cultural practices, experiences, and stories or narratives. We consider how each theory could be used to help answer research questions in the student's area of interest. Students become adept at discussing theory and its grounding in human assumption and worldview, and articulating what it is we are doing as researchers and thinkers when we study, create, and apply theory.