Communicating effectively to a public audience, with an emphasis on speech. Course covers development of arguments, consideration of audience and situation, organization of material, and multimodal presentation including effective use of visual technologies with oral communication.
Project based course focused on design of civic media. Provides community service learning opportunities for students interested in working with local organizations to address communication challenges. Considers the reciprocal relationship between media and public culture; examines participatory media technologies and practices; covers stages of project ideation, design, implementation, testing and evaluation.
This course considers how race (a social construct with real-world implications) affects intrapersonal, interpersonal, and public communication. Communicating Race combines the tools of self-reflection, rhetorical listening, and the analysis of public discourse to answer complex questions, such as -- How do people come to understand their own racialized identities? How do people talk about race in ways that both maintain and contest power relations? How do conversations about race challenge and also perpetuate systemic inequalities? Through the process of collaboratively pursuing answers to guiding questions such as these, students are prompted to more fully recognize their own intersectional positionality in relation to institutionalized power. Communicating Race engages with students' lived experiences, while also exploring a range of theoretical concepts including implicit bias, stereotype threat, white fragility, micro-aggressions, allyship, speaking for others, systemic racism, colorblind racism, and anti-racism By learning to convey their increasingly nuanced understanding of race through a variety of media, futhermore, students in this course will gain valuable experience communicating about complex topics and enacting how communication can be meaningfully used toward antiracist ends.
Introduction to concepts of rhetoric, communication, and media studies with emphases on the diverse humanistic and social scientific approaches to these interdisciplinary fields. This course focuses on the centrality of communication across a wide variety of contexts as well as the relevance of communication and media in society. Processes of communication studied include but are not limited to interpersonal and intercultural relations, auto/ethnography, institutional life, arts-based research, and the world of mediated culture and politics.
A semester-long study of topics in Civic Communication and Media. Topics and emphases will vary according to the instructor. This course may be repeated for credit with different topics. See the New and Topics Courses page on the Registrar's webpage for descriptions and applicability to graduation requirements.
The course investigates methods of arguing about ethics. First, students will be introduced to the general question of whether matters of right and wrong are susceptible to argument. are questions of right and wrong merely personal choices or do argumentative methods exist to distinguish right from wrong? Second, students will be introduced to various methods of arguing about ethical matters. Finally, these methods or argument will be applied to several examples of ethical questions prevalent in civic society, especially those including life and death, personal liberty, personal responsibility, and ethical rhetoric. The course also requires that students make presentations about ethical matters.
The primary aim of this course is to offer students the opportunity to creatively apply the core principles of rhetoric to a persuasive campaign they develop from start to finish. Students will learn about key rhetorical variables such as audience and context as well as major rhetorical tools ranging from argument to framing. In addition, the role of visual elements in persuasion will be explored. Each student will produce a complete campaign plan that will be presented in class. Student projects can focus on politics, corporate advocacy, and non-profit organization. Opportunities for working with organizations in the Salem community are available.
Project based course focused on design of civic media. Provides community service learning opportunities for students interested in working with local organizations to address communication challenges. Considers the reciprocal relationship between media and public culture; examines participatory media technologies and practices; covers stages of project ideation, design, implementation, testing and evaluation.
A writing-centered course focusing on criteria for and approaches to the analysis of public discourse. Critical forms such as the analysis of situation, arguments, structure, style, power and media will be explored through case studies. Provides training in methods of analysis necessary for advanced coursework, including forms and rhetorical criticism..
Examines uses of media to foster civic engagement. Through analysis of case studies students consider concepts such as participatory culture, citizen journalism, transmedia activism, and civic, radical and tactical media. We also develop understanding of civic media across platforms (oral, print, broadcast, digital), contexts (local to global, past to present), and use.
This course engages the topic of grief from personal, cultural, and scholarly perspectives. By reflecting upon personal experiences with grief, facilitating dialogues about grief within the course, and analyzing contemporary public discourse about bereavement, students gain vocabulary, skills, and insight to communicate effectively toward healing and transformation. This course centers the theoretical study and practical application of listening, storytelling, and dialogue, core competencies for students interested in the caring professions.
This course is an introduction to the study of gender and media cultures, with a focus on the Asian cultural context. It provides an introduction to historical, theoretical, and methodological approaches involved in such study. It aims at encouraging comparative cultural studies through analysis and comparisons of gender in the Asian culture with gender in non-Asian cultures. No prior experience required.
Examines the dynamic media environment, with a focus on digital technologies. Students will investigate the relationship between media, technology, and society, and develop skills for effective, ethical engagement with contemporary media.
This course addresses the knowledge and skills of media production based on the content of Asia, especially East Asian, history, society, and people. The course integrates media production and critical thinking to adapt to a diverse body of students including both the experienced and less experienced students in Asian, Civic Communication and Media, and Cinema Studies.
A semester-long study of topics in Civic Communication and Media. Topics and emphases will vary according to the instructor. This course may be repeated for credit with different topics. See the New and Topics Courses page on the Registrar's webpage for descriptions and applicability to graduation requirements.
This course offers an introduction to the history, theory, economy, technology, production, consumption, and regulation of visual culture and creative industry in modern Asian society. We live in a visual world. Asian visual culture producers have contributed to the diversity of this world. From Miyazaki's animations, Hong Kong's martial arts movies, Korean popular media, Chinese avant-garde artists' political voices to ordinary social media users, visual productions enrich intellectual and popular cultural landscape in Asia. Visual culture is a necessary part of gaining a better understanding of a specific culture and the relationship between various cultures in a globalized world. This course aims at providing students a broad view on Asian visual culture, and an in-depth investigation of visual culture as a necessary component of, and a great impact on Asian society. The course also aims at encouraging the comparative studies of politics and esthetics of visual culture in different cultural contexts, and helps students become critical viewer of visual culture and mindful users of media.
This course examines Asian social media as a form of digital culture and globalization. With its focus on contemporary forms of Asian social media, students will analyze, evaluate, and critique social media as it is manifest across different cultural contexts, particularly with respect both to institutional power and rhetoric and to individual agency and expression. Students will be challenged to reflect on social media as an emergent, hegemonic form of generating and participating in culture, to understand its risks and benefits to society, as well as to develop their own purposeful ethic regarding social media use and participation.
Intergenerational Communication is interactions between individuals from different age cohorts or age groups. Factors including age stereotypes, societal expectations, and individual backgrounds and habits can influence intergenerational communication in diverse cultural contexts. This course uses storytelling to connect students with older adults in Salem and area communities and within students' families and networks. The course is community-engaged learning and teaching. The course engages students in communicating with older adults based on mutual understanding, respect, support, and growth. Students and older adults will coauthor and co-create life stories through attentive conversations, engaged listening, writing, and creativity. With participants' permission, the class will contribute the life stories to a digital archive, publishing the stories in a chosen media genre, such as short stories, illustrations, and audio narratives, in digital storytelling.
This course approaches rhetorical theory through the concept of a pluriverse that informs contemporary postcolonial and decolonial rhetorical theories. By centering scholars, organizers, activists, and artists whose work is informed by lived experiences as well as by postmodern, postcolonial, decolonial, queer, critical, feminist, and disability studies, this course considers how broader intellectual and cultural movements are shaping the future of rhetorical studies. Moreover, this course equips students to connect the study of rhetoric to ethical ways of thinking and being in the world.
This course explores what structural conditions, power dynamics, and communicative processes are necessary to build positive peace-peace marked not just by the absence of war and violence, but the peace that exists among people who respect the fullness of one another's humanity and among societies wherein that respect is conveyed through systems, policies, power dynamics, and mediated representations. In particular, this course studies ways in which positive peace is constituted communicatively as an ongoing process of recognition, reconciliation, and community building. Students will be equipped to transform intrapersonal, interpersonal, and societal conflicts more aptly through the development of a deeper understanding of the words and symbols that define communities and conflicts. This course then empowers students to become more effective community organizers, activists, and advocates for justice.
This course introduces students to autoethnography--a qualitative research method that incorporates lived experience, personal narrative, and cultural analysis. It features a diverse range of personal narratives that engage the intersectional nature of identity while interrogating social injustice and reimagining transformative ways of being together. Students will learn to examine the cultural meanings of their own lived experiences, reflecting upon the intersectional nature of their identity, through the latest research regarding autoethnographic approaches. Further, students will communicate their enriched understandings through narrative analysis, peer review, and practice with various forms of mediated self-expression.
This course examines rhetorical practices through which advocates of equality cultivated political agency among disenfranchised Americans, developed a powerful movement for social change, and challenged norms that excluded women from the public sphere.
This course examines rhetorical practices through which Americans since 1920 have developed and challenged feminist politics, redefined expectations for gender performance and public leadership, and pursued the promise of liberty and justice for all in the United States.
CCM 344 approaches Asian Americans and their relationship lo the media in a historical and contemporary context. It focuses on the role that mass- and independent media play in domestic and transnational cultural exchange and appropriation, Asian/Asian-American representation, Orientalism, race and sexuality, and political activism. The course will review traditional media outlets such as film, theatre, and television; new media outlets such as YouTube and biogs; and sites for alternative cultural production and expression such as stand-up comedy halls and comics. Analysis will be grounded in theories and methodologies of Rhetoric, Communication Studies, Media Studies, and Asian American Studies and will enrich student understanding of the history of Asian Americans, their historical imaging and imagination of Asian Americans, and Asian American class, sexuality, and culture more generally.
This course recognizes how elements of popular culture inform and reflect our attitudes, behavior, and society and interrogates how popular culture asserts values and ideology through traditional and emergent media forms (television, radio, social media, video games, etc.). Readings will introduce students to the historical conceptions of popular culture and attend to its evolving relationship to media, technology, and society. By engaging with diverse texts, students will examine popular culture's intersection with various topics such as fandom, citizenship and belonging, and representation. This course attempts to explicate popular culture's role in politics and society and to provide critical skills of interpretation and analysis by encouraging students to reflect upon, praise, problematize, and respond to the ever-present influence of popular culture on the contours of everyday life.
Many formulations of rhetoric, citizenship and democracy assume the existence of the public and theorize the ideal public sphere. In this course, we will examine scholarship about the public, investigate how civic engagement is shaped by this powerful term, and consider how conceptions of the public sphere can both facilitate deliberative democracy and reinforce inequalities.
The internet and related technologies have reshaped how people communicate, share knowledge, and engage civic life. This course examines the relationship between technology and persuasion, with a focus on digital communication. Students will consider the implications of persuasive technology in society, education, and in their own lives.
Investigates relationships between social movements and the media, with particular attention to communication practices that connect, radicalize and empower marginalized community members. Course participants will explore frameworks, methods and concepts--such as pre-inception rhetoric, counterpublicity, movement structure and cycles, tactical media, and oscillation--for understanding networked social movements, past and present.
This course is offered to sophomores, juniors and seniors majoring in Civic Communication and Media. The instructor will work with students to help acquire internships in the Salem/Portland area and oversee the internship as it progresses throughout the semester. A variety of internship placements will be pursued including those in the non-profit, political and corporate sectors. Internships will focus on communication activities such as audience research, message development and outreach tactics. Students will be asked to complete short assignments throughout the internship, as well as turn in a final synopsis paper. Interested students should contact the instructor the semester prior to their internship in order to secure a worthwhile position.
This course is offered to sophomores, juniors and seniors majoring in Civic Communication and Media. The instructor will work with students to help acquire internships in the Salem/Portland area and oversee the internship as it progresses throughout the semester. A variety of internship placements will be pursued including those in the non-profit, political and corporate sectors. Internships will focus on communication activities such as audience research, message development and outreach tactics. Students will be asked to complete short assignments throughout the internship, as well as turn in a final synopsis paper. Interested students should contact the instructor the semester prior to their internship in order to secure a worthwhile position.
A semester-long study of topics in Civic Communication and Media. Topics and emphases will vary according to the instructor. This course may be repeated for credit with different topics. See the New and Topics Courses page on the Registrar's webpage for descriptions and applicability to graduation requirements.
A semester-long study of topics in Civic Communication and Media. Topics and emphases will vary according to the instructor. This course may be repeated for credit with different topics. See the New and Topics Courses page on the Registrar's webpage for descriptions and applicability to graduation requirements.
A semester-long study of topics in Civic Communication and Media. Topics and emphases will vary according to the instructor. This course may be repeated for credit with different topics and applicability to graduation requirements.
Individual program in which a student can study a topic not normally available in the department curriculum. A student could conduct critical or experimental research in the field or pursue a detailed program of study in specific areas of interest. Each independent study plan must have the approval of the Civic Communication and Media faculty.
Students will complete and present a major project that contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations regarding communication and media practices that foster civic engagement. Completion of the seminar, the career roadmap, and the comprehensive examination, will constitute the Senior Year Experience.
Willamette University