Communication and Culture Major

The Communication and Culture major combines humanistic and social science approaches to the study of all aspects of human and mediated communication, including:

  • the strategic application and implications of communication theories, tools, and techniques
  • the institutions and industries engaged in the production and distribution of mediated content
  • the receivers and their reciprocal relationship with such messages
  • the media texts in their social, political, local and global cultural contexts

In our increasingly interconnected world, it is clear that the right words and images strategically chosen can be powerful instruments to help us move towards a more ethical world with greater social justice. The Communication and Culture major prepares the media professionals of tomorrow to use the power of mediated communication with responsibility, by training them to be critical consumers and ethical producers of mediated communication in all areas of their lives: personal, professional and civic.

The undergraduate program has three areas of concentration that students will explore:

Students take four classes in a primary concentration, and two each in a secondary concentration.

To declare a major in Communication and Culture, students must have earned a minimum of a cumulative 2.5 GPA and 30 earned credits. 

View Major Requirements View Minor Requirements
View Course Bulletin

  • Upon graduation from the Communication and Culture major, students will have achieved the following curricular goals:

    1. Develop a critically-informed understanding of media as a set of industries, institutions, objects, and infrastructures; sites of political, economic, and cultural contestation; and fields of creative production.

    2. Understand how media–as historically situated technologies, production practices, and consumption practices–define cultural notions of pastness and futurity.

    3. Recognize and evaluate the ethical, regulatory, and legal frameworks within which media and communication systems operate, as well as the asymmetrical power relations embedded within these frameworks.

    4. Assess the affordances of communication and media practices for addressing or perpetuating social inequities, and for promoting positive social change.

    5. Articulate the varied roles that media and communication practices play in the shaping of global identities, cultures, and beliefs.

    6. Engage in communication analysis and research, including humanistic and social scientific inquiry.
    • COMC 3340/ COMM 3103: Freedom of Expression
    • COMC 3370/ COMM 3476: Ethical Issues and the Media
    • COMC 3330/ COMM 3110: Peace, Justice and the Media 
    • COMC 3350/ COMM 3112: Media Law
    • COMC 3380/ COMM 3106: International Communication
    • DTEM 4440: Privacy and Surveillance
    • DTEM 4480/ COMM 4005: Digital Media and Public Responsibility
    • FITV 4570/ COMM 4001: Films of Moral Struggle