Classes
Below, you can find a listing of all the classes I have taught, along with short descriptions of the class, some sample images and when I taught them. Classes are listed in order of recency. 300 classes are undergraduate lectures, 400s are undergraduate seminars, and 500s are graduate diploma cross-listed seminars. Syllabi are available on request.
Communication, Culture and Popular Art (COMS 462-532) - Winter 2024, Winter 2025
This course offers an advanced examination of popular culture. With attention to such phenomena as hit films and television shows, awards, stars, fans and pop art, this course focuses on the formation of hierarchies of value in cultural forms. This course examines how some cultural products come to be celebrated while others are dismissed. It also considers social and political consequences of divisions of high and low culture.
More specifically, it will consider the successive waves of media development, and its impact on previous hierarchies of value, such as the impact on film and music, by the rising cultural cachet of television, games, wrestling and fashion. Likewise, students can expect to learn about formations of taste, political economies of popular media distribution and the democratization of cultural critique.
Games, Media and Culture (COMS 333) - Winter 2021, Winter 2024
This course is dedicated to the study of games (digital and analog), their interplay with other forms of media, and their impact on contemporary culture. Students will explore methods and theories developed for the study of games from the perspective of academic scholars and as players, as well as critical accounts of technological developments necessary for game production, the evolution of games industries and the evolution of game (sub)cultures from the 1970s to today.
This course offers students the opportunity to play, discuss, experiment with, and critique games proper and media forms that are peripheral to games. Diving into the history of games, how they’ve been theoretically and critically understood, as well as their vernacular use, students are encouraged to think through games, not only as leisurely, but also as the product cultural industries, art and the sites of community.
Television Studies (COMS 426-545) - Fall 2023
This course introduces key issues, concepts, and approaches to the study of television, in its diverse forms and industrial arrangements. Television is examined as a format of visual media, as an industry continuously in development, and as a cultural object situated in between makers and audiences. This class seeks to answer a set of questions about television: what it is, what it does and how it shapes the world around us and our relationship to it. This entails studying television in a global context (as well as a domestic one) and attending to broad infrastructural shifts from linear to on-demand digital distribution brought on by the meteoric rise of streaming platforms.
Focused on a historical approach to television development, this class opens with discussions of TV technology in the early 20th century, before moving on to more contemporary discussions like writing for TV, broadcast practices, rating systems, genres, and prestige. Finally, students are asked to consider the labour dimensions of TV production, and impact of streaming on the traditional linear system of production and distribution.
Mass Media (COMS 360) - Fall 2021
This course provides an overview of the histories, foundations, theoretical frameworks, and contemporary applications of multiple forms of mass media, in varying socio-cultural, political, industrial, and economic contexts. The first section of this class introduces key frameworks, theories of mass media and audiences which will run through the rest of the course. The second section examines types of mass media more closely, globalization of media forms and the merging of these media forms into new arrangements. The third section focuses on emerging forms of mass media in the digital landscape that offer new potentials for democratic engagement, as well as increased institutional and industrial control.
This is an out of department introductory course designed to familiarize students with some of the foundational concepts of communication studies, especially as they pertain to mass media technologies.
Advanced Topics in the Photographic Image: Power in the Photographic (COMS 462-532) - Fall 2024
This course will examine photographic images, as well as photographic technologies and cultures of production as key arenas for the exercise, consolidation and contestation of power. From early developments in photographic technology, economic patents and techniques to modern photo engines the photograph has been a subject of popular, as well as commercial and governmental interest. As cameras have grown increasingly ubiquitous, and the configurations have become increasingly diverse, the individual and institutional functions of photographs they generate have also broadened.
This ubiquity consequently brings up new challenges for thinking through photography, as a tool of power, for the enfranchised, as much as for the marginalized. This seminar will explore the role of photography as a key technology and practice for affirming and contesting structures of power, in its uses by individuals, commercial actors and state institutions. Covering production, distribution and exhibition, students will delve into photography through in-depth readings, seminar discussion and a core project that will be focus of their output for the semester.
Visual Communication and Culture (COMS 369) - Fall 2023, Winter 2024
This course introduces students to the basic principles of visual forms of communication and culture. It also presents modes of visual culture and communication, within social, historical, and cultural understandings of representation. Visual culture, with emphasis on moving images, dominates our social lives and drives understanding of the contemporary cultures we inhabit. Students are invited to analyze and reflect on their own ways of seeing, as well as the institutions and industries that shape visual culture.
Tracing the beginnings of visual culture studies in the 90s, and moving both backwards and forwards, students can expect to apply the theoretical approaches and methods of visual culture to a variety of visual media including painting, sculpture, interior design, film, television, games and social media. Students are encouraged to think through these various media in nonlinear, convergent ways, to find new avenues for comparison.
International Communication (COMS 473-526) - Fall 2023
This course introduces students to key concepts, institutions, and media paradigms in international communication studies. Ranging from definitional debates of what even constitutes international communication, to medium-specific analyses of broadcast radio, news, internet, social media and new media, this class is designed to allow students varying entry points into the field. Overlaid onto issues of imperialism, technological innovation and geopolitical struggle, international communication will be examined over the course of this class as a key intersection between different media that surround us in our everyday lives, thinking through its development and its potentials.
Within this framework, students are asked to reconsider, along the international/transnational axis, technological innovations such as the telegraph and the internet, as well as the institutional and corporate dimensions of ownership over means of communication. From daily devices like the Sony Walkman, to the murky operations of Radio Free Europe, a vast array of devices, organizations and moments are opened up for students to explore.
