COMM1020 — Communicating Difference
This course provides a basic overview of eight social identity categories dominant in the United States today: race, gender, social class, sexuality, nationality, religion, ability, and age. Within each category, the relationships between communication, social identity, and power will be interrogated. The course is grounded in “social constructionism”, which contends that humans create reality through social interaction, which in turn shapes environments and structures in a recursive manner. The course will examine “difference” as a socially-constructed and communicative phenomenon, but one with material and embodied consequences. While the course calls attention to oppressive systems, it will resist narratives of victimhood, instead amplifying survival and resistance; how individuals and groups resist and transform systems through communication and social action. pre-req: Comm major or minor