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	300 Steele Building CB# 3504 UNC-Chapel Hill Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3504 email: fys@unc.edu phone: (919)843-7773

Communication Studies

COMM 050 [006E]: Family Communication and the Family Life-Cycle
Social & Behavioral Science/Other (SS) [GC Social Science]
Lawrence Rosenfeld
This course is designed to provide you with an opportunity to learn about families--your own and those depicted in films and on television. Everyone comes to a course on family communication with some understanding of how families function, and a very detailed knowledge of how one or more specific families live their lives. And no two people have shared the exact same experiences. This course--based on the assumption that there are many ways to be a family, that each family may be viewed as a system that reflects families-of-origin, and that communication serves to regulate all aspects of family life--has as its objectives to increase your awareness of the functions of communication in families, your ability to analyze family interaction in contemporary films and television, and your understanding of the stages of the family life-cycle. Course requirements include writing a short story about an event or member of your family, completing several examinations, and participating in a group project focused on an analysis of a film or television family.

COMM 051 [006E]: Organizing and Communicating for Social Entrepreneurs
Social & Behavioral Science/Other (SS) [GC Social Science]
Steven May
This first year seminar is designed to show how we can better understand organizational communication through the medium of different metaphors (e.g., machine, organism, culture, political system, psychic prison). More specifically, the course is designed to show how social entrepreneurs--or any other organizational members--can use these metaphors of organizational communication as tools for informing and guiding their entrepreneurial efforts.
The course has four primary objectives. First, the course will introduce students to the theory and practice of social entrepreneurship, with particular attention to successful social entrepreneurs. Second, the course will provide students with a systematic and critical understanding of organizational communication theory and research related to social entrepreneurship, including the factors involved in the functioning and analysis of today's complex organizations. Third, the course will also show students how this understanding can be used as a practical tool for their own social entrepreneurship. Finally, the course will allow students to explore the ways in which organizations are simultaneously the medium and outcome for social, political, economic, technological, and ideological change in our culture.

COMM 052 [006F]: Cynicism, Politics and Youth Culture
Philosophical and Moral Reasoning (PH) [GC Philosophical]
Lawrence Grossberg
(no description available)

COMM 060: Organizing and Communicating for Social Entrepreneurs
Steven May
This seminar examines the historical and current development of social entrepreneurship as a field of study and practice, with particular attention to successful organizational communication strategies designed to solve community problems. During the seminar, students will learn the basic characteristics and strategies of successful social entrepreneurs. They will also explore many of the innovative organizations created by social entrepreneurs around the world to eradicate poverty, provide college access to students, care for AIDS patients, create assisted living for the disabled, and provide electricity to rural communities, among others.  Students will interview and profile a prominent social entrepreneur and will also develop their own plan for an organization to address a community problem that interests them.

COMM 061 [006K]: The Politics of Performance
Della Pollock
Visual and Performing Arts (VP) [GCAesthetic/Fine Arts]
The term "performance" can be used broadly to describe a great range of cultural events and actions, including happenings, body art, street protests, parades and ceremonies, the presentation of self in everyday life, and staged shows. As an art, performance includes live events that operate both inside and outside the conventions of theatre spaces. Performances may be deliberately political in nature, aimed at awakening consciousness about a controversial topic and inciting appropriate action. It may more generally be concerned with questioning and shaking preconceptions about the ways things are around here. Accordingly, performance has been historically considered dangerous; a powerful means of generating feelings, attitudes, and actions inconsistent with submissive order. In turn, we may wonder whether all performance isn't political: if it isn't projecting alternative realities and discouraging unexamined beliefs, to what extent is it protecting and securing the "status quo" or given ways of acting and being in the world? In this course, we will explore the possibilities of making political performance, or making performance political. We will be particularly concerned with how performance may contribute to process of social change. As students of performance history theory-and as spectators, participants, critics, and social actors, we will ask: how can we understand and engage the potential for performance to make a difference in everyday lives?

COMM 062 [006M]: African American Literature and Performance
Visual and Performing Arts (VP) [GC Aesthetic/ Literature]
D. Soyini Madison
The course examines- through performance- the question of what characterizes "Blackness" as it is manifest through experience- history- and symbol in the United States (as well as the impact of African practices and identities upon Blackness in the US). The course is concerned with what has been termed the "black literary imagination."  We will examine- in performance- the black literary imagination as it encompasses the range of African American expressive traditions from music and dance to rhetorical strategies and visual arts.

COMM 063: The Creative Process in Performance
Visual and Performing Arts (VP), Communication Intensive (CI), US Diversity (US)
Madeleine Grumet and Emil Kang
The Memorial Hall Carolina Performing Arts Series sets the stage for this course, and students will be engaged with its multimedia, music, dance and theater performances.. We will explore the creative processes and cultural contexts of these performances and compare the arts as a way of knowing the world to the creative processes of academic scholarship. Students will research performance pieces, interview the performers, attend rehearsals and performances, do audience response research, and create their own performance piece as they observe the relationship of preparation and practice to the spontaneity and surprise of performances.

COMM 070 [006M]: Southern Writers in Performance
Literary Arts (LA) [GC Aesthetic/Literature]
Paul Ferguson
This seminar is a performance-centered class that addresses questions such as "what does it mean to be a 'Southern writer'" by focusing on the works of four prominent North Carolina writers: poets Kathryn Stribling Byer and Michael McFee, and novelists Clyde Edgerton and Lee Smith. We will read multiple works by each author, adapt their work for stage, participate in discussions with each of the authors (who will visit the seminar), and perform in three public performances. Students will rehearse performances with the professor and other students collaboratively, engage the works and write about them critically, as they reflect on the theory and practice of literature in performance.

COMM 071 [006F]: Conflict, Culture and Rhetoric: The Search for Peace in Northern Ireland
Philosophical and Moral Reasoning (PH) [GC Philosophical]
V. William Balthrop
(no description available)

COMM 074 [006F]: Remembering Dixie: Exploring Rhetoric, Memory and the South
Social and Behavioral Science/Other (SS) [GC Social Science]
V. William Balthrop
Perhaps no region of the nation is as glorified and vilified as "the South." This course will examine our collective memory of "the South," considering what the South "means" to different groups of people in contemporary America. We will begin by looking at controversies over such issues as public display of the Confederate battle flag, public commemorative displays like Silent Sam, arguments over "Southern Heritage," and other controversial issues. In doing so, we will explore the role of rhetoric--speeches, films, photographs, statues, buildings, websites, and so on--both in constructing our collective memory and in how we use that memory to influence ourselves and others.

COMM 082: Globalizing Organizations
Communication Intensive (CI); Global Issues (GL); Social & Behavioral Science/Other (SS)
Sarah Dempsey
"Globalization" is both a hotly contested subject and a central part of contemporary life. In this course, we explore the communication issues that arise within international contexts. Through the analysis of readings and films, we will delve into the contentious debates surrounding globalization and explore the ethical and social issues that arise within global forms of communicating and organizing. The objectives of this course include increasing your awareness and understanding of (1) multinational corporations and global labor flows, (2) international nongovernmental organizations, (3) multilateral lending institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary fund, and (4) transnational advocacy networks and social movements. Course requirements include writing an essay in which you reflect upon your own participation in a globalized world and conducting an individual analysis paper in which you examine the communication dimensions and ethical impacts of a global organization of your choosing.

COMM 085: Think, Speak, Argue
Christian Lundberg
This is a course in learning to think more critically, speak more persuasively, and argue more effectively by focusing on practical skill development in reasoning and debate. During your time at Carolina you will obviously sharpen your thinking, speaking and argument skills in the course of your normal classwork, but this will happen more or less indirectly. In this course we will focus directly on improving each of these skills. You will learn to think more critically by reflecting on the work of philosophers who deal with reasoning and informal logic, to speak with conviction and clarity through hands-on learning about the tradition of rhetoric, and to argue more effectively by debating the pressing issues of our day. The skills you will hone in this course will make you more effective as a student, in your chosen vocation, and as a citizen in an increasingly complex global public sphere.

COMM 006E: Children's Communication Development
GC Social Science
Lisa Skow
This seminar addresses a question that will be important to most students: how do we teach and communicate with children effectively? This course hopes to learn more about children by studying how they communicate. Through readings, discussions, oral presentations, writing, and observations and interviews with children we will explore how children develop their earliest language skills and how they become moral and social beings. Using this knowlege of children as communicators, we also will address hwo adults can help children to develop effective ways of communicating and relating with others.

COMM 006F: Mayberry or Global Village: A Critical History of American Media, Nation, and Place
GC Philosophical
Victoria Johnson
From television commercials to political campaigns, from The Matrix to on-line applications for college, a great deal of recent public discussion has promoted the "globalization" of electronic media and the promise of "new technology'. This promise is often tied to national ideals, national identity, and hopes for the nation's progress-it indicates what we in the United States are presumed to value as people. Yet, in spite of our daily encounter with the possibilities of a "global village," there remains an ongoing struggle-from our own frustrations with getting "online" to entire U.S regions; inability to get "wired:-between national ideals and local realities with regard to the use of new technologies. This course is an investigation of this historic and ongoing tension: How have debates over media been struggles over what it means to be American? Through readings, audio, video and film analyses and screenings, group discussions and presentations, papers and debate, we will examine how, from the 1800's to the present, "new technologies" (from the telegraph to motion pictures, from television to the internet) have entered into American culture. We'll consider how they have been fought over, defined and re-defined, and what this process has said about us as a people; our values and our future.