Civic Communication & Media Course Descriptions

Program Information Requirements Civic Communication and Media: Courses Learning Outcomes

CCM 101 Public Speaking (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Occasionally
Instructor: Staff

CCM 110 Introduction to Communication Studies (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Every semester
Instructor: Staff

CCM 199 Topics in Civic Communication and Media (1-4)

A semester-long study of topic 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 majors/minors in other departments.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Topic dependent
Prerequisite: Topic dependent
Offering: Occasionally
Professor: Staff

CCM 201 Arguing About the Right Thing to Do (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Alternating Years
Instructor: Staff

CCM 202 Creating Persuasive Campaigns (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Occasionally
Instructor: Staff

CCM 203 Designing Media (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Annually
Instructor: Koenig Richards, Staff

CCM 204 Communicating Race (4)

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, furthermore, students in this course will gain valuable experience communicating about complex topics and enacting how communication can be meaningfully used toward antiracist ends.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: PDE
Offering: Alternate years
Instructor: Parker Brooks

CCM 220W Analyzing Public Discourse (4)

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..

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Writing-centered; Arts & Humanities
Offering: Fall
Instructor: Staff

CCM 245 Civic Media (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Spring semester
Instructor: Staff

CCM 255 Grief Communication: Listening, Storytelling, and Dialogue (4)

This course engages the topic of grief from personal, cultural, and scholarly vantage points. 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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Alternate years
Instructor: Parker Brooks

CCM 258 Gender and Mass Communication in Asia (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Alternate years
Instructor: Wen

CCM 261 Media, Technology, and Society (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Every semester
Instructor: Koenig Richards, Pham

CCM 288 Introducing Asia to the World (4)

The course introduces students to media production based on the content of East Asian history, society, and people. The societies of East Asia, especially China, Korea, and Japan, have rich, complex, and multifaceted historical and cultural experiences. Yet, media representations focus on certain aspects while ignoring others. The course integrates the acquisition of knowledge and awareness of East Asia with critical thinking and media production. Students will work in project teams to choose a topic that they are interested in, prepare their own presentation and production, and to facilitate in-class discussions. Possible projects might include: design a syllabus to teach Asia to a specific group of people; curate and organize an Asian film screening festival; start a website that is relevant to Asian culture and people; or make a short video about the history of a very specific topic, such as Japanese cuisine.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities; World Engagement: CV
Offering: Fall
Instructor: Wen

CCM 299 Topics in Civic Communication and Media (1-4)

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Topic dependent
Prerequisite: Topic dependent
Offering: Occasionally
Professor: Staff

CCM 301 Asian Visual and Creative Culture (4)

From Miyazaki’s animations and Hong Kong’s martial arts movies to Korean popular media, Chinese avant-garde artists’ political voices or ordinary social media uses, visual productions enrich the intellectual and popular culture landscape in Asia. 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. Students are presented a broad view on Asian visual culture, and an in-depth investigation of visual culture as a necessary component of, and influencer of, Asian society. The course encourages the comparative studies of politics and aesthetics of visual culture in different cultural contexts, and helps students become critical viewers and mindful users of media.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities; World Engagement: CV
Offering: Annually
Instructor: Wen

CCM 310 Asian Social Media in Global Context: Critique and Design (4)

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.

General Education Requirement: Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences; World Engagement: NEL study beyond 132, CV
Offering: Annually
Instructor: Wen

CCM 318 Intergenerational Communication (4)

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.

General Education Requirement: Arts & Humanities, Social Sciences; World Engagement: Cultural Values
Prerequisite: One CCM Course
Offering: Annually
Instructor: Wen

CCM 321 Rhetorical Theory (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities; PDE
Prerequisite: One CCM course
Offering: Occasionally
Instructor: Parker Brooks

CCM 330 Communicating Peace (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities; PDE
Prerequisite: One CCM course
Offering: Alternate years
Instructor: Parker Brooks

CCM 335W Communicating Self and Society (4)

This course introduces students to autoethnography--a qualitative research method that incorporates lived experience, personal narrative, and cultural analysis. Communicating Self and Society features a diverse range of personal narratives, which engage the intersectional nature of identity while interrogating social injustice and reimagining transformative ways of being together. In Communicating Self and Society, students 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 learn to communicate their enriched understandings through narrative analysis, peer review, and practice with various forms of mediated self-expression.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities; Writing-centered; PDE
Offering: Alternate years
Instructor: Parker Brooks

CCM 341 Feminist Media Before 1920 (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Alternate years
Instructor: Koenig Richards

CCM 342 Feminist Media Since 1920 (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Alternate years
Instructor: Koenig Richards

CCM 344 Asian Americans and the Media (4)

CCM 344 approaches Asian Americans and their relationship to 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 blogs; 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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities; PDE
Offering: Annually
Instructor: Pham

CCM 350 Pop Culture, Power, and Marginality (4)

This course examines the ways various elements of popular culture inform and reflect our attitudes, behavior, and society. As major forces through which various types of information – from politics to economics, from style to sports – are distributed within contemporary culture, popular culture also asserts values and ideology about in approaching issues of our lives. This course is one attempt to understand that role and to provide critical skills and ways of reading popular culture that will encourage each of us to reflect upon, and problematize, the ever-present influence of popular culture on the contours of everyday life.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities; PDE
Prerequisite: One CCM course
Offering: Alternate years
Instructor: Pham

CCM 361 Artificial Intelligence and Society (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Prerequisite: One CCM course
Offering: Alternate Years
Instructor: Koenig Richards

CCM 363 Persuasive Technology (4)

The internet and related technologies have reshaped how people communicate, share knowledge, and engage in 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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Prerequisite: One CCM course
Offering: Alternate years
Instructor: Koenig Richards, Staff

CCM 367 Networked Social Movements (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Prerequisite: One CCM course
Offering: Alternate Years
Instructor: Richards, Staff

CCM 394/395 Internship (2-4)

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.

General Education Requirement: Arts & Humanities
Prerequisite: By instructor consent only
Offering: Annually
Instructor: Staff

CCM 399 Topics in Civic Communication and Media (1-4)

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Topic dependent
Prerequisite: Topic dependent
Offering: Occasionally
Professor: Staff

CCM 429 Topics in Civic Communication and Media (1-4)

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Topic dependent
Prerequisite: Topic dependent
Offering: Occasionally
Professor: Staff

CCM 490 Independent Study (4)

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.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Arts & Humanities
Offering: Every semester
Instructor: Staff

CCM 496W Research Communities Capstone (4)

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 this seminar, the career roadmap, and the comprehensive examination, will constitute the Senior Year Experience.

General Education Requirement Fulfillment: Writing-centered; Arts & Humanities
Prerequisite: CCM 110, two course from CCM Methods and Topics area. Restricted to CCM majors
Offering: Every semester
Instructor: Staff

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Course Descriptions