COM346 Race, Gender, and the Media (Fall, Spring)

Race, Gender, and the Media explores sections of British society and their representation via the British print and broadcast media. The course will examine how the United Kingdom’s domestic print and broadcast organisations were established and function today and the influence social and political history has had (and continues to have) on their operation and output. The division of the course into units allows students to explore the chronology of the British media, the evolving composition of the national population and the roots of their contemporary representation. How the representation of the British population — already divided along lines of social class, gender, race, culture, religion, region, ethnicity and sexual orientation — is informed, entertained and self-identifies will be examined via related theories. This will solidify student understanding about the relationship that exists between media history, practice, ethics and social and cultural anthropology.

Satisfies IDEA Course Requirement

Satisfies Shared Competency for Ethics, Integrity, and Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

Enrollment priority is given to Syracuse public communications majors who have not yet met their Diversity requirement.

Syracuse Newhouse students:

This course fulfills the Newhouse diversity requirement within your major.
Prereq: COM 107 required for Newhouse students (only)

Syracuse students: may not receive credit for more than one of the following: COM 346, 348, 350.

COM300.1 Engaged Media: Global Storytelling (Spring)

This course looks at the UK’s rapidly changing media landscape, with a particular focus on user engagement, storytelling, and media. In an era of “fake news,” threats to the freedom of the press, big data, and the burgeoning of user-generated content, journalists face unprecedented pressure to retain users’ trust, and redefine their role in the 21st century. At the same time, technological innovations have led to new ways of storytelling across a variety of media. In this class, you will examine how news reporters, broadcasters, and foreign correspondents are adapting in the digital age, and finding innovative and interactive ways to engage audiences. Throughout the semester, you will take part in a series of reporting exercises for different platforms. The course will culminate in a final piece of online journalism in which you employ a variety of engagement strategies.

CMD450 Communications Design Problems (Spring)

This class will involve working in multiple areas within the discipline of visual communications. Students initiate, create and complete three in-depth design projects reflecting unique problems of interest to each student/designer. Strategic planning, marketing, and design based on field research in London and within the EU that will add a global perspective to their problem-solving.

Enrollment restricted and required of all Communications Design students attending the London Design program.

Prereqs: CMD 252 and CMD 282

Coreqs: DES 304

This course has an associated course fee. See the London Course fees page for more information.

AIC316 Introduction to Visual Culture (Spring)

Visual culture studies recognize the predominance of visual forms of media, communication, and information in the postmodern world. Visual culture is best understood as a tactic for studying the functions of a world addressed through pictures, images, and visualizations, rather than through texts and words. We negotiate the world through visual culture, and the world itself is negotiated politically through visuality and visual images. This class is an introduction to the key issues of visual culture. It will examine the politics of images, the role that images play in producing cultural meaning, visuality and power relations, and how images are forms of visual communication. We will examine how images circulate through digital media, remakes, and viral networks, and the cross-fertilization of images between various social arenas, such as art, advertising, popular culture, news science, entertainment media, video games, and design.

Key questions and points of consideration are:

Can we study visual culture as a system, but not as a pure state of visuality—that is, a system of visual meanings that are not purely imagistic—not formed only of images—but include texts and graphic design, design of functional objects, architecture, logos?
Are social institutions systems of order that perpetuate, preserve, and legitimize complex forms of collective identity?
What is the role of the visual arts in a mass-mediated visual world?
Can visual culture studies be defined as an interdisciplinary field?

This course may also be registered as CRS 316 or FMA 316.

ARC561 Survey of British Architecture (Fall, Spring)

London is arguably the center of global design. Many local design firms have offices in London and abroad, and it is this global design network intersecting with British design traditions that situates architectural inquiry in this course. The architectural survey course involves directly engaging works — archival objects, physical buildings and urban assemblages visited in the field — and producing analytic representations of those works in order to glean lessons. Site visits, office visits, readings and lectures introduce individual works of historic and contemporary architecture and the contexts in which they were created, considering the questions and methods that drive architectural practice.

Open only to students admitted to the London architecture program who are required to take this course.

Coreq: Architecture studio: ARC 407/408/608/609

ADV206 Advertising Practice in a Diverse Society (Spring

This course introduces students to the practice of advertising, studying how this complex, symbiotic communications business works: the industry as a whole including regulation and ethical standards; advertising agencies and their internal structure; relating with clients and their customers’ needs in terms of conceptualisation and research; and advertising itself, comparing and contrasting examples from the US, UK and other countries. While the course will cover the basics of traditional media, it will also focus on non-traditional vehicles such as word of mouth, social media and shopper marketing. The course builds up to the creation of an integrated ad campaign for a major international brand. The project will be done in small groups competing with one another, from a real client brief, facilitated by industry professionals, and leading to a final presentation. For communications majors and non-majors.

Syracuse students may not receive credit for both ADV 201 and ADV 206.

Satisfies Shared Competencies:

Critical and Creative Thinking
Ethics, Integrity, and Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion