57 undergraduate courses in the 2026–27 Undergraduate Calendar.
Focuses on one-to-one, face-to-face communication in both the personal and professional realms. Such topics as verbal and non-verbal interactions, listening, and the better management of interpersonal communication will be studied.
This is an introductory course addressing the major theoretical issues in, approaches to, and applications of communication. Theories from various branches of communication, including interpersonal, group/organizational, rhetorical, mass and cultural, will be explored in-depth. Historical, current, and practical critiques of each theory will be conducted. Coursework is designed to encourage students to give critical consideration to the place of theory within the field of Speech Communication and within everyday life.
A foundational studio course introducing students to the creative processes of performance across a range of contexts. Students develop core performance skills through embodied practice, collaborative creation, and critical reflection. The course emphasizes physical awareness, vocal expressivity, textual analysis, and ensemble building while exploring the relationship between performance and identity. Through progressive exercises, improvisation, scene work, and performance projects, students cultivate presence, authenticity, and creative risk-taking. This required course serves as the entry point to further specialization, establishing the groundwork for understanding performance as a mode of meaning-making and social engagement.
This course examines historical and contemporary practices, theories, principles, figures, and allies of anti-racism. Students will learn methods of communicating and pursuing anti-racism in culture, society, and in personal and professional interracial relationships. Coursework will immerse students in recognizing language, behaviours, institutions, and discourses that maintain white supremacies and further enable racist policies and practices in North America. Students will be challenged to apply course material to real issues of racisms in local contexts and communities.
This course focuses on developing the qualities and transferable skills necessary for integration, continuous learning, and professional development. This course establishes a common baseline of leadership, communication, and collaboration capabilities for Accounting and Financial Management majors. Focus will be on the design and delivery of various types of communication and the development of basic teamwork skills.
This course examines the evolution and development of Black Peoples' artistic, cultural, and literary experiences from a global perspective including art and design, theatre and performance, literature, music, spoken word, and other modes of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practice. Coursework is designed to immerse students in analyzing Black art, culture, and literature through intersectional, feminist, and queer lenses. The course is designed for both thinkers and creators. Students will engage in the course material through readings, viewings, and field trips around film, comics, anime, popular culture events, plus the visual and performing arts.
How does design help us think? This studio course introduces students to practice-based methods for generating knowledge. Topics may include prototyping, performance as research, material thinking, multi-modal representation, and experience design. Students will test and explore how we learn differently through creative practices.
In this course, students in Architectural, Chemical, Civil, Environmental, and Geological Engineering will enhance oral and written communication competencies in contexts relevant to the engineering profession.
In this course, students in Computer, Electrical, and Management Engineering will enhance oral and written communication competencies in contexts relevant to the engineering profession.
In this course students will enhance oral and written communication competencies in contexts relevant to the life sciences and physical sciences.
This course introduces the basic theories for studying the multiple relationships between communication practices and gender. The course emphasizes how communication creates gender and power roles and how communicative patterns reflect, sustain, and alter social conceptions of gender.
This course focuses on how Black public figures such as artists, intellectuals, and journalists in the 19th-21st centuries create and disseminate expressions of Black freedom in the public sphere and will explore how performances of Black speech in service of Black freedom is an act of borderless belonging.
This course surveys the rhetorical strategies of both more recent and historical civil rights and anti-racist activists. Students will use Black rhetorical theory and will examine work by international historical figures such as Franz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Albert Memmi, and Mohandas Gandhi, Frederick Douglas, WEB Dubois, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Fred Hampton, Robert Hill, and Walter Rodney and such recent figures as Kimberle Crenshaw, Robyn Maynard, Brittney Cooper, Desmond Cole, Feminista Jones, Rinaldo Walcott, and Idil Abdillahi. The objective for students is to understand the evolution of liberatory, anti-racist rhetoric and the rhetorical successes and failures of key anti-racist activists.
This course examines leadership, team dynamics, and communication in organizational contexts. Students will develop communication knowledge and skills to enhance their abilities to be effective in leadership and team roles.
This course introduces foundational theories and lines of inquiry in contemporary media and cultural studies. Students apply media and cultural studies theories and methods through case studies of cultural artifacts ranging from wartime propaganda to memes and viral videos.
This workshop course in performance studies explores performance as a way of knowing. It investigates performance as artistic practice and as a means of understanding historical, social, and cultural practices, including drama/theatre texts, poetry, narratives, and texts of everyday life.
Theory and practice of public speaking. A workshop course involving design and delivery of various kinds of speeches, and the development of organizational, vocal, listening, and critical skills.
This course explores the genealogies and historical development of Black performance created in regions such as North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. Students will examine the influences of key artists and theorists. Students will be challenged to apply historical, political, and cultural contexts to the analysis of audio, text-based, and/or audio-visual materials. This course expands students' concepts of Black performance to include performative modes such as performance poetry, TV shows, music, and podcasts.
Theory and practice of interviewing. A workshop course which teaches theory, design, and presentation of interviews. Videotaping student exercises will enhance interview design and delivery, as well as listening and critical skills.
This course introduces theories and practices central to the relationship between communication and race/ethnicity. Students gain theoretical and practical understanding of the opportunities and obstacles that exist for racialized equity-deserving groups. Students are prompted to recognize their positionality in relation to race and how communication can be meaningfully used toward anti-racist ends.
A workshop course in leadership combining theoretical and experiential perspectives. Students will develop and apply knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to be effective and perceptive communicators in a leadership position.
This course introduces a theoretical framework for understanding the nature and significance of public communication. Strategies and techniques typically employed in political and commercial contexts are examined.
This course takes a historical approach to the discipline of communication studies. Using a range of historiographic approaches, it analyzes technologies, theories, and practices of communication within the broader context of social and historical change. Potential topics include writing in the ancient world, the printing press, radio and television, cinema and sound recording, the computer and new media.
This course introduces key social issues in and around games, including traditional games, sports, and digital games. Through lectures, readings, and gameplay students will be introduced to the anatomy of games, the history of games and digital games, the game industry, and explore current issues of games in scholarship.
This course explores how gender is performed on the stage and in the media. Key performances and performers are studied from the perspectives of critical feminist theory and performance studies. Students consider how performances can create, affirm, and disrupt how society understands and performs gender.
In this course students will learn advanced digital design theory. They will participate in workshops with professional designers, develop specialized digital materials, and contribute signature work to their digital portfolio.
This course offers a sustained engagement with theories and methods used to study communication practices related to gender and sexuality through looking at a specific topic. This course emphasizes how communication practices influence relationships between social conceptions of gender, sexuality, power, identity, and culture. Subject to different content, the course may concentrate on a topic in-depth, such as gender and science, masculinity and race, colonial and non-Western feminisms, queer theory.
This course analyzes whiteness, race, and ethnicity with special emphasis on language, media, discourse, rhetoric, and performance through looking at a specific topic. This course will enrich student understanding of the conceptions and impacts of race on communicative practices.
In this course students will be introduced to counterstory as research method, genre, and organizing rhetoric within anti-racist movements. Students will examine counterstory in the context of Critical Race Theory and read classic counterstories by figures such as Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, Richard Delgado, Bryan Brayboy, Tomson Highway, and Lee Maracle. Course activities will challenge students to assess and assert the value and truth of the Black lived experience, Black epistemologies, and Black knowledge production, including that of Black Canadians and their Indigenous and Allies of Colour. Students will write, workshop, revise, and publish their own actionable anti-racist commitments.
The analysis, writing, and editing of speeches. This course considers how genre and style impact the creation, reception, and implications of meaning. Students practice writing, as form and style, in the construction of arguments and other genres of speech making.
A workshop course which works from theory to develop the skills to work in groups effectively. The principles of group dynamics, leadership, and conflict resolution will be studied and implemented in small group meetings and presentations.
This course examines organizational theory, the communication process, and the interplay between the two. Students will develop the skills to identify, analyze, and solve a variety of organizational communication problems through case study group work and other workshop-style methods.
Students explore techniques to access and develop the voice as a resource for performance.
In this course students will be introduced to design and production of digital presentations. They will develop specialized digital materials and contribute work to their digital portfolio.
This course examines the ways in which individuals and institutions communicate to enact agency and build communities situated within power relations. Through reading and discussion of critical communication theory and by conducting their own analysis of how power and agency operate in a community, students will develop their understanding of what power and agency are, the relationship of each to communication, and how each constitutes community life.
This course investigates how distinct modes of communication impact the creation of messages, dissemination or knowledge, and reception of meaning. Students will examine aural, textual, and visual communication in the context of print, electronic, and digital media.
This course offers a practical and applied examination of how various forms of performance may bring about an experience of political conscientization because creating a performance can be considered a process of political enlightenment and engagement.
This course explores how critical race and performance studies illuminate 20th- and 21st-century theatre and performance. Students investigate the historical, political, and cultural contexts that inform the creation and presentation of performance works involving race, examining how theatre-making can resist or perpetuate structures of oppression and colonization. Through embodied research practices and critical analysis, students explore how racial concepts find expression through performative communication and scenography. Applying intersectional and decolonial approaches, students develop skills to create equitable, accessible, and anti-oppressive performance experiences while building capacity to communicate effectively across diverse artistic contexts and navigate complex creative territories with care and self-awareness.
This course identifies critical communication inquiry at the individual, group, public, and collective levels of theory and practice. Students will work to develop strategies of engagement or thinking that could extend, modify, or overturn standing theoretical positions and initiate new inquiry. Critique and criticism are developed in order to explore advanced questions within the field of Communication Studies, and students are introduced to critical research methods used by scholars in the field of Communication Studies.
This course further develops theories and methods for studying how communication practices reflect, maintain, and disrupt social conceptions of gender and sexuality. Students will examine communication in different contexts to understand how gender, sexuality, and communication are implicated in power relations, and how gender and sexuality intersect with multiple dimensions of identity and culture.
This course is an advanced study of the intersection of communication and race that develops theoretical, critical, and historical perspectives on whiteness and race, racist language and communicative practices, and anti-racist critiques of communication. Students will further explore their own relationships to cultural conceptions of whiteness, race, and ethnicity.
This course examines the artistic, cultural, political, and disciplinary histories of African American rhetoric, discourse, and persuasion. Students will study various genealogies of African American rhetoric through primary texts such as dialogues, essays, folklore, music, song lyrics, dance, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches by African Americans. Special attention will be given to the economic, gendered, and social conditions of African Americans from the enslavement period in North America to the present, as well as to the Black diaspora.
This course examines the communicative, psychological, and sociological aspects of persuasion and persuasive messages, with attention to interpersonal contexts, the role of images, and persuasion in the media and public discourse. This course will explore the ways in which the sending and receiving of persuasive messages involve cognition, emotions, and social norms in everyday contexts.
An examination of how communication on the part of individuals, groups, and institutions implicates social justice. Students examine the relationship between communication and justice to understand how the representation and performance of gender, race, ethnicity, and other cultural constructs contribute to social and political conditions.
This course examines practical and theoretical dimensions of communication in times of crisis. It examines case studies and communication strategies and conducts critical and conceptual analysis of how crisis disrupts and transforms various forms of communication.
This course focuses on how conflict is communicated and resolved in one-on-one, group, and organizational contexts. Theoretical perspectives, simulations, role plays, and self-assessment exercises will enhance students' abilities to be successful communicators in conflict situations.
This workshop course will examine the communication skills necessary for the organizational consultant. Participation in videotaped simulations will allow students to explore consulting styles and training interventions by developing the communications expertise and knowledge specific to the consulting professional.
A study of the social, historical, and rhetorical dimensions of collective action. Topics may include health and welfare movements, civil rights and anti-war protests, and environmentalism.
This course examines the relationships between games and culture. By playing, analyzing, and making games, students will consider the social, political, and economic dimensions of games and acquire ways of thinking about how games communicate by transmitting, contextualizing, and contesting culturally situated meanings.
This course explores how to create, perform, and analyze performance texts, here defined as including drama/theatre texts, poetry, narratives, and the texts of everyday life. Through readings and creative investigation, students will explore the links between the participant, the researcher, the site, and the impulse of inquiry.
This course explores the function of communication in advocating for and generating social change, mostly through practices of resistance, protest, and other forms of dissent and collective action. Students will consider how the broader assemblage of media, social, and civic institutions resist change, and will imagine how communication might be used effectively to challenge the status quo.
An examination of the interplay between communication and ethics from historical and pragmatic perspectives. Issues discussed include communication in a variety of settings, such as intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, public, and intercultural interactions as they relate to personal development, values, meaning making, and ethical ways of communicating.
This course will explore the role of media in enabling and/or inhibiting communication about the environment and climate change. After offering an overview of the field of environmental communication, it will engage in an analysis of key issues regarding the role of the media in relation to the environment, such as "social license to operate," the role of alternative media practices, and the environmental impact of media systems themselves. The course will consider a range of different media genres in relation to the environment (e.g., public relations, governmental communication, news media, social media, NGO campaigns, documentaries). What are the primary objectives and strategies of different forms of environmental communication and how do these various media shape public understanding of environmental issues?
Seminars in special areas of speech communication.
Seminars in special areas of speech communication.
This course is designed to give the student an opportunity to complete a comprehensive presentation in their major area of concentration.
This course is designed to give the student an opportunity to complete a comprehensive presentation in their major area of concentration. Second part of THPERF/COMMST 499A.