Social Change and Communication Course, and Communication & Race

I want to learn more about teaching social action because I teach courses that focus on Race and Communication, Social Change, and activism.

Course Description:

Race and Communication examines the ways in which communication practices shape and are shaped by racialized identities. This course explores identity formation through the basic understanding of race, symbolism, cultural performance—through music and art, educational pedagogies, and memory. Through a wide range of texts—films, books, academic articles, popular culture pieces, encyclopedia entries, poetry/music, YouTube clips, and social movements—students will learn about the myriad ways that race and racism are codified, reified, and reproduced by communication. The course starts at the historical inception of race as a scientific justification for inequalities, working from colonization, and making its way to contemporary racial issues in America. Together, students will engage the ways social location, cultural formation, and racial identification have shaped their own communicative perspectives and responses to society and imagine possibilities for change in the face of such constraints.

COM 526 Social Change and Communication is interested in how persuasion has been utilized to make social change for marginalized communities through social movements, speeches, and material spaces and objects. This course will explore the following major questions/themes:

1. What are social movements and social change?
2. How is persuasion and social change related?
3. What role do social movements play in communication?
4. How have social movements been constructed in the United States?
5. How is identity connected to social change?

The course will largely explore these themes through persuasive theories and a critical and contextual analysis lens as they relate to identity, gender, and various perspectives. By studying social change in this manner, students will pay attention to and begin to dismantle multiple and overlapping systems of oppression; the majority of the readings and content will address how various social groups, movements, and oratory pieces address the need for social change in the United States of America. This course is a graduate-level reading, writing, interactive and discussion-based class. Students will be addressed as community members and will be expected to have a high level of participation. Critical and thoughtful engagement with these topics is expected, with respect for ourselves and others while building this community.

Ariel Seay

Assistant Professor

Communication

North Carolina State University