Tuesday, January 6 – What is “Contemporary” about Contemporary Communication Theory?

Unit One: Attention, or Knowledge in the Age of Communication Overload

Tuesday, January 13
Yves Citton – “An Ontology of Filtering”
Katherine Hayles – “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes”

Tuesday, January 20

Mark Andrejevic – “Thinsliced Thoughts and Theory’s Ends”
Cathy Davidson – “Now You See It: Attention and the Future of Learning”

Unit Two: Bodies: Communication, Affect and Interaction

Tuesday, January 27
Lisa Blackman – “Communicating Bodies”, The Body: The Key Concepts
Sara Ahmed – “Collective Feelings, Or the Impressions Left by Others”, New Formations

Tuesday, February 3
Emma Dowling – “The Waitress: On Affect, Method and (Re)presentation”
Michael Hardt – “Affective Labor”, Boundary 2

Unit Three: Materialism: Media in/as the Environment

Tuesday, Feburary 10
Toby Miller and Rick Maxwell – “Our Dirty Love Affair With Technology”
Jennifer Gabrys –  “Media in the Dump”

Reading Week (No Class)

Tuesday, February 24
Timothy Morton – “Zero Landscapes in the time of Hyperobjects”
Timothy Scott Barker – “Information and Atmospheres: Exploring the Relationship between the Natural Environment and Information Aesthetics”

Unit Four: Identity and Expression

Tuesday, March 24
Screening: The Stuart Hall Project
Readings: Stuart Hall – Minimal Selves

Tuesday, March 31
Jack Halberstam – “Go Gaga: Anarchy, Chaos and the Wild”
Marco Deseriis – “Lots of Money because I am Many”

Unit Five: Building Common Ground: Gender, Community and Popular Communication

Tuesday, April 7
Nina Power – “You’re like an advert yourself” and “Consumer Culture: Girls on Film”, The One Dimensional Woman
Angela McRobbie – “Beyond Post-feminism”, Public Policy Research

Tuesday, April 14
Sarah Banet-Weiser – Popular Misogyny: A Zeitgeist
Mary Beltran – “The Hollywood Latina Body as Site of Social Struggle”

Supplementary: bell hooks, Anna Czarnik-Neimeyer, Lynnee Denise, and Stephanie Troutman – “Whose booty is this?” [Video to be watched before class]
Monday, April 20 – Assignment for Unit #5 due via moodle.