All Courses
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FWIS 180 001 F21
-According to many tellings of US history, this country was founded on protest. However, despite the nearly constant presence of social movements in the United States since its founding, we often learn about this past as a series of isolated incidents, rather than a history of interrelated, simultaneous, and often mutually exclusive social movements, each with its own history, goals, and strategies. Despite these differences, there are certain attributes that tie most activist and social justice movements together; among the most important is strategic communication. -In this course, we’ll take a historical and anthropological dive into a variety of social movements from across time and from around the world. We’ll take seriously the role of media, technology, and infrastructure in the development of diverse strategies, as well as the importance of both individual and group identity formation. We’ll analyze advantages, risks, and affordances that vary along lines of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class. Along the way, we’ll think critically about the communicational tactics of each one, analyzing what worked, what didn’t, and why. Using this knowledge, students will choose an issue important to them, develop a communicational strategy for addressing this issue and—if they desire—put it out into the real world!
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HART 450/670 001 Sp22
This course will run like the humanities equivalent of an architecture design studio in which students can develop processes for producing imaginative solutions to problems that are complex in form, content, and scale. We will focus on the evolution of urban form in light of existing and emerging communication and representation tools and techniques that make it possible to represent change over time and space. These same tools and techniques prompt a new range of art-historical and cultural questions that bring up new disciplinary questions to be covered during the semester. We will explore questions, assemble information, consult specialists, analyze precedents, test techniques, study contexts, generate insights, imagine new worlds, or consider new forms of communication. We will, in addition, be able to rely on the expertise of a GIS Specialist/Developer from the Center for Research Computing’s Spatial Studies Lab [spatialstudieslab.rice.edu] and/or Fondren’s GIS/Data Center who will assist with the visualization needs that course-related projects might require as well as provide tutorials in GIS applications. Graduate students will be required to complete an additional assignment equivalent to an analytical 20 page paper (e.g., create online tools that can aid their dissertations). While the course itself will be contained in one semester, the research projects to be examined and the online tools to be created are likely to exceed the semester’s duration.
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FWIS 176 001 Sp22
Social media is everywhere. From social justice hashtags like #BLM and #MeToo, to the market power of popular TikTokers, to the sometimes earth-shaking tweets from the President of the United States, whether we like it or not, social media is part of our everyday lives. In this course, we will explore social media from a number of perspectives: we will learn its history; explore its technicalities; think critically about its content; and ultimately seek to understand why and how social media has quickly become a mainstream tool for written and audiovisual communication.