Communicating Terror: Political Violence and Media

Catalog description

This course begins from two basic assumptions about terrorism: it is a historical, political and ill-defined concept that takes many forms and it is a mediated phenomenon. The course will analyze the various ways that media, broadly defined, have been connected to terrorism, focusing on the media used in acts deemed terroristic (e.g., the mass media, the airplane, the bomb, the body and the internet), how terrorism is represented in popular media, and the media deployed in counterterrorism efforts. The aim of the course is to go beyond popular narratives of terrorism and foster a broader understanding of the history, politics and unequal social consequences of framing an increasing amount of actors, actions and utterances as terroristic. Prerequisite(s): declared COM major/minor with A COM 265X, and majors must have completed a statistics/logic course (A COM 275 or A MAT 108 or A SOC 221 or R CRJ 281 or A PSY 210 or A PHI 210).