Topics in Rhetoric: Audience

Catalog description

The purpose of this course is to provide students with an understanding of the nature and evolution of contemporary audiences and how they can be contextualized to cover audiences as both - consumers of knowledge and information products, as well as co-producers. This course traces the history of audiences by juxtaposing understandings from rhetoric, composition studies, media scholarship, social interactions, technical communication genres, focusing especially on emerging technologies like AI. Students in this class will learn to use several sources of data and information to analyze the audience/tasks/contexts for the design and development of information products, assess its effectiveness through user experience research, and reflect on ethical research practices for doing the same. The course provides in depth coverage of rhetoric as a historically rooted but evolving humanistic perspective covering circulation and (re-)production, performance and text, and delineating its connections to logic, aesthetics, politics, and ethics. This class does not require any background in rhetoric, digital studies, or multimodal composing. Prerequisites: 76-101 or 76-102 or ( 76-106 and 76-107 ) or ( 76-108 and 76-107 ) or ( 76-108 and 76-106 )