Special Topics (Shell)

Catalog description

This course focuses on a specific context where social identities are negotiated through particular discursive practices, emphasizing the verbal and nonverbal communication behaviors that are appropriate in this context and through which people constitute and perform their identities. The course examines symbolic practices and communication norms in families, self-help groups, television talk shows, cyber communities, social movements, and genders/sexualities, using approaches such as symbolic convergence theory, social constructivism, ethnography of communication, and conversational analysis. Students may take this course up to two times with different topics.