teaching: undergraduate: COM 202
Introduction to Communication II
Announcements
- The Jump Start volunteering opportunity advertised in class on Wednesday 7 October
What's this course all about?
In this course you will be learning about some of the main themes, theories and concepts that underpin the study of human communication. As such, we will examine how humans interact with each other to achieve different goals (e.g. constructing identities, establishing and maintaining relationships, building communities). We will look at the different ways these goals are achieved through a range of different modes of communication (e.g. linguistic, nonverbal, visual). We will also look at the ways people communicate in a number of different settings (e.g. one-to-one, organizational, political).
As you will hear in the first week, COM 202 is deliberately structured around six core concepts in communication:
PROCESS CULTURE MEANING
CONTEXT RELATIONSHIP POWER
We will be dealing with each of these core concepts in turn. In addition, every week you will be introduced to a different sub-field of human communication scholarship (e.g. nonverbal communication, relational communication). Most of these sub-fields covered in COM 202 are developed in courses run as part of the Department of Communication's program of academic research and teaching. Because of this, we look upon COM 202 partly as a general introduction to the field of human communication, and partly as a 'taster' for what you might study if you decide (or if you had decided!) to pursue communication as a major.