Spring 2025

RHCS 100-01: Public Speaking(T/R) 9:00-10:15 am
RHCS 100-02: Public Speaking(T/R) 10:30- 11:45 am
RHCS 100-03: Public Speaking(T/R) 9:00-10:15 am
RHCS 100-04: Public Speaking (T/R) 1:30-2:45 pm
RHCS 103-01: Rhetorical Theory(T/R) 12:00-1:15 pm
RHCS 103-02: Rhetorical Theory(T/R) 1:30-2:45 pm
RHCS 105-01: Media, Culture, and Identity (M/W)10:30-11:45 am
RHCS 105-02: Media, Culture, and Identity (T/R)10:30-11:45 am
RHCS 105-03: Media, Culture, and Identity (T/R) 1:30-2:45 pm
RHCS 250-01: Critical Intercultural Communications (M/W)10:30-11:45 am
RHCS 279-01: Video Art and Alternative Media (M/W) 12:00-2:00 pm
RHCS 295-01:ST: Media and Activism (M/W) 12:00-1:15 pm
RHCS 295-02: ST: Media and Activism (M/W) 1:30-1:45 pm
RHCS 345-01: Data and Society (M/W) 9:00-10:15 am
RHCS 345-02: Data and Society (M/W) 12:00-1:15 pm
RHCS 345-03: Data and Society (M/W) 3:00-4:15 pm
RHCS 412-01: Artificial Intelligence Past and Present (T/R) 3:00-4:14 pm
RHCS 412-02: Rhetoric and Revolution (T/R) 3:00-4:15 pm
RHCS 490-01: Senior Capstone (W) 10:30 am - 1:15 pm

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COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
RHCS 279-01: Video Art and Alternative Media …Prof. Drummond
This intermediate-level course provides a constructive and critical framework for the development of independently conceived projects in Video Art and Alternative Media. Historical and contemporary texts situate video within a larger cultural, historical, technological, and socio-political framework. Screenings of art media provide first-hand insight into the radical nature of this field, which embraces marginalized voices and perspectives, interdisciplinary methods and research, alternative production and distribution, and experimental and activist media. Students are challenged to expand their visual literacy through written work and video projects; to ask questions; to consider nuances and think critically; and, ultimately, to consider their own subjectivity and agency within a dominant cultural ideology that promotes consumption, familiarity and stasis over diversity, creativity, and innovation.
“Video is everywhere and nowhere at once. It surrounds us as signals and waves and data flows, but it remains ephemeral, shapeshifting, endlessly dispersed and dislocated. Unlike celluloid film, video can be instantly transmitted. And unlike traditional artistic materials, video depends on transmission: on destinations rather than origins, on simultaneous presence and absence, on images here relaying events there in an instant. Video became widely accessible as a consumer technology in the 1960s, but it also became subject to near-total corporate or government control in nations around the globe. Today it forms a pervasive and fluid media network that is thoroughly global, social, and interactive. Indeed, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, video has arguably become the dominant mode of communication. Video is on our phones and on our screens, shaping public opinion and creating new publics in turn, spreading memes and lies, evidence and fact, fervor and power, even stoking revolution. In other words, video is a means of politics and an agent of social change; it has transformed the world… Artists have explored the social and political effects of video for decades, inventing tools, forms, and ideas in the process. Some hoped to create entirely new networks of communication, to stimulate democratic engagement and public participation. Others protested the rise of commercial and state control over communication, information, and life itself…” — Michelle Kuo/Stuart Comer, Signals: How Video Transformed the World, MoMA, 2023.
RHCS 295-01 and 295-02: ST: Media and Activism... Dr. Suglo
This course offers an introduction to diverse methodological frameworks and methods for understanding and studying the relationship between media and activism. We will delineate this relationship through thinking about media, activism, media in activism, media & activism and, media as activism. We will examine with various methods for engaging in and understanding activist organizing around the world. At the end of the class students will engage in a project where they will utilize at least one method learned in the class to critically study one activist movement past or present. Readings, lectures, guest lectures, discussions, activities, and assignments are designed to equip students with the tools to engage in research in media studies and critical humanistic modes of inquiry.
RHCS 412-01: Artificial Intelligence Past and Present... Dr. Sun
This course invites students to explore the complex journey of artificial intelligence (AI) from its historical roots to its contemporary significance. By examining AI through three distinct lenses—technical development, philosophical foundations, and societal implications—students will gain a multifaceted understanding of this transformative technology.
 Key topics will include the evolution of AI and robotics, milestones in algorithm development, representations of AI in popular culture, and pressing issues of bias, social justice, and environmental concerns in current AI practices. Utilizing theories of technology, we will unravel the complexities of AI and consider its impact on our past, present, and future.
 This course aims to provide students with a solid foundation in AI's evolution while encouraging critical engagement with the broader societal implications of this technology.
RHCS 412-02: Rhetoric and Revolution:  Commemorating the 35th Anniversary of the 1989 Revolutions... Dr. Barney
The momentous revolutions across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 were created, sustained, contested, re-remembered, and reconstituted through the power of symbols. With the 25th anniversary of the revolutions upon us, this course looks at the fall of communism and its tumultuous aftermath from a rhetorical perspective covering cases in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and others. From the lofty speeches of resistance leaders, the homemade pamphlets circulated by intellectuals, the slogans used by everyday protesters, to the provocative photos, television broadcasts, and even monuments, memorials and the Berlin Wall itself, the emerging democracies in Europe were built on an extraordinary combination of language and visuality. While using 1989’s revolutions as an organizing principle, the course also explores issues of globalization, justice, identity, and nationalism in the post-communist period—tracing how the memory of 1989 was used strategically by different political actors in the decades since. Students will write original rhetorical criticism on primary artifacts from the 1989-era and beyond and will engage with international students and experts from other disciplines at UR during the course of the semester.