Program Clusters

 

This specialization focuses on cultivating doctoral students with abilities of message production and interpretation.Doctoral students are expected not only to construct effective talks or texts but also to interpret their meaning thoroughly through a fine analysis of the interplay of institutions, texts, and audiences of various communication systems.

The next four-year rotation of coursework in Rhetoric and Culture tentatively includes:

 

Critical Issues in Rhetorical Theory

This course frequents students with current issues in contemporary rhetorical theory in a way to help grasp the significance of rhetoric in social sciences and its specificity in communication science. With classical concepts and its modern implications as the basis, students are guided through topics such as: rhetoric as public judgment, rhetoric and agency, and visions of civility, with necessary dialogues with modern thinkers while addressing challenges from postmodern conditions and technological innovations.

Special Topics in Persuasion Communication

Persuasion exists in all communication situations. The course focuses primarily three dimensions: (1)to learn the basic elements of persuasion (cognitive, attitudes, beliefs, behavior, emotional); (2) to explore the more commonly use of the theory, such as cognitive dissonance theory, theory of reasoned action, processing models of persuasion;(3) persuasion tactics and effect evaluation.

 

Special Topics in Discourse Analysis

The main purpose of the course is to compare among nine interaction-oriented approaches in the area of discourse analysis: speech act theory, Gricean pragmatics, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis,  discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis and narrative analysis. For each approach you will learn basic assumptions and typical questions. Then, you will utilize what you have learned about these approaches to analyze samples of discourse and also to critically analyze journal articles.

Special Topics in Public Communication

Public communication is defined as the “one-to-many” communication. It is manifested on both organizational and individual levels. Organizational public communication is when a specific collectivity communicates to its many stakeholders. Individual public communication is when one person communicates to many audience members at once face to face or broadcasted by some electronic media. This seminar will cover processes and effects of both kinds of public communication. Topics of interest include audience analysis, strategizing, message design and their short-term and long-term impacts. A special emphasis will be put on the role, principles and performance of organizational spokespersons, since these communicators usually serve as organizational and individual public communicator all at once, and play an important role in today’s society.

Special Topics In Marketing Communication

In the recent years, the domain of marketing communication has undergone an obvious paradigmatic shift. Persuasion approaches characteristic of psychological, societal, semiotic and rhetoric underpinnings are gradually converging to broaden theoretical and practical horizons, from which the dimensions of cognition, emotion and socio-cultural symbolism are integrated to greatest possible extent. Generally, marketing communication scholars and practitioners work more closely to identify multiple avenues to get deeper inside the mind and heart of the target audiences, thus yielding holistic consumer experience and creating sustainable communication effectiveness. This course, corresponding to this trend, aims to enable students to better utilize the up-to-date knowledge pertinent to marketing communication through conceptual exploration, case study and practical application.

Special Topics in Risk Communication

Risk is a major concept in modern society. Since Ulrich Beck’s book in 1992, Risk Society, we have seen the growth of risk communication and crisis preparedness in national policy debates and public concerns. The goals of this course are (1) to understand the historical nature and concept of risk society and risk communication, (2) to study some of the prominent social science and communication theories that help students understand the risk and risk communication process, (3) to study how communication works with situations of everyday risks and with crises, (4) to understand the best communicative strategies for handling a risk situation, (5) to understand the reasoning for the new push in public participation in the risk communication process and (6) to discuss some case studies that learn from experiences in the health, environmental and industry fields.

Seminar in Rhetorical criticism

As the methodology, the basic logics and methods of rhetorical criticism are the required for a researcher with a rhetorical focus. Besides reviewing the fundamental procedures of rhetorical criticism, this seminar will cover three major topics. The first topic is meta-theoretical concern of rhetorical criticism, including philosophical assumptions and standards of evaluation for rhetorical criticism. The second topic covers different approaches of rhetorical criticism, including traditional, dramatical, and critical criticism and the variations from three schools. The final topic will be on how to apply rhetorical criticism to examine important rhetorical artifacts, and to complete a rhetorical criticism study.

Visual Semiotics and Rhetorics

Following digital convergence, cross-media or multimedia expressions have long been part and parcel of communication phenomena today. The habitual division of media content into “verbal and nonverbal” has gradually lost its validity, if not legitimacy, when communication competence are more and more beyond the familiar linguistic scope. Indeed, the concept of media literacy today necessarily implies sensitivity and sensibility toward iconographical, musical, and animation elements together with language. These non-verbal” elements have long been great instruments for advocacy, and in both narrative and argumentative forms. The popularity of terms such as “visual communication”, “visual rhetoric”, “multimodal expressions” proves that it is an exigence to address media effects or literacy in a new light of the “visual”.

This course tries to familiarize students with this “visual” trend in communication research. With social semiotic as the pivotal, it explores this apparently new academic trend as something deeply rooted with rich traditions. Different schools of thought and their impacts on visual culture research will be introduced in a way balanced between theoretical knowledge, critical analysis and creative expressions.

This specialization focuses on cultivating doctoral students with abilities of media management and media policy planning.  Doctoral students are expected not only to be familiar with social impact of communication technologies from a historical view but also to be able to manage mediated communication organizations and planning media policy.

The next four-year rotation of coursework in Communication Technologies and Influence tentatively includes:

Critical Issues in Communication and Technology

The purpose of the course is to develop students’ understanding of new technology and of its impact on various areas of society, including historical development, social and cultural context, issues and applications of new communication technologies. The broader aim of the course is to encourage students to critically analyze the articles they read and to involve comprehensive review and criticism of development of new technology.

 

Key Issues in Organizational Communication and Media Management

1. To introduce the important issues of media management and organizational communication. 2. Able to predominate the changes and impact of media, have media management knowledge and the ability to propose relevant topics of media policy.

Special Topics in Political Economy of Communication

Familiarise students with mainstream and alternative approaches to political economy of communication.

 

Special Topics in Telecommunication Policy and Law

The basic objectives of this course are two-fold. First, from practical point of view, it is a course for those students who will work in the broadcast and related electronic industries. Understanding telecommunication law as reflected by the FCC will help you to aware of many issues and problems in the areas of station policies and programming. This course will not try to train you as a lawyer, but to realize how the regulation and policy of telecommunication is formulated (in other words, the regulatory process), what the specific regulations applied to various industries, and what kinds of implications will different regulations have on the existing and new media.

Second, understand the role of other players such as courts, other federal agencies in formulating these regulations and policies. Most significantly, the role of the court, which has influenced the FCC from its inception, is imminent.

Based on these two objectives, we will study the structure of the FCC, the Courts, and other federal agencies. After the regulatory process is understood, we then will discuss the specific regulations as they relate to the broadcast industry and cable systems. Lastly, we will spend two-week talking about the 1st Amendment cases in relation to the rights of broadcasters.

 

Critical Issues in Communication for Social Change

The course examines concepts and issues associated with the role of communication in the developing world. We will survey the theory and practice of varying philosophical premises of development communication including：modernization theory, dependency theory, debates on information flows and new media technologies, social marketing, world-system theory and globalization theory.

 

Special Topic for Media Effects Study

Study of media effect has undergone significant paradigmatic transfer in recent years, tending to accentuate full integration of media psychology and hermeneutic phenomenology. Therefore, research perspectives encompass both the micro-level and macro-level communication contexts, probing how conventional and newly emerged media may interact to exercise joint effect on individual audiences as well as society at large. In response to the said paradigmatic transfer, this course revolves around broad range of impact generated by various media modalities on psychological processes, identity construction and formation of socio-cultural trends. Hopefully, students are more enabled to conduct study of media effect with holistic approach.

Media , Technology and Culture

This doctoral course, as the core curriculum for the Communication Technology Group in the Institute of Communications, focuses mainly on the relations and interaction among culture, the media, and technology.
If culture is defined as “the trajectory of human life”, then it is similar to that of Wikipedia, which interprets culture as “The evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively”. The definitions of “culture” vary among different groups of people. Through the dialogues with communication scholars and the great masters, this course is aimed at rethinking how to cope with the cultural changes caused by the changes in the media.
Thus, the teaching objectives of this course are drafted as follows:
1. To explore the structural evolution in human society and culture.
2. To interpret the interaction among culture, the media, and technology, and the patterns that the human beings use and turn them into a part of their life.
3. To explore from a variety of perspectives the relations among culture, the media, and technology.

This specialization focuses on cultivating doctoral students with abilities of media criticism and social practices.  Doctoral students are expected not only to be able to analyze media practices from a critical view but also to provide practical solutions to important media issues.

The next four-year rotation of coursework in Media Criticism and Culture Action tentatively includes:

Critical Communication Theories

The Innovation of communication technology which previously never seen had changed the activities and regime of human kind. Gutenberg movable-type printing facilitated Reformation and republic of letters to go public. These historical processes constitute modern public sphere and national state. The construction of electronic transmission instruments build up the flow of trans-continent and trans-national information. Furthermore, a global-scale civil society become possible. This course will try to analysis the social historical context of modern communication technology and mass communication regime in historical perspective as well as the impact to the cultural production, distribution and consumption. To discovery how communicational activities change the social and public life. How could personal identities and tastes were constructed in terms of different models and implements, like books, press, cinema, broadcasting, television and network. What effects regard of civil societies and public sphere would be sustained by communication.

 

Critical Debates in Communication and Culture Activism

Through familiarity with critical debates, understand the trends, schools, development, potentialities and limitations of communication cultural studies.

Non-Profit Organizations and Communication

Nowadays the non-profit sector plays a key role in civil society and in the economy. The course content is designed for students who not only plan to study nonprofits, but who also may serve as volunteers or leaders. We will examine the history and scope of the nonprofit sector, both globally and within Taiwan, as well as contemporary theories of nonprofit enterprise, internal issues for effective management and leadership, marketing and public relations, advocacy and external communication techniques, decision making models and current ideas about possible future for the sector. Students will leave the course with a solid understanding of these organizations whose bottom lines are not focused on generating profits, but on public service and changing world.

Communication and Cultural Modernity

This course discusses some crucial issues, debating events from colonial age to post-war Taiwan’s cultural changes. These issues include colonial and colonial modernity, Taiwan new literary movement, Taiwan Cultural Association, K?minka movement, anti-communist literature, Chinese Cultural Renascence, folksy literature, urban cultural industry, vaunt-courier arts and social movement, community construction and local cultural history, critique to localism, global cultural consumption, national identity and post-modernity and so on.

 

Alternative Media Studies and Praxis

 

Special Topics in Gender and Communication

This course emplores view-points inspired by feminist theories and sexuality/gender studies to explore critical issues within media organizations and communication institutions. First it seeks to unpack and analyze issues in the media representation pertaining to sex, gender roles, sexual orientation, gender expression, gender identity, race, class, ethnicity. Secondly, this course examines a variety of phenomena within gender and labour, gender and organizations, gender and (organizational) culture, gender and (communication) management at work place in Taiwan. Thirdly, this course will encourage students to think about social/cultural activism and strategies.

 

Culture:Theory and Field Study

 

This course provides a comprehensive discussion on major works in the study of modern society such as those by Marx ,Weber , Freud, Claude Levi-Strauss ,Victor W. Turner ,Clifford Geertz ,Michel Foucault ,Pierre Bourdieu , etc. At the same time , it also gives a practical guidance for the participant observation and qualitative research for the field work in modern society , illustrated by concrete cases.