SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION

CMNS 437-4

Robert Hackett	Spring 2003
RCB 6231; 604-291-3863	Burnaby Eve.
Email: hackett@sfu.ca

MEDIA DEMOCRATIZATION: FROM CRITIQUE TO TRANSFORMATION

Prerequisites:

75 credit hours, including CMNS 235, 240 or 331. Cannot be taken for further credit if student has taken CMNS 428 or 487 under the same title.

Overview:

Does critical communication scholarship leave you frustrated and depressed? Aware but disempowered?

This course starts where many others end – the need for a democratic renewal of the media system in economically developed liberal-democracies in Canada. The focus, however, is not on the critique of actually-existing media, but on popular efforts and movements to define and build positive alternatives. Students are being asked to consider, and engage in, normative reasoning. The course takes as a starting point a value commitment to democracy, but students are certainly not asked to accept any particular political position. They are asked, however, to seriously (and critically) consider “progressive” critiques of, and alternatives to, the dominant media.

Possible topics include:

- Normative ideas about the media and democracy. What do we really mean by “Democracy”? What roles should the media play in a democracy? How should they be structured? In what ways, according to progressive critics, do the corporate media fall short of these criteria? What alternative structures and paradigms are being proposed?
- Historically, what political and social processes and groups have favoured or hindered media democratization? What strategic routes, what forms of struggle, have popular groups adopted in their efforts to win communicative space?
- What can we learn from the practice of independent, radical media?
- Could there be a coherent movement for media democratization, and what might be the most fruitful strategies for its emergence and growth?

Format:

A weekly participatory lecture/seminar, 3-4 hours. Ongoing participation in discussion, exercising your intellectual imagination, and keeping up with the readings, are essential. These activities, more than library research characterize the course.

Required Course Texts:

Most of the following five books will be required. The “required” ones will be labeled as such by the Bookstore.
Ian Angus, Emergent Publics: An Essay on Social Movements and Democracy (2001)
John D.H. Downing et al. Radical Media (2001)
Kate Duncan, ed., The Liberating Alternative: The Founding Convention of the Cultural Environment Movement (1999)
Philip Lee, ed. The Democratization of Communication (1995)
John Nichols & Robert McChesney, It’s the Media, Stupid (2000)

Assignments and Grades:

(subject to revision with notice)
Seminar participation, including occasionally setting questions and acting as “scribe” for class discussions 20%
Periodic in-class “pop quizzes” 15%
Paper #1 30%
Paper #2, extended take-home exam, or short research paper based on personal participation in media democratization project 35%

CMNS 437 is open to graduate students, with appropriate modifications, as a Directed Studies.

The School expects that the grades awarded in t his course will bear some reasonable relation to established university-wide practices with respect to both levels and distribution of grades. In addition the School will follow Policy T10.01 with respect to “Intellectual Honesty”, and “Academic Discipline” (see the current Calendar, General Regulations Section).