Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines communicative responses to transforming global communications systems and shifting structures of global economic and cultural power. Considers how communicators and producers of knowledge and culture interact with and produce these systems and structures and the implications of these processes for social justice. Note: Priority will be given to students enrolled in Global Communication Double MA Degree program. Students with credit for CMNS 858 (Special Topics: CMNS & Global Social Justice) in Spring 2014 & Spring 2015 may not take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

Overview: 

"Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.” (Rawls) “…the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.” (Engels) “Man is above all else mind, consciousness—that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.” (Gramsci) “The condition of possibility for deconstruction is a call for justice.” (Derrida) “Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.” (Habermas) “Global social injustice is intimately linked to global cognitive injustice.” (de Souza Santos)

This course uses the lens of justice and the process of producing knowledge to examine the relationship between communication and the global. In the first half of the course we will reflect on how knowing the global is a question of justice, by thinking through our personal approaches to producing and communicating knowledge. In the second half of the course we will examine justice in terms of the epistemological question of how to know the global. Here we will consider various differing visions of the relationship between knowledge and justice — idealization, critical historicism, constructivist reason, situated logics and embodiment — and ask whether, and how, ways of reasoning and communicating shape global justice.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: