Center Courses: Speech Communication

The Center for Writing Studies, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Art and Design
Art History
Curriculum and Instruction
Educational Psychology
Rehabilitation Education
Speech Communication
Women's Studies

:: SPCM 429: Ethnographic Methods (Peggy Miller)
I highly recommend taking a Qualitative/Ethnographic Methods course; they are offered in various departments. Peggy's course introduced me to several texts that I included on my exam lists. One challenge was that several students in the course were already working on projects or at research sites together, so they knew each other (and each other's work) better than I could--I was a bit of an outsider. However, people were nice, and their projects were interesting. More important, Peggy was an excellent reader for my project--she had set up the course to support people at different stages for their ethnographic research projects, and she helped me think through different ways for presenting my data. (Description by Karen Lunsford)

:: SPCM 438: Seminar in Rhetorical Theory: Rhetoric and Visual Culture (Cara Finnegan)
I took this course in the spring of 2001 with Cara Finnegan. It was a great class, very helpful in providing a solid foundation in visual theory (Mitchell, Crary, Benjamin, Elkins). Cara was wonderful in allowing students to direct their work to the field/audience most appropriate for them. The reading load was pretty heavy, but the assignments themselves, a book review, response papers, classroom presentation (more like leading discussion), and seminar paper, were very useful. (Description by Jim Purdy)

:: SPCM 538 Visual Rhetoric (Cara Finnegan)
I took this class in Spring 2005 and it had changed somewhat (according to Finnegan) from the previous iteration she taught in the past. First, what I appreciated about Professor Finnegan was how knowledgable she was about the field of Writing Studies and her openness to discuss issues that relate to our field specifically. We moved from a general multidisciplinary overview of the field of visual studies and then spent most of the semester considering various applications and criticism from various fields that took up issues of visuality or visual objects to varying degrees. The weeks where arranged by theme (nature/ science, digital/new media, war, etc.). The last few weeks we discussed visual theories by W.J.T. Mitchell, Martin Jay, and other important figures. Discussion of disciplinary issues related to visual studies was a prevalent subtopic for the class. (Description by Martha Webber)

:: SPCM 438: Qualitative Methods in Critical Communications Research (Andrea Press)
The course gave an overview of ethnographic research methods. I found it very useful as a way to understand the uses of ethnography from the perspective of anthropology and sociology. (Description by Joyce Walker)

:: SPCM 538: Current Issues in Rhetorical Theory (Cara Finnegan)
This graduate seminar is a comprehensive survey of key developments in contemporary rhetorical theory during the past thirty years. It is designed to offer graduate students the opportunity to engage the most current debates in the field. (Description by Cara Finnegan)

:: SPCM 538: The Problem of the Public (Cara Finnegan)
Most academic formulations of politics and rhetoric assume the existence of a relatively stable, uniform entity called “the public.” But such assumptions beg the question of whether that thing we call “the public” indeed exists, and, if it does, whether it is as uniform and stable as we like to claim. This graduate seminar suggests that the public is the problem -- that scholars of rhetoric and political communication must come to terms with the public as a construct that both serves useful ends for deliberative democratic discourse and at the same time may reinforce and reinscribe oppressive relations among people characterized as much by difference as by homogeneity. (Description by Cara Finnegan)