Com­mu­nic­at­ive Di­lem­mas and Pub­lic Af­fairs

Course content

The course builds on new sociological theories to equip students to analyze how societies are increasingly differentiated in different communication streams that have become more and more dependent on each other. Under the conditions of the pandemic, we have experienced major crises and scandals and seen how local and international actors across many sectors (health, economy, politics, education and security) become interdependent and reliant on new technologies and cannot be treated separately.

This subject equips students with knowledge needed to understand the many different streams of communication at play and how their interdependencies make demands on organization and management.

In the first part of the course, the students will learn to observe and analyze different streams of communication such as security, health, mass media and law, and understand their autonomy and build in ambiguities and dilemmas. The students will learn new theoretical vocabularies pertaining to the repertoire of form and media of communication, and how they might be producing new possibilities and innovations. Politics appears here as a question of how to connect and disconnect different forms and media opening up transformative possibilities.

In the second part of the course, the students will learn new sociological theories concerning the role of platforms (cloud sharing, social media, gig economy. etc) and their communicative and organizing role in societies. The students will learn how platforms produce data and how their data management techniques increasingly permeate institutions, organizations and the social contexts in which they are embedded. The students will learn how the streams of communication instantiated across platforms become naturalized, increasingly reconfiguring the social order of institutions, organizations and their environments as a data order.