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COMS 626: POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNICATION

Credits: 
2

Theoretical approaches to communication have tended to derive from the structural functionalist consensus social analysis perspective. This course challenges this dominant approach (media as autonomous social institutions rather than as instruments for domination of the disempowered by the powerful) by examining theories of social relations of communication including Gramsci’s articulation of hegemony, the Althusserian notion of communication as an ideological state apparatus and Gunder Frank’s dependency hypothesis. It is envisaged that these critical approaches to examining communication would highlight institutional and power implications for the formulation of meanings into messages vis-à-vis predicted channel influences.