Courses

Faculty in Rhetoric and Communication Studies marry scholarship and teaching, recognizing active, ongoing research and intellectual inquiry grounds genuine learning inside and outside the classroom. Faculty theorize about and analyze various forms of symbolic action-media, rhetoric, and relational dynamics-and treat subjects including elective politics, law, social protest, globalization, history, conflict and negotiation, and culture, the latter including public memory, consumerism, identity formation, gender, race, and class.

Theoretical expertise ranges from antiquity to post-modernity in the Western tradition. Methodological approaches include critical, critical/cultural, qualitative, and quantitative. RHCS professors mentor scholarly writing, foster intellectual exchange, promote performative agility, and encourage interdisciplinary exploration and discovery.

  • RHCS faculty view communication in a general liberal arts education to include, but not be limited to, the facility, in a variety of contexts to:
  • Analyze and speak extemporaneously on various public issues with clarity and informative and/or persuasive art
  • Report complex findings in a manner accessible to lay persons and appropriate to intellectual communities of their origination
  • Field interrogation in various venues thoughtfully, ethically, persuasively, or with other purposes
  • Manage conflict with an analytical eye towards reaching negotiation and resolution, or other ethical purposes
  • Identify, analyze, and/or critique public expressions of individual or collective identities and dominant ideologies as well as various public challenges to them
  • Present prepared addresses on various occasions, which may entail informative, persuasive, ceremonial, or other purposes.
  • Become sophisticated analytical audiences of public discourse and other forms of symbolism, which includes judiciousness in assessing arguments, emotional appeals, and other strategic choices, and recognizing the potency of visual rhetoric for various audiences.
  • Develop acumen in assessing communicative dynamics in various interpersonal or group settings for varied purposes, which might include alleviating misunderstandings or correcting insufficient or overly complex communicative patterns so as to promote good ends.

Most courses are considered either a rhetoric or communication studies course. Check major and minor requirements and upcoming courses for more information.

Rhetoric and Communication Studies

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  • RHCS 100 Public Speaking

    Units: 1

    Description
    Introduction to the art of public speaking. Students will learn the classical canons of rhetoric: the arts of invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery. Emphasis is placed on the design and delivery of speeches.
  • RHCS 101 Key Terms in Communication

    Units: 1

    Description
    Examines a dozen of the most important terms in the field of rhetoric and communication studies. The course is not an end-point for the study of communication, but, rather, an inquiry into a vocabulary that informs discussions in virtually every class in the RHCS curriculum. These terms include culture, ethics, identity, publics, criticism, power, rhetoric, media, and communication.
  • RHCS 102 Interpersonal Communication

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): Social Analysis (FSSA), AI-Social Inquiry (AISO), IF-Power/Equity/Identity/Cult (IFPE)

    Description
    Survey of theory and practice relating to one-to-one communication. Exploration of role of communication and meaning in development of self, perceptions, and relationships. Introduction to social scientific study of communication. Includes lab-based practicum.
  • RHCS 103 Rhetorical Theory

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): Linguistics elective (LING)

    Description
    Introduction to theoretical study of rhetoric where we learn to think about language, speech, argument, and symbolic action at large as social forces, influencing how we perceive ourselves and others, how we understand our relationship to local and global communities, and how we address important issues in politics, law, and culture.
  • RHCS 104 Interpreting Rhetorical Texts

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): Linguistics elective (LING)

    Description
    Introduction to critical interpretation of rhetorical texts such as speeches, written arguments, and various media. Topics covered may include audience analysis, lines of reasoning, logical fallacies, modes of proof, evidence types, generic forms, and visual vocabularies.
  • RHCS 105 Media, Culture, and Identity

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): American studies electives (AMER), Social Analysis (FSSA), AI-Social Inquiry (AISO), IF-Power/Equity/Identity/Cult (IFPE)

    Description
    Basic theoretical frameworks and concepts in media studies. Through close analysis of a variety of texts including, but not limited to, films, music, television programs, newspapers, magazines, and websites, explores the ways in which culture is produced and consumed. Case studies and other examples will provide entry points into thinking about how culture shapes and also is informed by individual and collective identities.
  • RHCS 245 Digital Humanities

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): IF-Quantitative Data Literacy (IFQD)

    Description
    Brings together computational methods with humanities questions. Explores the possibilities and limits of methods such as data visualization, network analysis, and text analysis for analyzing humanities data and modes of communication for scholarly arguments. Asks questions about computation, data, and digital methods.
  • RHCS 250 Critical Intercultural Communication

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): GS: Skills and Applied Courses (GSSA), AI-Social Inquiry (AISO), IF-Power/Equity/Identity/Cult (IFPE)

    Description
    Provides an introduction to the study of intercultural communication through a critical lens, with a special emphasis on how power affects communication between different types of cultures on a transnational, national, and local level. The course highlights the many communicative contexts (economic, governmental, legal, educational, family, media and more) that surround this power and lead to both cross-cultural collaboration and conflict. Students will engage with global perspectives that challenge Western worldviews and offer alternative narratives about issues such as borders, bodies, space, and place.
  • RHCS 279 Special Topics in Rhetoric and Communication Studies

    Units: 1

    Description
    Special topics course offering lower-level/introductory inquiry in rhetoric and communication studies.
  • RHCS 295 Topics in Research

    Units: 1

    Description
    These topical courses focus on theory and practice of selected research methods (e.g. rhetorical criticism, ethnography, interview and survey methods, etc.), providing students with critical understanding of published research, a grounding in research methodology, and a working knowledge of the research process. May be repeated for credit when topics differ.
  • RHCS 302 Advanced Theories in Interpersonal Communication

    Units: 1

    Description
    In-depth exploration of specific theories in area of interpersonal communications. Will focus on role of communication in creating, maintaining, repairing, and transforming individual's sense of self and other. From this foundation, students will explore essence of dialogue through works of Buber, Bakhtin, Arnett, and Baxter.
  • RHCS 333 Theory and Pedagogy

    Units: 1

    Description
    For students who have successfully applied for positions as student consultants and speech fellows at the speech center.
  • RHCS 340 Rhetoric in South Asia

    Units: 1

    Description
    Seminar on the rhetorical production of “South Asia” in contemporary U. S. media cycles, drawing attention to contemporary issues of public attention in and about South Asia. Using the critical and creative work of such writers as Gayatri Spivak, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Amartya Sen and Martin Bernal, the course equips students with classical, comparative, and critical cultural tools from rhetorical theory, and with a transnational and intersectional feminist focus, the course excavates discourses of cultural problems and innovates rhetorical means of their elimination. Student work is collaborative, collective, critical, and creative, oriented towards digital/media production for public audiences.

     

    Prerequisites

    RHCS 102

  • RHCS 342 Rhetoric and Gender Violence

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): WGSS Gender and Violence (WGGV)

    Description
    We explore in this seminar rhetorics of gender violence, resistance, and abolition. Taking a rhetorical approach, we explore “tropes” of gender violence: how social discourses focus on gender violence, how public beliefs about gender are produced through rhetoric and can set or eliminate conditions for gender violence. Drawing on both classical and contemporary rhetorical and cultural theories, we explore how tropes turn attention to definitions, contexts, cases, causes, and effects of gender violence, along with means of resistance to and abolition of gender violence. We bring our explorations to bear on considerations of contemporary gender violence crises in the aspiration of developing a praxis of living that is free from gender violence.
  • RHCS 343 Rhetoric and Politics

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): Law/Liberal Arts area 7 (LW7)

    Description
    Analysis of American political systems from rhetorical perspective using several theoretical frameworks and applied research. Examine interpretive processes on which political arguments and ideologies are based. Study impact of language on issues, candidates, and campaigns. Develop perspective of government's role in the "ongoing conversation" of politics and evaluate rules, choices, and strategies employed in different political arenas.
  • RHCS 345 Data and Society

    Units: 1

    Description
    Explores how topics such as algorithmic decision making, media manipulation, and “big” data effect our daily lives in the past and present.

     

    Prerequisites

    Any 100-level RHCS course, BUAD 202, DSST 189, DSST 289, or ECON 170

  • RHCS 347 Advertising and Consumer Culture

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): American studies electives (AMER)

    Description
    Critical approach to the study of advertising and consumer culture, challenging students to reconsider entrenched assumptions and ideas about advertising and consumer culture more broadly. Issues of representation, production, reception, and citizenship, considering the material advertisement as well as its relationship to individuals and larger institutional structures. Application of theoretical concepts to historical and contemporary advertisements and objects of consumer culture. Application of different methodological approaches to the study of advertising including ethnography, focus groups, and textual analysis.
  • RHCS 349 Memory and Memorializing in the City of Richmond

    Units: 0-1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): American studies electives (AMER)

    Description
    Examines various sites of memory production (i.e. films, museums, monuments) -- how they have been conceptualized and debated -- and asks students to consider memory not only as an entity used in reconstructing the past but capable of being reconstructed itself. Over the course of the semester, students may take several field trips to historical sites and museums throughout the city of Richmond to experience how memory is reproduced and to consider alternate ways of crafting narratives of the past.
  • RHCS 350 Rhetoric in a Globalized World

    Units: 1

    Description
    Exploration of the rhetoric of U.S. internationalism in the 20th century and its impact on the discourse of globalization in the 21st century through close analysis of speeches, public documents, maps, photos, posters, radio, and films. A broad historical/critical perspective is offered on important public arguments pertaining to the global expansion of American power, while also engaging with significant archival and other primary materials from both American and international perspectives. Special attention to the relationship between historical and contemporary rhetorics of intervention, foreign aid, and exceptionalism.
  • RHCS 352 Media Theory

    Units: 1

    Description
    Introduces alternative media and communication studies theories that include and exceed questions of representation, with special emphasis on the implications of media form on media content. Asks questions about how media are implicated in what many media theorists have called “man,” i.e., the human, critically interrogating what this human means in terms of race, gender, class, and sexuality, while also thinking about the relation between said human and media technologies.
  • RHCS 353 Rhetoric and Law

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): Law/Liberal Arts area 1 (LW1), PPEL Law-related Area Course (PPLW), WGSS elective (WGSS)

    Description
    Inquiry into the law from rhetorical perspectives, using the history and theory of rhetoric and its long-standing association with law and justice. Examination of interpretive processes on which legal arguments and ideologies are based. Exploration of the language of legal argument, court decisions, and of the role of rhetoric and the law in shaping of public life and social justice.
  • RHCS 354 Communication Theory and Race

    Units: 1

    Description
    Applies the work of Western, modern theory to communication and rhetorical studies. Seeks to understand epistemology (knowledge), ontology (being or existence), Marxism (materialism), and/or resistance as of central importance for communication studies.
  • RHCS 359 Media and War

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): American studies electives (AMER), GS: Pol Gov diplomacy/order (GSDW)

    Description
    Engages students in an inquiry into the rhetorical and communicative dimension of war in the twenty-first century.
  • RHCS 360 Digital Humanities Workshop

    Units: 1

    Fulfills General Education Requirement(s): IF-Quantitative Data Literacy (IFQD)

    Description
    The workshop builds a digital humanities project around a specific topic, bringing together the exploration of data and the humanities. The topic is chosen for each semester and often involves a collaboration with a community partner.

     

    Prerequisites

    RHCS 245, DSST 289, DSST 395, or AMST 201

  • RHCS 387 Independent Study

    Units: 0.25-1

    Description
    No more than one unit of independent study may count toward the major or minor.
  • RHCS 388 Individual Internship

    Units: 0.25-1

    Description
    Practical application of speech communication principles and skills in a supervised, out-of-class environment. Graded pass/fail only. No more than one unit of internship may count toward rhetoric and communication studies major. Open to majors and minors only, but does not count toward the rhetoric and communication studies minor. No more than 1.5 units of internship in any one department and 3.5 units of internship overall may be counted toward required degree units.
  • RHCS 406 Summer Undergraduate Research

    Units: 0

    Description
    Documentation of the work of students who receive summer fellowships to conduct research [or produce a creative arts project] in the summer. The work must take place over a minimum of 6 weeks, the student must engage in the project full-time (at least 40 hours per week) during this period, and the student must be the recipient of a fellowship through the university. Graded S/U.

     

    Prerequisites

    Approval by a faculty mentor

  • RHCS 412 Special Topics Seminar

    Units: 1

    Description
    Special topics courses allow for advanced inquiry and research in Rhetoric and Communication Studies.

     

    Prerequisites

    RHCS 102, RHCS 103, RHCS 104, RHCS 105, or RHCS 106

  • RHCS 490 Senior Capstone

    Units: 0-1

    Description
    Special topics seminar for seniors only focusing on research with an oral presentation requirement. Course is required for the major.
  • RHCS 498 Honors Thesis Writing

    Units: 1

    Description
    Special topics seminar for seniors only focusing on research with an oral presentation requirement. Course is required for the major.
  • RHCS 499 Honors Thesis Writing

    Units: 1

    Description
    Advanced research and writing opportunity for departmental honors students. Requires completion and presentation of honors thesis.