About The Department

What Is Comm Studies?

The field of communication studies is notoriously difficult to define. This is due, in part, to the fact that Communication Studies is an inter-discipline that has achieved disciplinary status over the past thirty years. The relative youth of Communication as a discipline, compared to more established fields, often results in misapprehensions about its intellectual content and institutional history. Communication Studies brings together elements of the social sciences and the humanities under one central concern: the study of humans' communicative capacities. This might involve studying the ways in which those capacities have developed and congealed into technologies, social forms and practices. It might involve analyzing the impact of these communicative styles, strategies, and practices on political, cultural and economic development. Communication Studies can include the study of humans' symbolic systems, such as language or images, and the social relations and forms produced through those systems of communication - i.e., culture. It might also involve the systematic study of the production, transmission and reception of communication as information and the institutional arrangements that might coalesce around these processes as specific organizations of knowledge.

Communication Studies at Northeastern
Northeastern's Communication Studies department has been in existence since 1981. It was formed out of the Speech and Theatre department and expanded its curriculum to include radio and television production, organizational communications, and interpersonal communication. Over the past two decades the departments has grown to house the largest number of majors in the College of Arts and Sciences. While providing a solid liberal art education, the department also offers three distinct areas of concentration.

Organizational Communication
This concentration of communication studies focuses on the flow and impact of communication messages in organizations. Students learn how to effectively diagnose communication problems in organizations and to formulate strategies for change. Students are solidly schooled in various theories of organizations as well as in skills for the assessment of organizational communication practices. Students go on to pursue jobs in fields such as marketing, public relations, advertising, corporate communications, as well as in training and development and consulting.

Public Advocacy & Rhetoric
This concentration of Communication Studies includes the study of the skills, critical methods, and communication theories necessary to effective leadership, citizenship, and professional engagement in a functioning democracy. Students of Public Advocacy and Rhetoric will develop competencies that enable them to think critically, understand the value of a variety of theoretical perspectives, make persuasive arguments, and gain the skills and confidence necessary for successful participation in their workplaces, their communities, and their nation.

Media Studies
This concentration of communication studies offers training in critical media analysis, media history, communication theory and audience analysis. It also offers hands-on training in media production, programming and management. These courses explore the aesthetic, technical and logistical aspects of electronic media production. The media studies stream provides students with both the theory and practice necessary to understand the complex interactions between communication technologies, cultural forms, and economic and political practices. Students go on to graduate school, but also go to work in the fields of media production, advertising, public relations, and teaching.

The Future of Communication Studies at Northeastern
Students flock to Communication Studies for a reason. As a generation raised within highly mediated environments and against the backdrop of rapid developments in communications technology, they naturally gravitate toward a field that addresses these issues. They are bearing witness to the revolutionary changes being wrought by new communication technologies and seek ways to think about these changes. They understand, often intuitively, the deeply formative role mass media images and messages play in their constitution of self and in their meaning-making activities and seek the means to empower themselves within these processes. They understand the power of effective communication skills in the workplace and seek to develop them. They see that an education in the management of information and communication flow only makes sense in this knowledge economy. Students understand that Communication Studies will provide them with ways to understand, think critically about, intervene in, and successfully navigate our increasingly mediated and communication-obsessed social environment.

Some have called Communication Studies, "social science for the 21st century." Others see it as "philosophy for the New Media Age." Epithets aside, Communication Studies provides the kind of innovative interdisciplinary education students need in these times. Our students receive a well-rounded education in the founding premises of the liberal arts and the social sciences, as well as a more applied and instrumental education in a variety of communications related fields. They are given the opportunity to integrate theory and practice via applied workshop courses and the co-op program. They are encouraged to develop critical thinking skills, strong communication skills, and creative problem-solving skills. More than this, Communication Studies students are given a solid context for thinking through and understanding the more career-oriented and pragmatic choices they must make in their lives. Communication Studies encourages the development of a solid sense of ethics and personal responsibility, and the tools to contribute.