Our intercultural communication courses are taught by internationally recognized faculty and explore critical questions such as:

  • How do we develop a more inclusive society?
  • How do we deal with intercultural conflict productively?
  • How do we engage in meaningful intercultural dialogue?
  • How do we address important social issues in innovative ways?
  • How do we bring about sustainable social change?
  • How does social media influence our perceptions of world events?
  • How do I develop a global identity?

Lower-division courses:

COM 263 Elements of Intercultural Communication     (various sessions)
This course is designed as an introduction to the basic concepts, principles, and skills for improving communication among persons from different minority, racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. Various dimensions of intercultural communication related to both domestic and international contexts will be discussed from multiple perspectives including social scientific, interpretive, and critical.

Upper-division courses:

COM 463 Intercultural Communication: A Global Context        #90459  
This course offers students the opportunity to broaden their understanding of intercultural communication in various communicative contexts from a global perspective by exploring topics such as:

  • Immigration and acculturation in the family context
  • Intercultural identity in an interpersonal and intercultural context
  • Media and globalization in a mass media context
  • Health literacy and health disparity in health contexts

COM 394 Communication, Culture, and New Media Technologies      #70698  

This course is designed to enable undergraduate students to think about and apply communication theory and research to the socio-cultural implications of various communication technologies.

This online class is planned to examine the impact of communication technologies on our daily lives, going beyond technical and how-to issues to examine how new media affects our communication practices with others. This course will help satisfy the curiosity of anyone who wonders about the social consequences of media technology in contemporary society.

COM 394 Digital Media, Culture, and Communication in Asia      #90387  
Asia is mediatizing rapidly and Internet usage in Asia outpaces every other part of the globe, with its online users making up close to 50% of the world’s internet population. One-third of the social network site Facebook users come from Asia.

This new course, emerging from the #AsiaMediated project, will develop undergraduates’ media literacy skills by helping students access, analyze, evaluate information creation and sharing across communication platforms and create transmedia content across digital and social media sites. This course will examine app development and design, knowledge production and communication processes on popular Asian networks. To promote critical and interdisciplinary thinking on socio-cultural aspects of new media, this course will discuss implications of digital content and applications for identity, community, politics and authority relations in Asia and worldwide.

COM 494 Conflict and Intercultural Dialogue     #72479  
With our society becoming more culturally diverse, we often find ourselves divided along political, ethnic, and religious fault lines. Although the challenges are many, a dialogue is one of the keys to bridging these differences and working collectively toward a shared future. In this course, we will explore the complex relationship between conflict, culture, and dialogue. Our focus will be on questions such as the following:

  • What is the role of dialogue in building bridges of understanding across cultural divides? 
  • What are the challenges to engaging in intercultural dialogue? 
  • What are the approaches to facilitating intercultural dialogue? 
  • What are the potential contributions and limitations of intercultural dialogue?