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Our Program

The Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh educates students who make positive change in the world.  We are engaged in the production and study of cultural, political, and material practices of meaning-making.  In pursuing our goals, we examine contexts of power, knowledge, and desire that exert differential impacts on various kinds of bodies and groups. We collaborate with students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels to inform their lives through practical knowledge and scholarly criticism.

In short, we attend to the intersection of continuity and change.  Our research, teaching, and public-facing work in community outreach attends to structures of power.  We find such power at work in capital, race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, ability, and elsewhere, and we look for opportunities for social justice.  Moreover, we examine the forms of persuasion, protest, silence, coming-to-voice, testimony, noise, and imagination needed to transform such power structures.