In this interdisciplinary course you will examine how political power, forms of governing and communication are intimately connected, and why these connections matter.  

The course deals with communication as sense-making. You will consider politics as the formation of a common world and how rhetoric, as argument, is an integral part of politics.  

Key topics are the role of rhetoric and democracy, an emerging planetary rhetoric as a novel approach to contemporary political issues, our formation as individuals, and governing ourselves. 

You will explore practices and technologies of communication, and introduced to an understanding of communication as fully social and practice using key concepts to explore current issues and arguments and their role in the politics of a changing planetary world.

Areas to be examined include what it means that the contemporary world is a planetary world and the politics of current transformations and environmental, technological, economic, social and cultural change, and how we govern ourselves as part of this change.