Doctor of Philosophy in Communication, New Media and Cultural Studies

The challenges we face today—social and environmental injustice, climate change, precarious work, surveillance, and a shrinking public sphere—are big, complex and multifaceted. Among their many other dimensions, they are questions of communication and culture, which demand urgent engagement. The PhD in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies (CNMCS) is for creative students who embrace complexity, love difficult questions, and hunger for intellectual, artistic, and pedagogical risk-taking driven towards positive social change. This program brings together three interdisciplinary fields that all originated in attempts to understand and debate big problems using tools from the arts, humanities, and social sciences: cultural studies began by trying to articulate the significance of culture beyond the privileged space of the university, communication studies wanted to understand how mass media was changing modern society, and new media scholars and artists wanted to probe how computing and digital communications were changing human knowledge and creativity. Each of these fields understands that the problems we face today, with all their varied technological, economic, ecological, and political implications, are, fundamentally, problems of communication and culture. Learning to read, critique, and create culture, media, and communication is critical to seeing things, and doing things, in new ways. The PhD in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies (CNMCS) is a joint program between the Departments of Communication Studies and Multimedia (CSMM) and the Department of English and Cultural Studies (ECS). Our many complementary strengths are in areas including new media arts, performance, policy, visual culture, digital culture, musicsound, gender and sexuality, critical race studies, indigenous studies, postcolonial and diasporic studies, transnational culture and international communications, critical environmental studies, political economy, professional communication, and media analysis and strategy. The program draws faculty members from CSMM and ECS as well as other departments in the Humanities to act as supervisors of CNMCS doctoral students.

The PhD Degree Program normally entails four years of study. The admission requirement is a completed MA, MSc, MFA or Master of Communication Management (MCM.) degree in a relevant field (e.g. Communication Studies, Cultural Studies, New Media, etc.). We also welcome applications from students with a Master’s degree in a related field (e.g. Music, Digital Humanities, Visual Culture, Visual and Fine Arts, Sociology, Anthropology, Women’s and Gender Studies, English, Philosophy, Interdisciplinary Studies, etc.) who have focused on research germane to the program and can demonstrate, in their letters of application, how their graduate work to date has prepared them for a PhD in Communication, New Media and Cultural Studies. While students must have expertise in at least one of New Media, Communication or Cultural Studies, the committee will look particularly favourably on students who have demonstrated fluency in two or more program areas. A successful applicant from an MA program with a coursework component will have grades of at least A- in two-thirds of their courses. Students whose training has not included graded coursework are encouraged to submit a dossier of work completed during their Master’s program. For applicants who do not hold a post-secondary degree from a program whose language of instruction was English, you will be required to provide an official record of the Test of English as a Foreign Language.