I have been teaching in the area of media and communication for over a decade, with a consistent emphasis on critical and global studies of communication. I aspire to develop among students a global outlook that connects to their daily lives and trains reflexive, creative, and socially responsible media practitioners and scholars. To do so, I rely on a diverse pedagogical toolbox that includes, for instance, conducting collective replication studies and campus-centered ethnographic inquiry. I enjoy assigning final projects encouraging students to use their multi-lingual skills and creative essays asking students to impersonate how a CCTV camera “sees” them. I routinely welcome community organizers, journalists, and civil society practitioners as guests in my classes. And I use arcs for my syllabi that disrupt the centrality of Euro-America in the study of digital technologies and interrogate the gaps between Western theories dominating the field of communication and media practices and cultures across Africa.
Over the past four years at Stanford’s Digital Civil Society Lab, I’ve had the pleasure to co-teach with eight scholars from different disciplines – political science, law, education, history, computational social sciences, sociology, and communication – and to an even more multi-disciplinary group of students, notably from computer science, African and African American studies, and STS.
In the academic year 2022-2023, I am co-teaching the Digital Civil Society class in the Spring quarter (cross-listed in Communication and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity).
Syllabi from some of my past classes are available below. Feel free to share them, draw from them, and do not hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions!
Dr Toussaint Nothias 