Undergraduate | Degree Requirements
As a unit of the College of Arts & Sciences, the Department provides its students with a strong liberal arts education that emphasizes critical thinking, analysis, problem solving, persuasive communication, and research writing. Please feel free to contact an Undergraduate Advisor at any time for questions regarding CMCL degree requirements.
* Although every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this page, the final authority on courses and CMCL degree requirements rests with the current COAS Bulletin. Check the current Schedule of Classes for updated courses offerings.
Undergraduate Curriculum
CMCL’s curriculum is focused on the study of communication as it occurs in a variety of cultural contexts. We engage communication through language, embodied gesture, sound, and the visual by exploring: overtly political acts (e.g., legal decisions, social movement protests, and memorial dedications); staged and everyday performances (e.g., comedy acts, festivals, tours, and social networking); and the production, circulation, exhibition, and reception of media (e.g., cinema, radio, television, video, photography, internet, and mobile digital devices). The faculty and students are motivated by cultural politics, practices, theories, and histories within the U.S. and internationally, including questions about identity, communities, representation, and power inequities. CMCL’s wide range of interactions, objects, and investments aims to prepare students how to learn from, intervene in, and adapt to the ever-changing world in the 21st century as citizens and professionals.
To provide an interdisciplinary and flexible opportunity for undergraduates, the CMCL curriculum requires only two
introductory-level courses for majors. CMCL-C 190 Introduction to Media is designed to introduce students to the basic vocabularies and the skills required to critically analyze media texts, institutions, apparatuses, and audiences within specific cultural contexts. CMCL-C 205 Introduction to Communication and Culture is designed to present students with a broad overview of theories and perspectives that characterize scholarship in communication.
If you are interested in majoring in CMCL, you can create a highly individualized curriculum to suit your needs, interests, and goals. It is possible, for example, to limit yourself primarily to courses that focus on one of the three disciplinary orientations in the department—(1) rhetoric & public culture, (2) performance & ethnography, or (3) film & media—or focus on a topic of particular interest within or across any of these areas, such as: gender, sex, and sexuality; race and ethnicity; international cultures and globalization; advertising and political economy; law and culture; democracy and social change; or film and video production.
Here are some of the courses we offer.
IUB Course Requirements for a Bachelor of Arts Degree
For more detailed information, see the College of Arts and Sciences (COAS) Bulletin.
Fundamental Skills Requirements Number of Credit Hours English Composition 3 Intensive Writing 3 Foreign language
(demonstration of proficiency through the fourth semester of a single language)10-18 Mathematics
(note: some math courses do not count for credit toward the degree, e.g., MATH-M 025)0-4
Distribution Requirements Number of Credit Hours Arts and Humanities (A&H) 12 (4 courses) Social and Historical Studies (S&H) 12 (4 courses) Natural and Mathematical Sciences (N&M) 12-20 (4 courses) Students are required to complete one Topics class, all of which carry either A&H, S&H, or N&M credit. The Topics course will count as one of the four required courses in one of the areas listed above.
Culture Studies Requirement Number of Credit Hours Two courses from List A or one course from List A and one course from List B
6 Major Concentration (CMCL) Number of Credit Hours
The CMCL major or minor may be declared by meeting with a CMCL undergraduate advisor.
The CMCL major requires all the COAS requirements plus 30 credit hours in the department, which must include:
- CMCL-C 190 Introduction to Media (3 cr.)
- CMCL-C 205 Introduction to Communication and Culture (3 cr.)
- No more than 6 credit hours at the 100 level (C190 counts as 3 of these credits)
- At least 15 credit hours of upper-division (300/400 level) courses in the department, of which at least 6 credit hours must be at the 400 level
Total credit hours required for graduation (at least 100 of these hours must come from inside the College of Arts and Sciences) 122 NOTE: Although academic advisors are available to offer guidance concerning degree requirements and course selection, students are responsible for planning their own programs and for meeting all degree requirements for graduation.
Minor in Communication and Culture
The CMCL minor requires a minimum of 15 credit hours in the department, including the following:
- C190 or C205 (3 cr.)
- 9 credit hours of upper-division courses in the department, of which at least 3 credit hours must be at the 400 level
