Mission and Vision Statements

Mission Statement

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.

Vision Statement

The Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh is committed to cultivating a fundamentally diverse, inclusive, supportive, and self-reflexive environment for all its undergraduate, graduate, staff, and faculty members.  Cultivating this kind of environment will allow the Department to make the greatest positive impact on the field of communication.  We commit ourselves to becoming a creative community of inquiry in which all can flourish and contribute to disciplinary innovation in research and teaching.  We also strive to bring intellectual curiosity, skill, and dedication to the question of how to generate and maintain a just and equitable scholarly community.