The mission of the Department of Communication is to pursue research, teaching and outreach rooted in an understanding of communication as the primary process through which persons, societies, and cultures are formed and changed. We research communication processes at global, national, institutional, group, and interpersonal levels; we promote a consciously critical disposition in communication research, where familiar questions are expanded and recast, sometimes combining research methods and strategies that elsewhere would be considered unusual bedfellows (e.g. rhetoric and performance, content analysis and textual criticism; criticism and survey research). We aim to address matters of pressing social and cultural concern through the lens of communication as a process essential to our survival as a species and a polity.