This first core course maps out a conceptual grid for the programme from a bird's eyeview . Topics covered include: 

• different ways to understand globalisation, transnationalism, and the nation-state
• ICT & Development at the UN
• PR & Advertising before and since the web
• cinema and its global affect
• new media, revolution, and the Middle East
• non-western television flows
• cosmopolitan hopes and 'postnational' realities in the wake of 9/11
• the global cultural politics of music-making in a digital age of reproduction

The second core course delves more deeply into these issues and introduces another level of study from close-up. For instance:

• postcolonial and diasporic media/virtual communities
• practices of everyday life online and in converging media-spaces
• power vectors of race/ethnicity, sex/gender, class/status in virtual and embodied worlds
• struggles for ownership and control of the internet
• human rights, media governance, and digital activism
• censorship and surveillance in cyberspace
• after (post)modernism in a post-Web 2.0 age
• social media, belonging, and power relations
• new media - new maps and how we see the world

As an integral part of successfully completing the Dissertation component, students take part in a two-term Research Skills course. Here we cover topics such as: 

• research design and planning - from start to finish
• deciding on a topic/research question formulation
• finding and using the literature at an advanced level
• selected data-gathering and analysis across the arts, humanities, and social science spectrum
• academic thinking, writing, and presentation
• citation formats, ethics that matter, and the theory-method relationship from several angles
• coping with stress, being creative, and originality

By term’s end students will be fine-tuning their individual research projects, contributing to our study of these themes in class presentations.

Sarah Kember

This course builds on, and challenges, existing approaches to media by tracing the transition from debates on new media to debates on mediation.

‘Mediation’ takes us from a more spatial, black-boxed approach to separate media (photography, film, television) and separate aspects of the media (production, content, reception) towards a more temporal approach which is often invoked but rarely developed. We will ask what it means to study ‘the media’ as a complex process that is simultaneously economic, social, cultural, psychological and technical.

Working from debates on remediation that are critical of new media teleology (and its links to capital), we will examine the ‘allatonceness’ of the new media landscape, focussing both on its features (blogs, Facebook, Flickr) and on the processes that connect them with each other and with us. We will ask what it means to live as a constitutive part of a complex media and technological environment.

The course examines specific media events such as the launch of the supercollider (big bang machine), the global financial crisis, the world’s first face transplant, the ongoing quest for life on Mars and the emergence of intelligent media. The point will be to examine the relation between the event and its mediation. Would it be more accurate to say that rather than being represented by the media, these events are performed through mediation? If events are performative, then how should we respond to them in our critiques?

Reading:

• Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway, Durham and London: Duke University Press
• Bergson, H. (1998) Creative Evolution, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications Inc
• Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (2000) Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press
• Braidotti, R. (2006) Transpositions, Cambridge: Polity Press
• Derrida, J. and Stiegler, B. (2002) Echographies of Television, Cambridge: Polity Press
• Kember, S. and Zylinska, J. (2012) Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press
• Suchman, L. (2007) Human-Machine Reconfigurations, Cambridge University Press
• Van Loon, J. (2007) Media Technology: Critical Perspectives, Open University Press

Liz Moor

This course is a core part of the MA Brands, Communication and Culture programme, but is available to a limited number of students from other MA programmes in the Media and Communications department as an option course.

It provides a critical exploration of the history and practice of branding, from developments in markets, consumer culture and intellectual property law to current uses of brands and branding in commercial organisations, charities and the public sector. Students are assessed via an essay of 5000-6000 words.

Reading:

• Lury, C. (2004) Brands: the Logos of the Global Economy, London: Routledge
• Moor, L. (2007) The Rise of Brands, Oxford: Berg
• Arvidsson, A. (2006) Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture, London: Routledge
• Julier, G. (2000) The Culture of Design, Oxford: Berg
• Aronczyk, M. and Powers, D., eds. (2011) Blowing Up the Brand, New York: Peter Lang
• Kornberger, M. (2010) Brand Society: How Brands Transform Management, Cambridge: CUP
• Bently, L,. et al., eds (2011) Trade Marks and Brands: An Interdisciplinary Critique, Cambridge University Press
• Woodham, J. (1997) Twentieth Century Design, Oxford: OUP
• King, S. (2008) Pink Ribbons Inc., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Rachel Moore

This course traces the changes in perception brought with modernity as they were written about and addressed through filmmaking when film was recognised as a new art form in the 1920-30s by theorists such as Jean Epstein, Siegfried Kracauer, Béla Balázs, Sergei Eisenstein, and Walter Benjamin. 

The newness of film at its inception forced thinkers to ask what the form was, not what its representations mean. This question, and its subsequent literature, is once again relevant, as we face new media formats. Avant-Garde here refers as much to literature as it does to film, thus texts come from a range of authors whose thinking falls outside disciplinary boundaries.  

The aim of this course is four fold: 

• to provide a grounding in Classical Film theory
• to develop the student’s sensibility to aesthetics and form
• to investigate the liberatory qualities of cinema
• and most importantly, to expand both the student’s and the course leader’s moving image archive, to see things we wouldn’t otherwise see

Screenings and clips come from little-known classical Hollywood film, animated film, experimental film, artist’s cinema, and documentary film.

This course meets for three hours on a Friday morning, with a one-hour lecture, a screening and group discussion, as well as a 1-hour seminar later on in the afternoon. The texts are difficult and require multiple readings. Seminars require 3 written responses to the readings over the ten week period, full attendance and participation, and one oral presentation. A 5,000-6,000 word essay is the final assessment.  

Reading

• Agamben, Giorgio, The Open- Man and Animal, Stanford University Press, 2004
• Bataille, Georges, Visions of Excess, trans Alan Stoekl, University of Minnesota Press, 1995
• Eisenstein, Sergei, Eisenstein on Disney by Jay Leyda; translated by Alan Upchurch introduced by Naum Kleinman, London: Methuen, 1988
• Epstein, Jean, ‘Bonjour Cinema and other Writings’,  Trans. Tom Milne, Afterimage, no 10 (1981)
• Mulvey, Laura, Death 24 x a Second, Reaktion, 2007
• Epstein, Jean, ‘Bonjour Cinema and other Writings’,  Trans. Tom Milne, Afterimage, no 10 (1981)
• Perniola, Mario, The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic: Philosophies of Desire in the Modern World, translated by Massimo Verdicchio, London-New York, Continuum, 2004
• Tsivian, Yuri, “The Poitics of Gesture’ Ostrannenie, University of Amsterdam Press, 2011

Lisa Blackman

Within the humanities, sciences and outside the academy we are witnessing a ‘turn to the body’. That is, from practices such as neuromarketing, through to the amplification of the senses, attention and perception within simulated realities, contagious forms of communication which spread virally and the modulation of emotion and the creation of mediated intimacy on reality TV, the body and its capacity for mediation is central to understanding communication. This course will take a field of study known as body-studies in order to examine the place of the body and embodiment within sense-making.

The course will ask how the media work and create appeal by engaging a number of concepts, including affect, body-without-an- image, enactment, performativity, entanglement, abjection, suggestion, diasporic vision, mediated perception and bodies-without-organs.

These concepts will be put to work in the context of a number of case-studies which have been the subject of both science and humanities debate; media representations and eating disorders; body image; non-verbal communication; the emotions; film and the senses; narrative and identity; images and the non-visual; biomediation, voices and haunting; viral media ecologies such as the internet and facebook, practices of neuromarketing, and the connection between the emergence of media technologies, such as film and TV with psychic research into telepathy and mediumship in the nineteenth century.

Reading:

• Blackman, L (2008) The Body: The Key Concepts, Berg
• Blackman, L and Walkerdine, V (2001) Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies, Palgrave
• Blackman, L and Venn, C (2010) Special issue of the Journal Body & Society on Affect (issue 16:1- includes articles by Couze Venn, Lisa Blackman, Valerie Walkerdine, Julian Henriques, Erin Manning, Patricia Clough and Mike Featherstone)
• Cho, G (2008) Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, Silence and the Forgotten Korean War, Minnesota Press
• Clough, P (2007) The Affective Turn, Duke University Press

Rachel Moore

Issues in Media and Culture is a course that focuses on the correspondence between making things and thought about cultural artefacts.

Theory, philosophy, and artistic practice all share in the business of asking us to pay attention to something we might otherwise not consider, might not see nor hear, and to think about it. Philosophy searches for meaning unfettered by habitual understandings and beliefs. By making something and placing it before us, the practitioner too makes demands on our otherwise quotidian understanding of the world. Theory pays attention to the relationship between meaning and the things we encounter in the world, be they actions, customs, artworks, or media events. It tries to reveal, clarify, or deepen that relationship.

In all cases, it is with great care that we cut something out of the continuum of life and frame it, be it by the covers of a book, the focus of a lens, the devices of a story, or the punctuations of dialogue. This course aims to aid in sharpening that care by investigating aesthetic, historic, and social theories about the relationship of creative endeavour to contemporary culture.

Reading

• Frampton, Hollis (2010) On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, ed. Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press
• Bataille, Georges The Accursed Share Vol I: Consumption, trans Robert Hurley, Zone Books, 1991
• Kracauer, Siegfried, ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1995)
• Lazzarato, Mauritzio, “Immaterial Labor” from Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy, eds. Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics, University of Minnesota Press, 2006
• Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, New York:  International Publishers
• 1967, Chapter from Capital ‘The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy’, Situationist International
• Stern, Daniel, Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)

Dave Morley

The course reviews interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of media audiences and on the role of the media in constructing the post-modern geography of our contemporary world.

Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and cultural geography It focuses on audiences, media effects and patterns of cultural consumption, addressing the specificity of different media (radio, TV, cinema) and their micro-contexts and conditions of consumption, on the uses of a range of both ‘old` and ‘new’ communications technologies in articulating the private and public spheres, and on the ‘moral panics’ that have accompanied the arrival of technologies from the radio to the mobile phone and the internet.

It examines the role of a variety of media in constructing the virtual geography of our post-modern electronic landscapes, and at processes of identity and boundary construction, mobility and hybridity, within the broader context of processes of globalisation.

Reading:

• D. Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, Routledge, 1992
• D. Morley and K Robins, Spaces of Identity, Routledge, 1995
• D. Morley, Media, Modernity and Technology, Routledge, 2006 (parts 4-6)
• W. Brooker and D Jermyn (eds), The Audience Studies Reader, Routledge, 2003
• E. Bird, The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World, Routledge, 2005
• M Christensen et al (eds), Online Territories: Globalization, Mediated Practice and Social Space, Peter Lang, 2011

Sara Ahmed/Richard Smith

This course will examine how ‘ethnicities’ and ‘nations’ are constructed within the media. Our aim will be to analyse how the media constructs ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nations’ over time, as well as to explore the ways in which formations of ethnicity and nationhood affect media practices.

We will not only examine a range of contemporary media forms, but we will also situate these forms in relation to longer histories of Western imperialism, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.

Our task in mapping this ‘history’ as a ‘history of the present’ is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to much longer histories of empire.

The course will introduce you to key concepts in Black Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies including: colonial discourse, colonial fantasy, othering, hybridity and diaspora. Our concern will be with how histories ‘get under the skin,’ and we will thus pay attention to how race, ethnicity and nation affect how we experience our relationship to multiple and mediated worlds.

We will draw especially on postcolonial and black feminist theory, attending to the intersection between race and ethnicity with gender and sexuality.

Reading:

• Ahmed, Sara (2002), ‘Racialized Bodies’ in Real Bodies, ed. Mary Evans and Ellie Lee, Paladin Press
• Dines, Gail and Humez, Jean. M. (eds.) (1995), Gender, Race and Class in Media, London: Sage
• Ferguson, R. (1998), Representing ‘Race’: Ideology, Identity and the Media, London: Arnold
• Ross, Karen (1996), Black and White Media: Black Images in Popular Film and Television, Cambridge: Polity Press
• Shohat, E and Stam, R (1994), Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge

Nick Couldry/Veronica Barassi

This course aims to explore how the media operate as a focus of ritual action, symbolic hierarchy and symbolic conflict. In particular, it explores to what extent theoretical frameworks already developed in anthropology and social theory can help us analyse contemporary media and mediated public life. The course begins with a general introduction to debates on the media’s social impacts (integrative or otherwise). Key theoretical concepts are then outlined: sacred and profane, symbolic power, ritual, boundary, and liminality (two lectures). Specific themes relating to the media’s contribution to public life and public space are then explored: celebrity and ordinariness; fandom and media pilgrimages; media events and public ritual; mediated self-disclosure (from talk shows to the Webcam); ‘reality’ television and everyday surveillance (total five lectures). The course concludes with a review of ethical questions arising from the media’s role in public life and public space.

Reading: Bell, Catherine (1992) Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press; Bourdieu, Pierre (1990) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity; Carey, James (1989) Communication as Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman; Couldry, Nick (2000) The Place of Media Power: Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age. London: Routledge; Couldry, Nick (2003) Media Rituals: A Critical Approach, London: Routledge; Dayan, Daniel and Katz, Elihu (1992) Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Durkheim, Emile (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life tr. K. Fields. Glencoe: Free Press; Rothenbuhler, Eric (1998) Ritual Communication. Thousand Oaks: Sage; Rothenbuhler, Eric and Coman, Mihai (eds) (2005) Media Anthropology. Thousand Oaks: Sage

Julian Henriques

How can sound – as distinct from images, code and text - be used to understand society, culture and technology? What can music tell us about the non- representational qualities of the communication process? How can auditory be used as a critique of the conventions of visual dominance and visual culture? What does music have to say about our experience of the world and our creativity?

This course explores how musical meanings are conveyed and understood and how this is mediated through the cultures and technologies of production, recording and consumption.

We will consider how music communicates mood and meaning, not only through associated imagery and the lyrical content of songs, but as sound itself. How for example do we recognise that music means love, anger, sadness, terror, or patriotism?

We will also think about the processes that link production, circulation and consumption, as well as explore the ways that music connects with individual and collective identities.

Reading:

• Bull, Michael and Back, Les, eds (2003), The Auditory Culture Reader, Berg
• Cox, Christoph and Warner, Daniel, eds (2005), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, London: Continuum
• Attali, Jacques (1985), Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Manchester University Press
• Chion, Michel (1990), Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press
• Eshun, Kodwo (1998), More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, London: Quartet
• Henriques, Julian (2011), Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques and Ways of Knowing (2011) New York: Continuum

James Curran

This is a course about the political and economic organisation (‘political economy’) of the media with particular reference to western democracies.

It investigates what influences the media, and how this affects the media’s role in society. It considers different ways in which countries have organized and regulated the media, and relates this to theories of democracy and power.

As you will see, there are conservative, liberal and radical political economy answers to all these questions. There are also other answers as well that are strongly critical of the political economy tradition.

The course focuses on journalism, though it also takes account of media entertainment. And while it is western-centric, it also connects to other parts of the world. For all these reasons, it is an especially demanding course.

Reading:

• M. Castells, Communication Power, Oxford University Press, 2009
• J. Curran, Media and Democracy, Routledge, 2011
• J. Curran, Media and Power, Routledge, 2002
• J. Curran ed. Media and Society, 5th edition, Bloomsbury, 2011
• D. Hallin and P. Mancini, Comparing Media Systems, CUP, 2004
• J. Hardy, Western Media Systems, Routledge, 2008
• V. Mosco, The Political Economy of Communication, 2nd edition, Sage, 2009
• M. Schudson, The Sociology of the Mass Media, Norton, 2002

Aeron Davis

This course looks at the rise of promotional culture (public relations, advertising, marketing and branding), promotional intermediaries and their impact on society. The first part of the course will look at the history of promotional culture and will offer some conflicting theoretical approaches with which to view its development. These include: professional/industrial and economic, political economy and other critiques, post-Fordist and postmodern perspectives, audience and consumer society accounts. The second part will look at specific case areas, investigating the ways promotion intervenes, interacts and mediates social relations and organisations. These sector studies include: fashion and taste, hi-tech commodities and innovation, news media and conflict in civil society, popular culture and creativity (film TV, music), celebrities and public figures, political parties and representation, and financial markets and value. In each of these areas questions will be asked about the influence of promotional practices on the production, communication and consumption of ideas and products as well as larger discourses, fashions/genres and socio-economic trends.

Reading: S Cottle ed (2003) News, Public Relations and Power, Sage; M Lee ed. (2000) The Consumer Society Reader, Blackwell; S Lash and C Lury (2007) Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things, Polity, Cambridge; W Leiss, S Kline, S Jhally and J Botterill (2005) Social Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace, Routledge; J Turrow and M McAllister eds. (2009) The Advertising and Consumer Culture Reader, Routledge, New York; R Sassatelli Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics; G Sussman ed. (2011) The Propaganda Society: Promotional Politics in Global Context, Peter Lang, New York; A Wernick (1991) Promotional Culture, Sage.

Angela McRobbie

This option examines themes connected with urban modernity, urban post-modernity and the post-colonial city.

Drawing on urban sociology, social and cultural theory and also relying on novels and the fiction of city life as well as art, fashion, and cinema, the course considers questions about how urban space intersects with and shapes patterns of everyday life, as well as focusing on key issues in regard to control, surveillance and social order.

Topics include:

• urban spatiality, sexuality and consumer culture in the city
• the history of prostitution
• the sociology of gang culture
• gentrification and urban creative economy
• social unrest and the London riots

Students are encouraged to use as case study material the cities with which they are most familiar.

The course is examined with a 5,000-word essay. Teaching format comprises a weekly lecture followed by screening and seminars.

Reading: 

• L. Waquant (2009), Punishing the Poor
• G. Bridges and S. Watson (2010), The Blackwell City Reader
• G. Bridges and S. Watson (2011), Companion to the Blackwell City Reader
• A. McRobbie (2005), The Uses of Cultural Studies
• P Bourdieu et al (1999), The Weight of the World

Pasi Valiaho

This course maps today’s post-cinematic screen culture in terms of technologies, politics and aesthetics. Inter-disciplinary in its scope, it summons from film and visual studies, critical theory, psychology and philosophy so as to explore how images move and evolve in our screen-saturated world in different contexts, ranging from entertainment and science to the arts, as well as to analyze what kinds of desires, perceptions and affectivities their movement generates. The course takes first a genealogical look into the emergence of modernity’s screen culture in the late nineteenth century, charting the economic arrangements, power formations and models of subjectification that were involved in the process of moving images’ becoming the major socio-technological force of modernity. Secondly, the course maps the work of screens in our biopolitical era, analyzing how screens, from video games to virtual realities, shape the conditions of agency today. Lastly, the course discusses the possibilities of critical practice and thinking through screens, analyzing how artistic creations can recombine and redistribute the sensibilities of our age and thus animate critical consciousness of the present. The course requires students to critically reflect on their own relationship to contemporary screen cultures, relationships that may be productive, poetic and arbitrary as much as they are disciplined, rationalised and controlled.

Readings: Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999); Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2007).

Aeron Davis

This course examines the actors and communication processes involved in contemporary political communication. Its core concern is to explore notions of ‘crisis’ in mature democracies as voter turnouts and party memberships steadily drop, national economies struggle, and news media decline. It combines theoretical insights and empirical data from the fields of media studies, journalism, sociology, political science and economics. It mainly focuses on democracies, particularly in the US and UK, but literature and examples are also drawn from other types of political system and country. Weekly topics combine political communication themes and contemporary examples, with discussions of related theory and concepts. Topics covered include: The crisis of politics and media in established democracies; comparative political and media systems; mass media and news production; political parties, citizen relations and political marketing; government media management, war and propaganda; symbolic and cultural political communication; forms of public participation and public opinion; media effects and audiences; digital media and online politics; globalisation and international political communication. Much of the material for this course is highly contemporary, so students are encouraged to maintain an awareness of current developments in political communication in the UK and elsewhere.

Reading: Chadwick, A (2006) Internet Politics: States, Citizens and New Communication Technologies, Oxford, Oxford University Press; Corner, J and Pels, D eds., (2003) Media and the Restyling of Politics: Consumerism, Celebrity and Cynicism, London, Sage; Dahlgren, P (2009) Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication and Democracy, Cambridge; Davis, A (2010) Political Communication and Social Theory, London: Routledge; Fenton, N ed. (2010) New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age, Sage; Lees Marshment, J (2008) Political Marketing and British Political Parties, 2nd edn. Manchester University Press; Hallin, D and Mancini, P (2004) Comparing Media Systems, Cambridge University Press; Hay, C (2007) Why We Hate Democracy, Polity.

Peter Lee-Wright

This course offers an introduction to practical research methodologies and their deployment in various different specialist journalism fields.

Commencing with an analysis of British government systems, both national and local, and methods for accessing information from them, the course evolves a critical approach to the many different sources journalists use, the compromises involved and constraints within which they work.

Drawing on both original research and practical expertise, the course is convened and taught by Peter Lee-Wright, with input from a range of visiting specialists.

Subjects covered include:

• online data-mining
• Freedom of Information
• investigative journalism
• economic and political journalism
• the problems and pitfalls of foreign journalism and reporting conflict
• dealing with the military and the UK D-notice system
• managing human, particularly vulnerable, human sources

Readings:

• Morrison, James (2011), Essential Public Affairs for Journalists (2nded.), Oxford University Press
• Kampfner, John (2010), Freedom For Sale: How We Made Money and Lost Our Liberty, Pocket Books
• Fogg, Christine (2005), Release the Hounds: A Guide to Research for Journalists and Writers, Allen & Unwin
• Franklin, Bob & Carlson, Matt (Eds.) (2010), Journalists, Sources, and Credibility: New Perspectives, Routledge
• Löffelholz, Martin & Weaver, David (Eds.) (2008), Global Journalism Research: Theories, Methods, Findings, Future, Blackwell Publishing
• Brooke, Heather (2006, 2nd edition), Your Right to Know: A Citizen’s Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, London: Pluto Press
• Tett, Gillian (2009), Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe, London: Little, Brown
• Coté, William & Simpson, Roger (2000), Covering Violence: A guide to ethical reporting about victims and trauma, New York: Columbia University Press

Mike Kaye/Aeron Davis

This course introduces students to practical campaigning issues and directs them towards producing their own campaign.

It will examine contemporary political communication primarily from the perspective of interest groups in society, although many of its elements are applicable to other types of organisational campaigning. It touches on mainstream mass media, online media, advocacy and other communication methods. On a practical level it will introduce students to the basic skills and core concerns for campaigning.

The course is convened by Aeron Davis but mostly taught by Mike Kaye, who has extensive experience of campaign communication. Many of the issues and considerations link to contemporary events and everyday politics, so students are encouraged to maintain an awareness of current developments in political communications in the UK and elsewhere, through newspapers, television, radio and the internet.

Angela Phillips

An introduction to the major theoretical debates in the study of journalism.

We will cover:

• the current crisis in journalism
• questions of political power and the public sphere
• ownership forms and how they are changing
• the role of audience
• regulation and representation
• journalism as a narrative form

All these debates will be situated firmly in a current and practical context and you will be encouraged to make connections between formal lecturers, seminar presentations and practical discussions of the day’s events and how they are reported.

Sessions will usually be 1 hour followed by a seminar of 1 hour but may be extended if there are special events or speakers.

This course provides practice students with a theoretical underpinning for your work, which you will develop via personal study later in the year. 

Reading includes:

• Benson, Rodney and Eric Neveu (2005), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, Polity: Cambridge
• Fenton, Natalie (ed) (2010), New Media, Old News, Sage
• Lee Wright, Peter, Angela Phillips and Tamara Witschge (2011), Changing Journalism, Routledge
• Hindman, Matthew (2009), The Myth of Digital Democracy, Princeton University Press: Princeton
• Manning, Paul (2001), News and News Sources: A Critical Introduction, Sage: London
• Curran, James (2002), Media and Power, Routledge
• Jarvis, Jeff (2009), What Would Google Do?, Harper Collins
• Auletta, Ken (2011), Googled: The end of the world as we know it, Virgin

Robert Smith/Mark Dunford

A re-imagining of contemporary media practices. This course addresses the political economy of the media and considers other explanations for the way mass media functions.

The course places media practices within the context of critical debates on ways that media will develop in the future and links them directly to business practice. The premise is that the only way to prepare for running a media business is to invent one and test the concept. Students will be asked to conceive of a business concept and to explore the viability of their venture within the context of the ideas and practices explored within the module.

The programme is structured around a series of presentations by practitioners. It begins with a consideration of contemporary business models and the entrepreneurial skills needed to develop a viable business. The following session addresses key market drives including the identification and exploitation of Intellectual Property (IP) from the perspective of a business development specialist. Subsequent sessions address the policy context, entrepreneurial psychology, audiences models, marketing and approaches to selling media content, The final session is a series of presentations.

Tim Crook

The course investigates the nature of media law and ethical regulation for media practitioners primarily in the UK, but with some comparison with the situation in the USA and references to the experiences of media communicators in other countries. The students are directed towards an analysis of media law as it exists, the ethical debates concerning what the law ought to be, and the historical development of legal and regulatory controls of communication. The theoretical underpinning involves a course of learning the subject of media jurisprudence- the study of the philosophy of media law, media ethicology- the study of the knowledge of ethics in media communication, and media ethicism, the belief systems of media communicators. The course evaluates media law and regulation in terms of its social and cultural context. It is taught in one and a half hour lectures and two-hour seminars that involve the discussion of multi-media examples of media communication considered legally and/or morally problematical. The course delivers considerable practical knowledge of how to navigate media law and apply it to multi-media publication.

Reading: The course book is Comparative Media Law & Ethics written by the convenor with a companion website at http://www.ma-radio.gold.ac.uk/cmle; Media Law (Fully Revised 5th Edition 2008) by Andrew Nicol and Geoffrey Robertson: Harmondsworth, Penguin Book; McNae’s Essential Law for Journalists (21st Edition 2012) by David Banks and Mark Hanna, Oxford, Oxford University Press; Law for Journalists by Francis Quinn (3rd Edition 2011) London, Pearson Longman; Journalism Ethics and Regulation by Chris Frost (3rd Edition 2010) London, Pearson Longman; Ethics for Journalists by Richard Keeble (2nd Edition 2008) London, Routledge; The Ethical Journalist by Tony Harcup (2007) London, Sage; Media and Entertainment Law by Ursula Smartt (2011) London: Routledge.

Judy Holland

This is a core module for MA Filmmaking and is also open to other screen practitioners whose creative work involves narrative. Screen studies students interested in theoretical issues arising from the narrative process are welcome as well.

The course examines broad questions – what narratives are, how they differ from non-narratives, what forms they may take and what functions they serve in our own and one or more other societies. It also looks at elements of narrative creation, particularly character, structure and plot. And it explores the ways in which different aspects of production – eg writing, directing, editing, sound design – contribute to the intellectual and emotional impact of example screen narratives.     

The speakers include a mix of practitioners who work in the screen industries and theorists who study narrative in traditional, alternative, cross-cultural  and  new media forms. Examples are drawn from a range of fiction and non-fiction sources,depending on the speakers’ own interests, and include short films, documentary and feature films, tv drama, print journalism (news and features), games and online media.

Reading includes:

• Aronson, Linda (2010), The 21st Century Screenplay (NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin)
• Austin & De Jong (eds, 2008), Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices (Maidenhead: Open University Press)
• Bordwell, D, and Thompson, K (latest edition), Film Art, An Introduction (NY, Knopf)
• Chion, Michel (1990), ‘The Audiovisual Scene’. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Ed and trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994
• Murch, Walter (2001), In the Blink of an Eye: a Perspective on Film Editing. Silman-James Press
• Phillips, Angela (2007), Good Writing for Journalists (London: Sage)
• Strauven, Wanda (ed, 2006), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press)
• Vasudevan, Ravi (1989), “The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s”, Screen 30, no.3