Media & Communications courses

Level 4

Media History and Politics
Historical development of the British media, and their role in the development of modern Britain. Assessed by 2,000-word essay.

Culture and Cultural Studies
Introduction to debates around the term ‘culture’, including questions of ‘high’ and ‘mass’ culture, and the development of British cultural studies. Assessed by 2-hour unseen examination.

Media Industries and Technologies
This course provides a critical introduction to the structure of the contemporary media industries and assesses important debates. Assessed by 2,000-word project.

Key Debates and Concepts in Media
This course focuses on important debates concerning media power and mediated identity. Assessed by 2,000-word essay.

Representation and Textual Analysis
This course focuses on the formal address of media texts as a means of examining the way in which they make meaning. Assessed by 2,000-word project.

Mass Culture and Modernity
This course provides a historical perspective on the development of modern life and mass cultures in Europe and the USA. Assessed by 2,000-word essay.

Introduction to Media and Technologies
This course introduces contemporary debates on information and communication technologies. Assessed by 2,000-word essay.

Induction to Media Practice
Overviews of media production work in a variety of practice media. Assessed by 1,500-2,000-word essay.

Media Production Option 1
An introduction to media production in one of the practice options offered each year by the department. Production skills will be applied in the creation of small-scale projects. Assessed by portfolio/project and log for group work.

Level 5 & 6

Media Production Option 2 (30 credits)
An introduction to media production in a different area to the one studied in Option 1. You apply production skills in the creation of small-scale projects, and develop critical skills through the analysis of examples and of work produced
in each area. Assessed by portfolio/project and log for group-based work, plus 2,000- 2,500-word essay for third year students.

Media Production Specialisation (30 credits)
Students specialise in one of the practice areas and apply further technical and creative skills in the creation of a course project. Assessed by portfolio/project and log for group-based work.

Media Production Project (60 credits)
You undertake the research, planning and production of a major project or a portfolio of work in the practice area in which you specialised in Year 2. Assessed by portfolio/project and log for group-based work, plus 2,000-2,500-word essay.

Intellectual Foundations of Social Theory
This course provides a critical evaluation of a range of social theories and theorists that illuminate wider debates inside the media, communication and cultural environments. It aims to equip you with the conceptual skills to address the complex questions and intellectual paradigms you are
likely to encounter in your second and third years. Assessed by two 1,500-word essays.

Communications Psychology and Experience
This course is a general introduction to recent developments within critical psychological inquiry, especially where they intersect with media studies, sociology, anthropology and debates about the modern and post- modern. Assessed by 3,000-word essay.

Media Economy and Society
The course will build on issues pertaining to media industries and debates in the field introduced in Year 1 and take them to a more sophisticated level. It has been designed to complement the other Year 2 core module Intellectual Foundations in Social Theory by an exploration and critique of the role of the media and cultural production in contemporary society. Assessed by 3,000-word essay.

Culture, Society and the Individual
This course focuses on the formation of subjectivity in the context of huge social and political change and the growth of individualisation. Assessed by 2-hour seen examination.

Political Economy of the Mass Media
This course considers different perspectives on the relationship between ideological and economic power with particular reference to the mass media. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

Structure of Contemporary Political Communications
This course examines contemporary political communication through the mass media, in its national and international contexts. Exploring the history of political communication, looking at questions of media ownership and regulation, party political and election broadcasts, news bias and the agenda setting role of the media. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

Media Audiences and Media Geographies
This course reviews a range of 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. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

Media, Ethnicity and Nation
This course will examine how ‘ethnicities’ and ‘nations’ are constructed within the media. The course will introduce you to key concepts in Black Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

Public Culture and Everyday Life
In this course you are familiarised with a range of influential cultural theorists whose work allows fuller understanding of current forms of cultural practice, across the arts, in writing and fiction, as well as in popular culture, and whose work also enlarges our understanding of key social and political issues of the day. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

Music as Communication and Creative Practice
The course will focus on music and sounds as forms of communication. It emphasises how musical meanings conveyed and understood and how this is mediated through the cultures and technologies of production, recording and consumption. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

Embodiment and Experience
This course will examine the place of the ‘body’ in contemporary social and cultural theory taking a number of case studies as examples. Assessed by one project-based 3,000-word examined essay and a 1,000-word journal.

Cinema and Society
This course looks at the rise of visual culture from the inception of cinema to the present day. Parallel to film theory, the course will provide essential film viewing, with a screening of a classic film each week, to aid our understanding of film history
and aesthetics. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

Media, Law and Ethics
This course provides the knowledge and skills to avoid the transgression of defamation and contempt and other principal media laws in the UK, the USA and Australia and an appreciation and ability to critically apply principles of ethical conduct in all fields of the media. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

East Asian Screen Industries and Cultures
This course examines the recent development of transborder screen industries and cultures in East Asia. In addition to considering different theories of globalisation and the transnational, we will also ask whether these regional media industries can be understood as the result of political economic change, cultural change, or both. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

Media Rituals
The aim of this course is to explore how the media operate as a focus of ritual action, symbolic hierarchies, and symbolic conflict, introducing a range of relevant theoretical perspectives and applying them to specific themes from public life. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

Screen Cultures
Screens are now a dominant presence and interface in culture in a number of suggestive ways. The course requires you to critically reflect on your own relationship to screen cultures, relationships that may be productive, poetic and arbitrary as much as they are disciplined, rationalised and controlled. Assessed by 4,000-word essay.

After New Media
This course builds on, and challenges, existing approaches to media by tracing the transition from debates on new media to debates on mediation. The course will ask what it means to study ‘the media’ as a complex process, which is simultaneously economic, social, cultural, psychological and technical.