MA Brands, Communication & Culture

Liz Moor

This module 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 module.

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

The second core module focuses in more depth on key themes in contemporary branding, such as intellectual property rights, globalisation, place branding, the concept of brand ‘value’ and the impact of digital communications and marketing technologies. Throughout this core component of the degree, you will examine the very wide range of ways in which branding is used, from large media organisations and corporations to public sector bodies, charities, sports organisations and educational establishments. You will be encouraged to develop your critical and analytical skills, and to think creatively about how brands relate to their social and political contexts.

This module is the core course for the MA Sociology Cultural Analysis pathway.

It aims to provide you with a detailed, intensive introduction to some of the key thinkers who have been influential in the development of cultural theory and analysis. It is necessarily selective, with an emphasis on 20th-century European thought, but you'll also explore the different cultural critiques and critical cultures that have emerged through different perspectives. Through lectures and group discussions, we'll examine the interventions of the most important interventions in contemporary cultural theory and analysis. The course will appeal to those who wish to spend time deepening their appreciation of theoretical interventions, and who enjoy discussing the implications of theoretical analysis for both sociological research and political critique. 

The lectures will situate the theorist within their intellectual context and discuss the implications and significance of the contribution.

The module introduces you to key debates and developments in feminist theory, cultural theory and in particular feminist cultural theory. You'll explore early debates which defined these fields and contemporary developments and departures.

This core module does not attempt to map the whole field of gender scholarship chronologically, nor can it be exhaustive, but instead it extrapolates a number of themes around which some of the most influential and defining work has emerged.

More specifically, you'll be introduced to:

• social constructivist
• post-structuralist perspectives
• debates on feminism
• ethnicity and the critique of universalism
• key questions in relation to feminism, biology and reproduction on
• the emergence of postcolonial feminism
• debates on gender
• space and nation and post-feminist culture

This module addresses significant issues in the contemporary organisation of urban landscapes, urban life and connections between cities as well as the interface between human and architectural fabric. Drawing on specific empirical examples in based in China, Hong Kong, the US, London and parts of mainland Europe this module examines key debates in urban sociology and research. There is a strong focus on visual apprehension of cities and ways of accessing and researching cities through photography. The following sessions have been offered in previous years: 

• A tour of 'urban theory' from the Chicago School to the present day. This sets up the conceptual basis for the session following which, although empirically focused on specific cities, illuminate different conceptual frameworks for understanding urbanism.
• Whose City? This examines debates concerned with the social production of space and rights to the city. An examination of ghetto urbanism in the US through Wacquant, Bourdieu, Bourgeois and the research through which this kind of urban knowledge is generated.
• Pastness and Urban Landscape. This examines discrepant and linear notions of time/interpretations of pastness, collective memory, and how pasts are inscribed within urban landscapes. We will draw mainly on visually-led investigation of Hong Kong and London to explore these themes.
• Post-Colonial Cities. This session examines the intersections between globalisation and colonialism in Hong Kong and in the lives of ‘skilled’ migrants from the global North. It makes extensive use of photographic narratives of Hong Kong as an iconic city landscape and the use of environmental portraiture to capture migrants’ relationships to the city.
• Globalisation, Migration and Urban Life. Drawing on visual empirical research on mosques and African churches in London this session examines the impact of recent and current migration on commerce, religion and city landscape. It sets this in broader debates about globalisation and cities developed from the previous session.
• Material Cultures and Multiple Globalisations. This session draws on some of the more ordinary trajectories of commodities and collaborations composing the global world through small trade between China/Hong Kong and Africa, and Europe and Africa. 
• Mega-Cities and Non-City Zones. This session is set in China. It examines architecture, the generic city, land speculation and the dynamics between mega-cities and economic and technical development zones through some of the lives that are lived in them.
• Urban Regeneration. This session examines the politics, debates, conceptualisation and social divisions generated and sustained in urban renewal projects. Who benefits from these projects? How do they reconstruct cities? We will draw specifically on Olympic-related redevelopments in Athens, London, and Beijing.
• Architectural and Planning Politics. This session examines ways in which political and military decisions are embedded in architecture and planning. It draws on Weizman’s Hollow Land and asks questions about whether this involves a radical re-conceptualisation of space.
• Mobilities. This session is concerned with movement and routes as well as the infrastructure and technologies of mobility such as bridges, roads, airports, stations, tunnels, trains, motor transport, and shipping. It asks critical questions about whether these approaches to space generate information about social morphology or social life more generally.

This module examines the theoretical and practical relationships between urban photography and urban ethnography focusing on city environments. Through a series of interconnected lectures and seminars, the module asks questions about the nature of ‘sociological seeing’, of the relationship between walking and urban detouring, on object-hood, ‘thing-ness’ and materiality, on how the city is both imagined and imaged, and on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Students will be expected to read widely on the subject both from sociological and visual textual sources, and to actively relate learning to image-making processes and outcomes.

This 5-week MA module focuses on ‘sociology-in-the-making’, examining the processes of social research rather than its products. It follows the ‘empirical cycle’, providing an overview of key formative moments of sociological research, from formulating research questions, to producing and analysing data, to the public presentation of results.

It pays specific attention to how sociology may be transformed in the age of visual, digital and other empirical technologies, and examines the ‘doubling of social research’: partly as a consequence of the proliferation of social research tools and practices across social life, key empirical tasks of social research now refer both to social practices ‘out there’ as well as to our own work as social researchers.

The module also examines the the techniques, objects and settings in and with which social research is performed, both in and outside the academy.

Sensory Sociology: Imagining Digital Social Research takes an integrated approach to teaching digital sociology: it combines advanced training in sociological thinking with a practice based approach to methods teaching. Such an approach is challenging, as it requires you to think across the divide between social theory and social methods, and to adopt an active role in formulating social research approaches that are adequate to digital and contemporary contexts. In these contexts, the forms of social life as well as the methods of sociological research are undergoing constant change. This makes it necessary to adopt a creative approach to devising concepts, methods and techniques for the analysis of social life. Finally, it should be noted that this module is meant as an introduction to the Digital Sociology programme as a whole, and subsequent core and option modules in the Programme will enable you to explore in further detail several of the theories, methodologies and issues presented in this introductory module. 

Convener: Evelyn Ruppert

This option will function as an intense reading and discussion group tasked with ‘forcing thought’ (Stengers, 2005) on a series of contemporary problems/issues linked to developments in the fields of biomedicine, biotechnology and science. Our aim will be to reframe how we might approach emergent phenomena in these fields, taking into account the work of various technologies active in their current and possibly altered realisation. Observational technologies ranging from genetic screening, ultrasound and magnetic imaging to the quantitative techniques used in visualising pharmaceutical efficacy increasingly offer up more intimate and more seemingly substantive evidence (data/images) of who and what we are, what we can and should (not) do. Yet, while promising more certainty, these technologies are also unsettling core concepts of human identity and the bases on which human life is organised. Within social theory, there are some who see these new developments as generating new modes of personhood and, with this, new modes of activism; for others it has become imperative to rethink such technologies as not merely observing or acting on an object, but as embedded in their object and hence ethically implicated in and affected by it.  Within this latter approach the very notions of data and flesh begin to bleed and, in this wake, it becomes possible to pose a host of questions notably on ethics, representation and the possibilities for social science engagement. 

Convener: Marsha Rosengarten 

Visual sociology has taught sociology that text is not the only medium. This module introduces you to the problems of visuality and representation in sociology, beginning with classical debates in visual sociology, but including more recent debates surrounding the notions of media and methods to discuss how sociology can represent the social. The module will introduce you to the complexity of decisions to be taken in inventive sociology once the primacy of text is relinquished.

The module has two aims: first to introduce you to key fields of visual and inventive sociology, and second to key problems of doing inventive sociology. We discuss the cooperation of sociologists with other specialists, such as photographers or videographers, the relationship between self-representations of research subjects and those of the sociologist, the problem of representing objects which are not visual or textual in nature, combining different media, and how to address specific audiences.

This module examines visual advertising media and the proliferation of neo-liberal philosophies of consumer citizenship. In the milieu from which universal rights are disappearing, consumer citizenship imposes a moral obligation on subjects to make provision for themselves and their families well into the future. The logical implication here is that autonomous consumers come to adopt a certain entrepreneurial form of practical relationship to their selves. Enterprise is represented here as playing a vital translating role, promising to align general political-ethical principles, with the goals of industry and the self–regulating activities of individuals. Within this politico-ethical environment, consumers are constituted as both objects of enterprise and instruments of enterprise as they make 'entrepreneurs of themselves, seeking to maximize their ‘quality of life’ through the artful assembly of a ‘life-style’ put together through the world of goods’ (Miller and Rose 2008:49). 

Divided into four main sections. Part One: examines reflexive modernity and the linking of postmodern visual culture with citizenship as part of the development of political consumerism. Part Two: is informed by Michel Foucault's 1978-1979 lectures at the College de France, in conjunction with Miller and Rose (2008), so as to provide an account of the entrepreneurial self. Central objective of Part Two is to examine the 'governing of humanity', in the context of Neoliberal governmental rationality and market reform of public sector services (with emphasis on recent healthcare market reform). Part Three raises pertinent issues about visual media: the embodiment of consumer citizenship; the body as a site of self-discipline; body praxis and life-politics; and cultural political resistance to the commodity-sign. Part Four: examines Fairtrade branding and the geopolitics of ethical consumerism in the context of global advertising media.

This module explores the global politics of human rights in the present moment, paying particular attention to the way the power of “human rights” is mediated by institutional forms, discourses, and devices. Beginning with an intellectual and institutional history of the particular ways the concept of human rights is understood today, we will examine a number of sites that are central to the circulation of human rights today (local and international NGOs, courts, media organizations, states). We will also examine how a number of current political issues intersect with the language of human rights (undocumented migration, workers' rights, gendered forms of domination). Throughout we will pay attention to the intellectual and political benefits and costs of approaching political issues through the lens of human rights and consider what a politics of the forms of mediation of human rights might look like. Throughout, we will also imagine research questions and research strategies that would allow us to speak to the most pressing concerns in this area of investigation.

Convener: Monika Krause

The module provides an exploration of recent themes in feminist and cultural theory. It also allows you to explore a series of case study topics within the broad fields of gender cultural studies. You will become aware of the range of theoretical resources mobilised by feminist writers to account for, or make sense of, how bodies take shape over time. You will become familiar with the feminist approaches to questions of affect and emotion.

This module is intended to take you on a selective route through 20th and 21st-century philosophical reflections on politics & the philosophies of difference. You'll explore contemporary debates as part of a longer discussion.

You'll examine themes such as radical pluralism, relationality, divergence, multiplicity, and becoming. This module has been designed to critically review the continuing relevance of questions raised by our key thinkers by pairing them with another contemporary writer who either explicitly speaks to that thinker or who shares the key thinker’s attentions or philosophical imaginary in some way.

Each week, you'll have two set readings, and you're encouraged to read both if possible. In this way it will be possible for you to follow a more overtly theoretical route through the course, or follow a route that stays closer to theoretical controversies as they are played out in contemporary sites or issues.

Contemporary readings of urbanity stress the manifold unfolding’s of city environments. Pushing beyond geographical territories, urbanity requires us to work across different ideas of time and space and apprehend these from the perspective of ongoing process and change. Urbanities give rise to differential forms of practice – we engage cities and their infrastructures, institutions, governances, capitals and cultures in diverse and irreducible ways.  Given the dynamic relations that make up the urban and the people that inhabit and move through it, how do we begin to explore and comprehend questions of city life and our interventions in it?

This course investigates and experiments with a series of methods that can be employed to think about the urban. To engage the complex questions of the urban we require creative sociological methods through which we can observe, make sense of and analyse what we experience without fixing it in place. This course takes as its foundation artistic and sensorial innovations in the social sciences. It groups these over five weeks through themes of Observing, Listening, Assembling, Writing and Intervening. Such methodological innovations allow us to think about the urban in ways that engage multiplicitous publics, voices and forms of participation and practice. Drawing from interdisciplinary developments in visual, sonic and sensory sociologies, this course brings together theoretical literature with practical application and critical reflection.

This module focuses on the relationship between urban spaces and identities. Students will examine how sociological, psychological and anthropological theories of self relate to notions of culture, community, personal space and identity. The module will reference theoretical and critical sources exploring and questioning notions of selfhood and collective identity constructions such as gender, ‘race’, class, sexuality, aging and other  cultural formulations, in relation to photographic image-making. Students are encouraged to relate the theoretical readings, lectures and seminar discussions to ongoing visual and urban research practices, and where appropriate, to provide a critical framework for their own image-making.

This module will focus on a series of conversations with international photographers and artists whose visual projects relate to a critical examination of urban spaces. The speakers will reflect a wide range of practices, including landscape, portraiture, community, and other forms that relate to the developing field of urban photography and visual urbanism. The main aim of this module is to explore and reflect critically on how urban photographic practices speak to sociological, geographic and cultural debates about the nature of contemporary urban life.

You are encouraged to familiarise yourself with the speakers’ visual projects prior to the presentations, and to use the opportunity of discussing your work within the context of critical urbanism and sociological debate. You will select a photographer presenting during the module, or, with the agreement of the module convenor, another relevant photographer/artist, and then write a short essay reflecting on a project or wider oeuvre pertaining to that particular visual author.

Assessment: 2, 500 word essay focusing on either one of the photographer’s work in relation to core sociological and urban research issues, or select a relevant urban photographer/artist working in a related area as the subject for the module essay.

Convener: Paul Halliday

This module introduces students to social research methods that have special salience in the digital context: ethnography, network analysis and online textual analysis and issue mapping. The module offers an advance introduction to computer­‐enabled sociological methods and then proceeds to examine specific methods and their digitisation on a case­‐to­‐case basis. The module provides an overview of the central principles of these sociological methods, and then offers a hands­‐on introduction to correlated online research tools and platforms. The module provides experience of a range of current searching and database technologies, and techniques and commands for the analysis of online social content. Finally, the module explores the sociological implications of the changing status of social research methods in the digital environment, as methods are materialised in search engines, data visualisation tools, and so on.

In this module, you'll be expected to build on your growing understanding of media and materials in terms of sociological research projects by addressing a common course theme. You'll be encouraged to think about the appropriateness of different kinds of visual and sensory materials when addressing sociological questions, conducting research projects, and presenting their outcomes in relation to this theme in an exhibition, which takes place in the last week of term.

We'll explore the theme “above and below”, which is both understood as a prime metaphorical logic of organising societies (“upper class”, “social ladder”, “the global north and south”, “looking down on someone”, imagining God and Angels as being above etc.) as well as a crucial practice of organizing society, i.e. being buried, dwelling in bunkers, boring holes for tunnels, the practice of archaeology, oceanography, extraction mining, mountaineering, diving, flying, drones, living in penthouses and skyscrapers and so on. And we also want to ask how these metaphorical organising principles relate to the actual practices and what happens if we subvert them. What if God were imagined to exist down below, and living underground were considered a luxury?  

This course begins with presentations of the topic “above and below” in relation to sociological and historical debates as well as issues of representation. In your own experiments, you might begin by posing the question: what does it mean to attempt to represent issues of above and below? What might escape or exceed different visual or sensory forms? Which media is best suited to your initial explorations?

What is subjectivity? The module will explore this concept by engaging with questions around health, disease, illness and medicine. ‘Subjectivity’ implies a reference to the subject/object dichotomy that has traditionally been mapped onto the distinctions between ‘mind’ and ‘body’, ‘illness’ and ‘disease’, ‘meaning’ and ‘cause’, ‘value’ and ‘fact’. We start with a historical perspective on how these dichotomies informed the construction of (bio)medical knowledge and sociological approaches to health and illness. In this framework ‘subjectivity’ can point to the experience of illness as distinct from the factuality of disease, and to the ways in which this experience can disrupt (or inform) the construction of selves. We will then move on to problematise these distinctions by looking at a range of phenomena – such as ‘unexplained symptoms’, the placebo effect, suggestion – and theoretical perspectives that invite us to consider subjectivity as intrinsic to material bodies, rather than external and different from it. One of the underlying questions for the module will be how to think about the dynamic relationship between matter (or biomedical ‘facts’) and value (or cultural and social ‘norms’), and how ‘subjectivity’ in this sense might be studied empirically. While a wide range of sources can be brought to bear on these questions, the module will be based on close engagement with a selection of examples and texts each year.

Convener: Monica Greco

Inspired by Fredric Jameson’s notion of ‘cognitive mapping’, understood as the demand to achieve a representation of one’s place in the system and the logic of global capital, this module explores contemporary efforts to provide social and political ‘cartographies’ of capitalist society, with particular attention to the question of race. To this end, the course will bring the literature on cognitive mapping in critical dialogue with theories and analyses of ‘racial capitalism’, as well as to a range of theoretical and analytical texts on the interlocking of race, class and gender, as well as their articulation in different films and visual works. Having laid the theoretical groundwork in an initial session on the relation and contrast between the paradigms of cognitive mapping and racial capitalism, we will move to think the relation of race and representation through Frederick Douglass’s 19^th century lectures on photography, in the context of a broader consideration of the visual culture of abolitionism. This will be followed by a consideration of the way in which the visual presentation of data on racial exploitation and black experience were a crucial part of WEB Du Bois sociological inquiries. Our attention will then turn to Cedric J. Robinson’s crucial analysis of the ‘racial regime’ pertaining to the place of African-Americans in the pre-war US film industry. Robinson, perhaps the key reference for the debate on racial capitalism (see his Black Marxism), presents a powerful analysis of the complex and contested place of race in US film, and especially in the works of Black filmmakers like Oscar Micheaux. We will also consider Robinson’s analyses of the nexus of race and film representation in later works and genres, including ‘blaxploitation’, postcolonial cinema, and the ‘mulatta film’ – analyses in which issues of sex, gender and class are foregrounded. Robinson’s theoretical and analytical framework will also be compared to the work on race and cinema by other scholars, especially bell hooks. In the second half of the course, we will try to develop further the articulation between cognitive mapping and racial capitalism by considering the writings of Ruth Wilson Gilmore on race, violence, geography and the state, touching on her response to the Rodney King police brutality case and the LA uprising of 1992, relating it to Judith Butler’s analysis of the same conjuncture in terms of the ‘racial schematization of the visual field’. We will bring these theoretical debates into dialogue with several filmic and visual works, including the films Killer of Sheep, Handsworth Songs and Ferguson: A Report from Occupied Territory.

The course will conclude with a reflection on the tensions between Jameson’s cognitive mapping paradigm and the analysis of racial capitalism, as evidenced by Fred Moten’s contrasting analysis of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers’ film Finally Got the News, and its argument that Jameson’s approach to totalization neglects a ‘sonic’ dimension critical to grasping the political and aesthetic dimensions of black struggles in the US. Throughout, we will try to think of how bringing together a 'cartographic turn' in contemporary theory, art and political activism with arguments around ‘racial capitalism’, can challenge our presuppositions about the relationship between social inquiry, spatial analysis and political aesthetics.

Cultural policy, especially at local level, has been called on to play an increasing set of functions in recent decades. Cities, in particular post-industrial cities in the West, have seen in ‘culture’ a lever for regeneration, one that could be harnessed by targeted policies. However, all the main concepts at play – city, culture and policy – have been subjected to increasing scrutiny in social theory and research: expansion but also problematisation of the notion of culture; diversification and renewed centrality of the city as physical, social and political context; reformulation of cultural policy beyond regulations and policy process towards wider issues of governmentality, democracy and participation.

The module will present recent theoretical advances as well as empirical findings on these topics, focusing on key themes such as culture-led regeneration, place branding, cultural taste, and others relevant to the understanding of contemporary cities. These key themes will also be explored through a case study approach, aimed both at providing a space for in-depth investigation, and inspiration for students to identify and select contemporary cases to be developed for their final essay.