MA Creative & Cultural Entrepreneurship: Media & Communications Pathway

Theories of Capital critically examines key theories of social, economic, cultural and symbolic capital.  The module details these conceptual capital frameworks and compliments this theoretical foundation with application in the creative and cultural industries with a focus on government policy and the unique economic characteristics of the creative industries.  For example consumer consumption of status goods will be assessed using theories of symbolic and social capital. Emphasis will be given on the role of intellectual capital in policy. Students will learn the analytical rigour to critically assess creative and cultural industry policy and market structures.  Students will be able to translate theory into practice, and practice into theory.

This module will introduce students to a range of business modelling tools, and provide insight in to the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs and enterprises. The module has evolved from NESTA’s Creative Pioneer Programme and will use the Modelling Techniques that were designed and have evolved from The Academy and Insight Out which provide approaches to commercialising creativity.

It will critically review the key characteristics of successful enterprises, entrepreneurs and leaders, within the cultural and more commercially focused creative industries. It will look at the range of business models that exist and review how best to build a financially sustainable organisation.

Students will be introduced to a range of techniques:

1. Relationship Modelling – this will assist students to understand the range of business models in the creative industries, and to create the most appropriate route to market; it will consider the relationship that the originator of the creative idea has to the production, distribution and the audience/customer/client; it uncovers the student’s relationship to “reward”.

2. Evidence Modelling – this model uses Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad Model to review the likely impact of the idea; it helps makes the enterprise tangible and to ensure that the entrepreneur remains in control of the effects of their ideas. Using the modelling technique helps students to articulate their values and the benefits of their ideas.

3. Blueprint Modelling – an approach to creating an operating plan which will move their idea to market, articulating all of the activities and responsibilities required.
Consequence Modelling – using all of the knowledge from the modelling techniques, this will uncover the financial consequences of the decisions made. It will introduce them to basic financial modelling concepts, and ensure they are comfortable with the financial language of creative entrepreneurs.

The projects are intended to assess the full range of students’ abilities and to apply a range of learning outcomes which the programme enables students to develop. In particular, it enables assessment of the ability to design, develop and write an advanced practice-based research project using primary and/or secondary materials appropriate to the topic and according to the necessary conventions of scholarly work. It requires independent motivation and self-directed learning, under supervision, and enables students to demonstrate competence for critical analysis and sustained persuasive argument.

The dissertations are intended to assess the full range of students’ abilities and to apply a range of learning outcomes which the programme enables students to develop. In particular it enables assessment of the ability to design, develop and write an advanced research project using primary and/or secondary materials appropriate to the topic and according to the necessary conventions of scholarly work. It requires independent motivation and self-directed learning, under supervision, and enables students to demonstrate competence for critical analysis and sustained persuasive argument.

This practice module gives an overview of what a film producer needs to understand about the development, production and distribution of film content.

Working in teams, the module enables you to develop a critical view of the different roles of a producer. The development skills include understanding the principles of script analysis and script editing; developing a project from source material; collaboration with writers and directors; pitching; negotiating the deal; publicity and marketing; sales, distribution and exhibition; co-production; financing; legal and financial.

The production skills include budgeting and scheduling; managing the production; post-production techniques; editing, sound and music. The module will provide an introduction and context for the development of a ‘reflective practitioner’ approach to the producing process.

This module provides a critical overview of the UK Media Industry including cinema, television and online platforms, covering the following topics:

• Overview of UK cinema, television and independent sectors.
• The UK cinema production landscape – aesthetic, cultural and economic factors. The main UK players.
• Television drama and its values and challenges.
• New markets and companies – Vice, Netflix, Youtube, Kindle. Web drama and interactive. New distribution initiatives.
• Funds, Film London, Creative England, National & Regional Screen Agencies, Tax Credits, Crowd Funding
• Brainstorming ideas for fiction for a specific audience. The treatment, the pitch.

This module will introduce students to models of management, entrepreneurship and professional practice appropriate to creative, social or cultural organisations. It will examine the relationship between arts management practice, design thinking entrepreneurial practices and the culture in which that practice is situated. The module is in two parts, the first through presentations and seminars will equip students to develop a critical approach to both general management policy and practice and to practice has been developed to meet the characteristics and requirements of the arts sector. Students will be introduced to key ideas in organisational management from Weber to Handy and Belbin and current writing on leadership. Students will also be introduced to different forms of legal structures for organisations and basic issues relating to employment.

The second part of the module is the placement, which will work where possible as or like a knowledge transfer partnership scheme. One of the key aims of knowledge transfer partnerships to help businesses ‘improve their competitiveness and productivity through the better use of knowledge, technology and skills that reside within the UK knowledge base’. So, we understand this placement as not only an important learning experience for the student but also as an important link between companies (across sectors) and academe (Goldsmiths and its offer particularly). The placement may be attached to various projects - research and consultancy – ICCE is engaged with and also continuing to develop but equally may be a new initiative.

The module explores the consequences of social and mobile media in a comparative context. What does it mean to live entangled with social and mobile media? What are the consequences of the culture of ‘always on’ connectivity for our identities, relationships and communities? What are the implications for inequality? Are there any opportunities for protest movements or for coping during emergencies? These questions have never been as urgent as they are today. During the pandemic, we have collectively experienced a huge dependency on social and mobile media as our professional and social lives migrated online. The module offers an opportunity to critically unpack some of the assumptions made about media technologies, starting by unravelling the very notion of social media.

The module pivots on the double logic of social media: while social media enable socialities and intimacies at a distance, they are also key instruments of extraction and surveillance. This tension between agency and corporate or state control through datafication is a theme that runs across all lectures. The module takes a distinctly non-western approach focusing on the experience of social media in the context of everyday life. The key texts informing our seminar discussions are ethnographies from the global south. Through this comparative approach, we aim to question widely held assumptions about social media as well notions of intimacy, care, labour, protest and inequalities.

While both academic and industry research has long established how racial and ethnic minorities are portrayed negatively in the media, in recent times there has been an increase in the level of campaigning around issues of representation – from the trending of #oscarssowhite, to the activism of the website Media Diversified, and recent parliamentary interventions made by actors Lenny Henry and Idris Elba demanding more diversity on and off screen. The aim of this module is to develop a rigorous, theoretically and empirically grounded approach to the topic of diversity in the media in order to help students develop an in-depth and nuanced understanding of how cultural industries work to produce discourses around race.

The unique intervention of the Race and the Cultural Industries module is in drawing attention to the context of production. It explores the experience of people of colour working in the cultural industries to help explain why representations of race take the form that they do. In order to address the varied contextual factors that shape representations of race, there is a strong stress on interdisciplinarity, combining critical media studies (including political economy and cultural studies perspectives) with race critical scholarship (postcolonial theory, poststructuralist and post-Marxist approaches). By focusing on cultural production the overall aim of the module is to demonstrate how racialized minorities who work in the media are constrained (or enabled) by the conditions of the cultural industries. Moreover, the module is designed to help future practitioners conceptualise their own forms of antiracist media practice.

This module aims to provide students with the theoretical tools necessary for understanding postcolonial transformations in today’s Global South. The political imperative behind Postcolonial Studies – which emerged as an academic discipline in the 1980s – was metropolitan multiculturalism. Multiculturalism emerged as a key agenda of progressive politics – responding largely to mobilizations around race, diaspora and the politics of gender. Grounded in certain notions of representation, discourse and text, it enabled the theorist to mount an attack on the ethico-political enterprise of post-Enlightenment humanism on behalf of those who were excluded from its universalist schema. The module seeks to familiarise students with both analytical tools and activist models developed over the last few decades to comprehend, analyse and intervene in these transformations.

Media, both old and new, are fast changing not just the way we perceive the world but also the way we experience our being-in-world and our interventions into the world. In view of this, elements of the module are concerned with studying the cultural aspects of globalization, including ‘the politics of aesthetics’, ‘sensible politics’ and the visual cultures of non-governmental activism. Globalization has also seen to a remapping of cultural and artistic fields, and the emergence of new cultural and commodity imaginaries. The globalization of art has resulted in the culture of spectacular biennales and new practices of curating. Museums and collections have become major tools for educating and disciplining populations.

Drawing from the tools provided during the ‘Postcolonial Theory’ module, and supplementing these with the ‘thinking and doing’ that has arisen from the ‘decolonial turn’, the module approaches many of the weekly topics through the framework of ‘decoloniality’ and what Boaventura de Sousa Santos et al have named ‘epistemologies of the South’. In addition to this, a key component of the module is the new socio-political theory developed after the end of the Cold War, which aims to understand the decline of the nation-state and the enhanced power of supranational institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO. This requires a critical examination of a range of agendas, namely: Global Civil Society and Governance, Human Rights, Non-Governmental Organisations, Sovereignty, New Social Movements, (Intellectual) Property Rights, Environmentalism, Biopiracy, the Commons, Social Capital, etc. The module seeks to ground these concepts in political/cultural theory rather than treating them as ad-hoc ideas. Students are encouraged to draw from the critical theory tradition of cultural theory and to question the normative claims of liberal theory in the age of neoliberal globalization.

The critique of capitalism has been an important horizon for research and theory in cultural studies since its inception. Beginning with an introduction to this (anti-)disciplinary history, this module introduces and engages with past and contemporary critical approaches to the imbrication of capitalism and culture in cultural studies, cultural theory and philosophy.

We will consider the evolution of cultural studies from its early focus on the role of capitalism in shaping class relations and class culture, through its integration of such critiques into a still-expanding range of areas of concern, including issues around gender, race, sexuality, (post)colonialism, posthumanism and ecology. We will engage with key theoretical concepts and paradigms that have been developed in order to better understand the cultural dimension and functioning of capital, such as commodity fetishism, ‘capitalism-as-religion’, gift-exchange, theories of debt, parasitism, neoliberalism, information capitalism, and post-natural ecology.

We will ask how contemporary global phenomena such as the rise of digital networking, climate change and financial crisis may be transforming the relationship between capitalism and culture, and critically examine currently circulating claims that capitalism is giving way to ‘postcapitalism’.

From #BlackLivesMatter to the ‘refugee crisis’, from the ‘war on terror’ to school shootings in the US, the framing of and responses to urgent political and cultural debates often rely on the mediation of violence. Violence is mediated as something palpable, recognizable, physical, spectacular, and something that evokes strong emotions. Increasingly, violence is also often mediated as distant, routine, and normalized, sparking fears of ‘viewer’ desensitization and fatigue. This module draws on interdisciplinary feminist, queer, and decolonial theory to unpack and interrogate violence and its mediation. It asks – What is violence and how is it represented and mediated? How is violence theorized and understood? What forms and shapes does violence take? What are the material and affective economies of violence? How does gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, and (dis)ability intersect with violence? How do social justice struggles and activisms relate to violence? By foregrounding critical feminist, queer, decolonial perspectives in cultural, social, media, and political theory, this module illuminates the intersectionalities and assemblages of power that ‘make’ and mediate violence and the racial-gendered-sexual grammars that connect the seemingly disparate locations of (everyday) violence. In the first weeks of the module, we visit key debates in the feminist, queer, decolonial theorizations of violence and its mediation. In the following weeks, we examine the mediation of violence through several ‘sites’ and ‘processes’ (such as bodies, borders, migrations, nations, nationalisms, empires, capitalism, war, torture, death, debility, trauma) using feminist, queer, decolonial theory and examples/case studies from popular media.

‘Call out feminism’, ‘transfeminism’, ‘intersectional feminism’, ‘Indigenous feminism’, ‘TERF’ and ‘hashtag feminism’ each exemplify the proliferation of feminist media cultures in recent years. In the context of digital media culture, debates about gender, sexuality and race have become de rigour. Many such debates link identificatory categories to their origins in social relations and representations, denaturalising cultural difference and problematising social and cultural structures of power. This discursive shift in the representation of identity leads to the question of whether contemporary feminist media cultures debunk the central thesis of postfeminism—that the negation of feminism gives rise to an empowered femininity/woman. The question of such a shift is further problematised by the networked rearticulation of misogyny, homophobia and racism in the conjunctive reassertion of nationalism globally.

This module focuses on the question the relationship between feminism and media. We learn how contemporary feminisms come out of longstanding media practices of intervention through poster campaigning, filmmaking, photography, speech writing, zine production, and so on. We then consider the aesthetics of feminism through the theories and methods of feminist media and cultural studies, focusing on how feminist aesthetics are linked to technologies of production and reception, cultural practices and discourses of power. Feminist movements have always made use of their own media as a means to mobilise social action, often to address issues of social injustice put in terms of oppressive political systems, unequal cultural representation, inequity of civil liberties, the ‘pay gap’, and misogyny in the everyday from microaggression to intimate partner violence. Contemporary feminist media cultures are characterised by emergent, dynamic and efficacious forms of mediated visibility and participation that put longstanding feminist media practices into motion in new cultural forms and with new implications. We will learn how ‘popular’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘everyday’, ‘neoliberal’, ‘transnational’, ‘networked’ and ‘participatory’ feminisms buttress, intervene into, or provide alternatives to structures of power, particularly as they intersect with class, capitalism and colonialism within neoliberalism.

Through a foundational and rigorous training in ‘theory as method’, this module equips students with an analytical skill set that enables the critical interpretation of contemporary feminist media cultures. In the first weeks of the module, we learn how to apply feminist theories of subjectivity, representation, spectatorship, audiences, publics and networks. Doing so, we gain knowledge of the application of psychoanalytic, cultural, new materialist, critical race and queer methods of analysis within feminist media and cultural studies. We build on established ‘ways of reading’ through theorising subjectivity, representation and so on, practicing theory as a method of critical intervention. The following weeks specifically address the digital turn in feminism, examining a range of digital feminist phenomena including celebrity feminism, networked feminist activism, feminist film and television, and feminist social media (hashtagging, blogging, vlogging, podcasting). As well as analysing what various feminist aesthetics and technologies of production and reception do in globalised contexts of climate change and economic precarity, for instance, the module foregrounds situated and transnational perspectives, asking questions such as: How are feminisms configured by digital media culture in India and China? How did feminist media cultures play a role in the uprisings in Egypt? Assessment of the module asks students to explore questions such as: what constitutes feminist intervention now and in which cultural context? How should feminism be mediated? What are the potentials and pitfalls of feminism’s digital turn? What are the futures of feminist media?

This module examines a selection of films generally understood as examples of “world cinema”. It analyses the critical and conceptual approaches which have come to define the academic study of national and international film cultures, specifically ideas of “third” and “third world” cinema, and theories of regional and transnational cultures of production and reception.

Divided into three sections, the module will address a body of movies from Africa, Latin America and Asia that have been released over the last forty years according to three guiding themes: globalised economies, activism and populism. We will be investing these films’ formal strategies and thematic concerns; their social and cultural specificity or “universalism” (alongside the politics of that distinction); their industrial and institutional contexts; and their national and international status (for example, in their home countries and in the festival circuit). How different forms of colonisation are absorbed and interrogated will be a question that threads through the entire module.

This module 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 module 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, semiotics and textual analysis.

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, popular culture and creativity (film, TV, music), celebrities and public figures, political parties and promotional politics, and markets and values.

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.

From Ferguson to Gaza, from the local to the global, this module proposes that we are faced with the necessity to revisit the canonical texts of postcolonial theory in order to make sense of our contemporary world. The aim of the module is to introduce you to a selection of these founding texts, and to consider the manner in which the spectre of colonialism persists in our present, both in our material reality and as a ‘spectropoetics’ that haunts the unconscious.

In this sense, you will read classic postcolonial texts of the twentieth century together with contemporary academic, activist and artistic interventions and countersignatures. Close, first-hand reading of texts is emphasised and you are required to probe the whole spectrum of postcolonial thinking—from literary theory, politics, psychoanalysis, diaspora studies, race and gender studies to philosophy, art, anthropology and history—and as such interrogate the production and circulation of knowledge from diverse positionalities. We seek to problematize the very notion of post-coloniality, understood not as a temporal marker but more as a style of thought—as a problem, a question and an option, an ‘epistemic and political project’.

We begin the module from the present, with a questioning of the links and divergences between postcolonial theory and current decolonial thinking (in particular where this concerns struggles across today’s global south), in order to invest our readings of canonical postcolonial texts with a sense of urgency and to set out a disciplinary framework.

Weekly topics are organised conceptually and across geographical and temporal boundaries through the themes such as the following, each of which re-inflects the next: objectivity; recognition; representation; ecology; relation; translation; ambivalence, appropriation; repair and reconciliation.

You will be introduced 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: as well as regulation and representation. We will also look at 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 be followed by a seminar. This module will provide practice students with a theoretical underpinning for your work, which you will develop via personal study later in the year. Those taking this module as a theory option will find it provides a challenging insight into journalism as a practice.

Can film and digital media bring about social and political change? How do such films work, and what models are there for how filmmakers might relate to their subjects? Further, how are such films funded and distributed - how does their reach differ from conventional cinema and broadcast products?

This module will introduce you to activist filmmaking and digital media for social change. The module will be relevant for you both if your interest is primarily theoretical, and/or practical - for instance if you are interested in working in this area.

The module will give you a grounding in current debates in the field and, as well as exposing you to a range of contemporary projects and practices, some of the history of activist media.

Amongst the sessions and topics covered will be current film representations of activism, the history of activist and alternative media, a workshop in participatory media techniques, and case study sessions and in contemporary web-based projects.

The module will help you gain a practical and critical knowledge of contemporary approaches to activist media practice across different platforms, as well as the history of activist/community/participatory media.

This practice module gives an overview of what a film producer needs to understand about the development, production and distribution of film content.

Working in teams, the module enables you to develop a critical view of the different roles of a producer. The development skills include understanding the principles of script analysis and script editing; developing a project from source material; collaboration with writers and directors; pitching; negotiating the deal; publicity and marketing; sales, distribution and exhibition; co-production; financing; legal and financial.

The production skills include budgeting and scheduling; managing the production; post-production techniques; editing, sound and music. The module will provide an introduction and context for the development of a ‘reflective practitioner’ approach to the producing process.