MA Photography & Urban Cultures

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.

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 is based on a weekly critique seminar focusing on students’ visual work over the term. Students are given a photographic and textual assignment focusing on an aspect of urban space, this could be landscape, architectural, object or place based; resulting in a visual outcome that will form the basis of a group presentation and discussion of the work in relation to the accompanying written sociological analysis. The core aims of this module are to encourage the development of critical visual research skills, the ability to communicate visual images clearly and concisely, and to be able to relate and locate such image-making to the context of sociological and visual urbanism. Students will be asked to produce a short photo-essay on an urban topic exploring an aspect of urban material culture (either macro or micro), and to relate this to the theoretical and visual aspect of the Through the Lens A module. The short written component of the Talking Practice A module will focus on a critical examination of sociological and cultural processes underpinning the production of the photographic essay.

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

* only open as an option for students who have studied Through the Lens A

This module focuses on the relationship between urban spaces and identities. You 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. You 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 your own image-making.

Convener: Paul Halliday