MA Race, Media & Social Justice

The module offers a strong theoretical and conceptual basis for understanding critiques of race and racialisation historically and with regard to contemporary cultural contexts and political debates. In addition, our attention to media extends beyond media objects and technologies (texts, the audio-visual and new media platforms) to include how race and ethnicity are mediated and become in everyday life through complicated and changing interrelations between discourses, emotions and bodies. Attention is focused on an examination of race critical theories and related concepts that sociologists and cultural studies theorists have used to think about the formation of ethnic and racial identities in relation to social justice, specifically the social ideals of equality, valuing diversity, and the right to live in dignity. The module explores the challenges of reconciling the analytical rigour of race critical theories and practical aims of oppositional political agendas within the contemporary conjuncture. This exploration entails using a range of historical and contemporary examples to interrogate concepts and theoretical approaches. In this sense, we do not make a priori assumptions about the content and processes that are involved in racialisation, rather we investigate them in situ.

This module will examine how histories of Western imperialism have shaped the landscapes of the present. Our task is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to longer histories of empire. In addition to introducing key concepts from critical race and postcolonial studies, lectures will also offer phenomenological interpretations of how race structures the present often by receding into the background, as well as drawing on theories of affect and emotion to explore how security regimes become racial regimes. Our concern is with how histories of empire ‘get under the skin,’ and set reading include works that reflect on the experience of being or becoming strangers, or ‘bodies out of place.’ We attend to the intersection between race, gender and sexuality throughout

The dissertation requires you to demonstrate knowledge, understanding and critical reasoning but also to initiate a new project, to work independently and conduct new research, to apply knowledge acquired across the programme and to contribute to ongoing research in one of the main areas of the programme.

This module will examine how histories of Western imperialism have shaped the landscapes of the present. Our task is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to longer histories of empire. In addition to introducing key concepts from critical race and postcolonial studies, lectures will also offer phenomenological interpretations of how race structures the present often by receding into the background, as well as drawing on theories of affect and emotion to explore how security regimes become racial regimes. Our concern is with how histories of empire ‘get under the skin,’ and set reading include works that reflect on the experience of being or becoming strangers, or ‘bodies out of place.’ We attend to the intersection between race, gender and sexuality throughout.

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.

‘Palestine’ has become one of the most potent cultural/political signifiers of our time. This module aims to unpack some of its complex histories and meanings, with a view to understanding why it plays such a central role in contemporary debates about ‘Islamic radicalism’, neo-colonialism/globalisation, the decline of the West, human rights and ‘terrorism’. In doing so, it seeks to remedy a signal oversight in mainstream postcolonial studies, which has historically evaded any serious engagement with ‘Palestine’. These issues will be approached in a multi-disciplinary fashion, drawing on literary and cultural studies, politics, religious studies, trauma studies, film studies, history and ethnography. Particular attention will be paid to how cultural representation mediates relationships of power and ideology; and the role and effects of different styles, genres and modes of representation (fiction, memoir, graphic novel, film, poetry etc) in such mediations.

Please note: this is an experimental module and some of the texts will be less readily available than on comparable options. Students must be prepared to use internet sites like Amazon and AbeBooks to source out-of-print material, although every effort will be made to provide some stocks of each text in the library.

Why does music matter? What is its value? What makes music a distinctive form of communication? In what ways does music enhance people’s lives, and produce forms of individual and collective flourishing? Conversely, how can music reinforce social hierarchies? How does music link to questions of social power, notably in terms of class, ethnicity and gender, in relation to its production and consumption? How can music lead to individual and collective forms of flourishing?

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

Underlying the option are a series of wider questions about how we might research, analyse and understand the complex of sounds, words and images that constitute contemporary popular and many other kinds of music. How and in what ways may we argue that music can express, influence and affect human actions and perceptions? How are beliefs, values and identities encoded and communicated as part of a collective experience or to individual listening subjects? How is what we listen to mediated by technologies and what affects does this has? How do we analyse and talk about musical sound when this often considered as having little to do with representation? Such questions have received relatively little attention in media, communication and cultural studies, and many of these issues remain under-researched. Hence, you are encouraged to draw on your own personal experience of music in everyday life and to make use of this material in connection with some of the theoretical approaches under discussion during seminars (as well as others you will have come across in your reading and on other courses).

This option is more theoretically demanding than it might initially appear, as it entails thinking critically about a number of everyday musical and sonic experiences that are often taken for granted. It also requires you to both bring a range of critical ideas to your analysis of music and musicians as well as musical examples (on CD, phone, mp3 file etc.) to play to your seminar group. You are encouraged to read widely for seminar discussion and when writing essays, and to make connections to a number of relevant and related theoretical debates outside of the immediate popular music literature.

This option module examines the relations between gender, sexuality and media. It aims to explore the ways in which gender and sexuality are constituted through a broad range of media, and how they may be resisted, intervened in and created differently. The module considers media in an open sense, understanding it to include practices of mediation, technological processes and modes of production and consumption, as well as particular cultural forms including television, film, music, digital and social media, art and design. It attends to how gender and sexuality are not stable identities or classifications but are instead processes involving relations with media and technologies, and with ‘race’, ethnicity, class and dis/ability.

The module is taught in a combination of lectures, seminars, screenings and workshops. As well as exploring media through different theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches, practice-research is embedded in the module, meaning that you will try out different practices of making and analysing media. As examples, these practices might include experimenting with creative writing, blogging, collaging, photography, video, drawing. This work will go towards a portfolio that you will build up over the term.

Course convenor: Rebecca Coleman

From western antiquity until modern times, the body in the west has been aestheticised, vilified, eroticised and pathologised. It is in and through the body that both self and society have been fashioned and disciplined.

It is at the heart of the emergence of sexuality as a modern discourse, and a constituent feature of the politics of identity, formed around race, gender and sex. For all the different debates the body has generated, they have always been framed within the mind/body, and nature/culture distinctions, which have been at the core of western thinking since the eighteenth century.

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 addresses the emergent relations of virtual and material geographies and focuses on questions of territory, communication and speed. It is concerned with the mobilities of information, people and objects and will address topics such as the dynamics of migrancy/nomadology and sedentarism; questions of globalisation, regionalisation and the reassertion of border controls; the role of tele-technologies in the transformation of temporal and spatial relations; processes of de/re-territorialisation and ‘new mobilities’; and differential demographies of technology use.

These issues will be considered from an interdisciplinary perspective, and will draw on cultural studies, cultural geography, communication studies, anthropology and logistics. The module’s concerns will be exemplified through focussing on three of the iconic figures of the contemporary era of modernity - the migrant, the mobile phone and the container box.