MA Sociocultural Linguistics

This module will focus on how language structure relates to meaning and communication. We’ll look at various aspects of language structure – sounds, words, sentences and short texts, and relate them to function and meaning.

For example, we’ll discuss how speakers deploy different grammatical resources to give varied representations of events and their participants. We’ll also explore how different structural choices help speakers express their knowledge, and certainty or uncertainty of events, or how they impose obligations or grant permission to their conversational partners, what means they use to express attitudes and take a stance, and how they figure out what others mean even when they mean something different from what they say.

The module aims to make clear the wider aims of linguistic research, as well as enable you to apply theoretical notions to specific data sets and develop your own skills of linguistic analysis, especially as it relates to human interaction and communication. Language structure will be seen as contextualised and contingent, subject to variation at any one time and change across periods of time.

This module combines a sociolinguistic with a discourse analytic approach in order to explore the socio-cultural contextualisation of language and meaning from two angles: language use and language representation. This dual focus will be evident throughout the course; topics such as language and gender, language and ethnicity or language and the media will be examined in relation to the socio-cultural (and situational) contexts in which speakers use language as well as in relation to different representations of specific socio-cultural groups in the media and other (written) texts.

For example, we’ll investigate both how women speak and how women are spoken about (e.g. sexist language). Other topics that will be addressed in this module include the political correctness debate; attitudes to non-standard English; multicultural London English and the linguistic construction of identity.

The module will introduce you to a wide range of empirical research and methodologies. Drawing on analytical tools and frameworks from semiotics, pragmatics, (critical) discourse analysis, conversation analysis, feminist linguistics, ethnography and variationist sociolinguistics, we’ll investigate how language is used and meanings are created, interpreted and contested in a range of different texts, discourses and socio-cultural environments.

This module will introduce you to the analysis of discourse and identity in spoken interaction. The course will allow you to develop in-depth, critical understanding of approaches, concepts and debates in spoken discourse analysis. The second aim of the module is to provide you with the opportunity to apply your newly acquired methodological insight to the study of discourse and identity in many different conversational and institutional settings.

A range of methodological frameworks and analytic concepts will be explored, including ethnographic approaches to language analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, membership categorisation analysis, performativity and narrative analysis. Seminar discussions will seek to establish what each of these approaches have to offer to the analysis of discourse practices and identity constructions of speakers in naturally occurring talk. For example, we’ll consider the question if analysts should or avoid bringing inferable assumptions about the relevance of macro identity categories such as gender and social class to their data.

You’ll also be encouraged to carry out your own project by collecting, transcribing and analysing a sample of spoken language of your choice. You’ll then get the opportunity to present and discuss your work in seminars.

The overall aim of this module is to explore the diversity of the English language in relation to linguistic and social issues involved in language contact and multilingualism. You’ll have the opportunity to study the spread of English and the rise to its current status as a global language, discuss the establishment of (English) language standards and (standard) varieties world-wide, the emergence of English as a Lingua Franca, translanguaging and other language contact phenomena.

The focus will be on the challenges and opportunities open to multilingual societies and to consider the impact of multilingual settings on individuals. An understanding of Global Englishes and aspects of multilingualism provides you with the necessary conceptual and theoretical tools to understand English practices in a multilingual world and to conduct your own research within an area of interest.

This course introduces you to key themes, studies and methods that have shaped the interdisciplinary field of intercultural communication. We’ll address questions of cultural difference and diversity from a range of theoretical and methodological approaches. We’ll study cross-cultural patterns of (communicative) practices, attitudes, values and cognition. We’ll ask how speakers construct culture and cultural identities in interaction, both in everyday private settings (e.g. couples talk) and in work/institutional settings (including business and education).

We’ll also explore how cultural norms and stereotypes are reflected in language and/or discourse and how they affect our thinking. We’ll focus our discussion on various levels of language, including speech events, speech acts, interactional styles, politeness phenomena and written discourse.

Throughout the course, we’ll consider the term ‘culture’ critically, comparing popular definitions of ‘culture’ as homogenous and static with postmodern models that highlight the heterogeneity and fluidity of ‘culture’. You’ll become familiar with a range of methodological approaches to the study of language and culture, including the ethnography of communication, discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, intercultural pragmatics and politeness theory. The course will not only ask you to study cultural and communicative norms and practices in a range of different English-speaking countries and settings, but it will also draw on research from a wide variety of languages. Students will be asked to draw on their own linguistic and cultural backgrounds and personal experiences in their critical engagement with this interdisciplinary field of study.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to a range of linguistic approaches of written discourse analysis. The module explores a range of frameworks and leads students to a discussion of how the analysis of texts can illuminate wider social issues, for example issues of power and ideology and issues of representation and identity. The seminars endeavour to give you the space to apply the techniques explored in the reading to a wide selection of texts (texts from the contemporary media, advertisements, textbooks, political and administrative texts, texts in translation, etc.)

You’ll acquire knowledge of different levels of linguistic analysis and learn to examine written discourse at the micro-level, and to link the micro to the macro. The use of a variety of texts is intended to lead students to debates about language use and social issues in different areas of human activity: mainly media, but also translation, education, etc. You’ll be encouraged to engage with the research literature and apply the theoretical concepts and linguistic approaches you become familiar with to independent analyses of self-selected data.

What is English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)? What are ELF implications for language teaching? How can teachers address the plurality of English in their teaching? English as a Lingua Franca, and research into the plurality of English, is a vibrant field of investigation and this module aims to bridge the gap between the socio-cultural research on ELF and language teaching/teacher education.

You’ll start with exploring current research on the nature of ELF, focusing on pragmatic and multilingual aspects, before concentrating on pedagogic implications. Throughout the module, the emphasis is on the plurality of English, the fluidity and intercultural nature of ELF communication, and how to address these in pedagogy, in relation to multilingual resources, materials, assessment, a reconceptualisation of the notion of communicative competence and ultimately a change of mindset for an ELF-informed pedagogy.

This module is open to students interested in ELF and its applications for the classroom and to language teachers who would like to address ELF and the plurality of English in their pedagogy.

This is a new blended-learning module which will run in collaboration with the University of Bahia (Salvador, Brazil) in synchronous communication.

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 term ‘social media’ has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Social media is now a crucial aspect of how we form and maintain friendship networks, but it is also increasingly central to commercial exchanges (to branding, PR, advertising), and to news production and consumption (by both professional and citizen journalists).  In this course we consider the historical formation of social media and the lines that can be drawn to contemporary consequences, particularly the blurring of public and private lives, shifts in power relations and the spread of rumors and urban myths that we see today.   Some of the core questions for the course will be how to think about how types of social media content are (re)produced, how data is diffused with and across networks, how social media may reinforce social inequalities, and why social media is an integral part of ‘performed’ social life – not just a fad driven by Facebook and Twitter.  This course will be based around a selection of case studies that will vary from year to year.  In each case we will be asking how we can critically assess what difference (if any) social media has made to everyday life and social structures.

Module Convener: Dhiraj Murthy 

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

This course aims to investigate discourses of equality and social justice in the context of the changing manifestations of race, religion, class, gender and sexuality in advanced capitalist and neoliberal times. Taking an interdisciplinary case study approach the course examines international research on pertinent issues such as educational inequalities, migration, religious difference and gendered violence.

The course takes an intersectional approach drawing on feminist perspectives and critical race theory to understand the ‘border crossings’ of transnational peoples as they ‘live out’ new and affective religious, ethnic, class, sexual and gendered identities in rapidly changing global contexts.

The course will focus on three broad areas of inquiry: First, discourses on multiculturalism and concern about ‘the migrant’ frames our focus on social justice. Here we look at race, gender, citizenship and belonging in the context of Islamophobia, securitization and the nation state. Second, mapping differences among raced, gendered, classed and faith based groups in education, health and employment enables a critical analysis of social justice discourses such as ‘diversity‘ in the context of the ubiquitous nature of whiteness, patriarchy and elitism in our institutions. Third, we contextualise the courses’ concern with social justice and inequality by looking at agency and ‘voice’ and the struggle for civil, political and social rights. In particular we examine transnational feminist, ethnic and indigenous social movements and the emergence of postcolonial pedagogies of difference and dissent.

Course convenor: Nirmal Puwar

Interrogate the work that stories do in shaping social life. As such, its focus lies less on the literary or representational dimension of stories and more on the way that stories and 'storying' operate as one of a number of cultural processes through which the possibilities of and for social life and identity are shaped and delimited. It is for this reason that the concept of stories that will be explored in this course has significant social, cultural, political and ethical implications, and also raises provocative methodological questions in the context of social research. In this course students will come to understand the different ways that stories have been analysed in both classic and contemporary social theory and in research. Stories will be understood as descriptive (representational), constitutive (ontological) and relational (ethical). Although stories are strongly associated – for example in sociology, literature and history - with verbal narrative and narrative representation, this course will stimulate thinking and analysis of stories more broadly

in terms of what Mary Louise Pratt has called a 'contact zone' (Pratt 1992) between historically and geographically separate subjects and between different levels, scales and kinds of experience. Course topics such as ‘Stories and the social’, ‘Fiction as method’ and ‘Case stories’ will demonstrate ideas and discussions about how stories move across, divide, puncture and assemble diverse perspectives, spaces and temporalities of experience. Students will be introduced not only to the cultural and discursive dimensions of stories, but also to stories and storying as social, political, affective, visual, and material.

By discussing and investigating these different approaches to stories, students will be introduced to a range of theorists, debates and methods, inviting and supporting trans- and inter-disciplinary thinking. In this course, students will learn to identify and recognise the different implications of working with stories, and stories and doing an analysis of stories. Thus, as well as addressing issues of representation, ontology, epistemology and ethics, the course will consider some of the methodological issues that are raised, appeased or aggravated by the use of stories in social research. These issues may include the problems of interpretation, power, reflexivity, ‘truth’ and inter-subjectivity as they apply to textual data and to qualitative research. The course will provide opportunities for students to develop theoretical and methodological skills and knowledge that can be used to support their own research.

This is a module about the political and economic organisation (‘political economy’) of the media with particular reference to Western industrial democracies. We'll examine the issues raised by commentators who explain media processes and the relationship of mass communications to society in terms of political economy. We'll step outside the confines of this tradition of thought to consider other explanations of the functioning of the mass media. We'll explore broad-based discussions of the role of the media in society, what shapes the media, how it should be organised and what influence it has, viewed from a variety of viewpoints.

Topics covered include the power relations between advertisers and media producers, who controls the news, the political economy of celebrity, media work, the function of entertainment and the culture industries. As you'll see, there are liberal and radical political economy answers to all these questions. But there are also other answers as well. You'll have to make up your mind about which positions you think are most convincing and best supported by the evidence. This module is designed to help you navigate the literature, guide you through the relevant debates and assist you to reach your own conclusions.

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.

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 the 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 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.

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.

In this module, you'll learn about the social and cultural constructions and understandings of gender, sexuality and the body as discussed in anthropology and beyond. You'll develop a critical understanding of some of the major theoretical approaches to gender, sex and the body, as they have been and are relevant to anthropology. In European intellectual history ideas about the body have often revolved around the biological binary categories male and female.

In this module, however, using a range of ethnographic examples we look at ways in which the idea of male and female is perceived, embodied and challenged, cross-culturally, in different contexts, and at different historical moments. The topics addressed range from work, performance and narrations of the self, to queer communities and families, and from biopolitics, and new technologies of the body/reproduction, the body, gender, and nation, and gender and globalisation. By the end of the module, you will be expected to be familiar with the main theoretical perspectives in anthropology on gender, sexuality and the related politics. You should also be aware of the historical changes which have marked the analysis of these concepts and be able to use ethnographic material as evidence for theoretical points. 

This is the core module for the interdisciplinary MA programme in Anthropology & Cultural Politics.
In this module, we will draw on a number of questions that are common to Anthropology, cultural studies, visual cultures, science and technology studies, and the social sciences and humanities in general: culture, power, the public, everyday life, property, things…. In these terms, the reading list is widely interdisciplinary. The objective of the module is to assess the particular contribution that Anthropology can make to these discussions.

The module material is intended to take anthropology’s engagement with culture into areas of public and political concern. Since these areas are potentially limitless, the topics included have been selected for their ability to equip students with knowledge of key theorists and issues that will help illuminate contemporary society as well as students’ specific areas of interest. You are encouraged to draw upon your own practice and other experience in seminar discussions as appropriate.

Anthropology has for a long time had a troubled relation with history. The scientific racism of the 19th century was replaced in the beginning of the 20th century with ahistorical, site-specific studies. But with time, history became an issue again – the growing interpenetration forced by colonialism, and capitalism and the world wars questioned the assumptions of radical cultural difference on which synchronic studies were based. Inevitably, history and historical change has become the heart of anthropological theory. A number of questions and dichotomies on historical continuities and changes have emerged, both at a theoretical and an empirical level: the relation of structure and agency; the place of consciousness and historicity in relation to historical events; the formation of a global culture versus the persistence of local cultures; the meaning of terms such as ‘modernity’, ‘capitalism’ and the ‘West’.

Language, culture and identity – and the relationships between them – are key aspects of educational theory and policy. They have also provided a rich site for educational research. Increasingly, this research has outgrown a national focus, to explore the ways in which global interconnections have produced hybrid cultures, complex identities and new questions for education. How are social norms to be negotiated and understood in a multicultural society? How does culture affect the way in which teaching and learning are understood? What role can and should education play in responding to questions about identity?

This module focuses on issues of race, ethnicity and cultural diversity in education. We will begin by considering what these terms mean, before discussing how and why ethnic and racial boundaries have been constructed through history, and to what extent people accept or contest these boundaries. We will pay particular attention to the history of the concept of racism, and to some of its contemporary manifestations around the world.

From these starting points we will move on to consider how these concepts impact on education. Issues such as what is or should constitute a 'good pupil', the nature of the teacher’s role in the classroom, what knowledge is valued, and who decides, will be investigated. We will also consider how other aspects of identity, notably social class and gender, intersect with ethnicity and race to affect learning and learner identities in different ways.

The module aims to challenge stereotypes, and notions of ethnic identities as fixed and unchanging. It invites participants to reflect on their own ethnic and cultural background, and to explore how this influences their own understandings of racialisation and identity. It also expects participants to draw directly on their own personal experiences as learners and, where appropriate, as teachers. Throughout the module we will seek to consider strategies and discourse which lead to a more inclusive socio-cultural approach to teaching and learning, and to experience the excitement and complexity of being part of an inclusive multicultural classroom ourselves.

This core module for the ‘Comparative Literature & Criticism’ pathway of the MA in Comparative Literary Studies will introduce you to the main concepts of comparative literary theory and practice and its principal debates, complementing these with textual analyses and the opportunity to engage in comparative readings. We will examine key aspects of the development of the discipline of “comparative literature”, and study the theoretical frameworks elaborated to describe the ways texts relate to, derive from, or influence other texts (such as influence, imitation and intertextuality, translation, and reception). Historical relationships and how these are constructed will be examined, focussing on the idea of tradition, the concept of the canon and its revisions, as well as the importance of literary history in our understanding of literature.

The literary texts and films studied will enable you to study “in action” central concepts of comparative critical practice, focussing for instance on genre; topoi; thematic approaches; textual rewritings; “translations” of texts to different genres (e.g. poetry to prose) or media (e.g. written text to film).

The module will ask questions such as: what happens to a text and its meaning when it is adapted to or referenced in a new geographical, historical, or social context? What does this mean for the concept of meaning itself? What is the relationship between genre, theme and story? Between a historically situated national identity and the crossing of linguistic, cultural and historical boundaries?

Teaching Mode: 3-hour seminar, including lecture-type input from the tutor.

The module surveys key currents in literary and cultural theory from the turn of the 20^th century to the present day. Beginning with the examination of shifting ideas and theories of the literary during the discipline’s development, it goes on to explore key thinkers and tendencies, starting with Nietzsche. These will include Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Benjamin and Adorno, Blanchot, Derrida, structuralism, gender and postcolonial theory.

Although the question of the relationship of theory to literary and cultural criticism is a central one, the module will enable students to focus on theoretical concepts in their own right. You’ll also be asked to consider the theoretical implications of the particular formal and stylistic choices made by the thinkers covered.

This module surveys the most internationally significant trends, influences, and movements in European and American literature of the 20^th century.

Topics covered include:

• an examination the impact of the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Nietzsche on early 20^th century literature
• the modernist disruption of literary conventions of Realism
• the Harlem Renaissance
• modernist poetry
• existentialist philosophy and writing
• the ethics of writing on the post-Holocaust
• the emergence of poststructuralism
• OULIPO
• the experimental texts of postmodernism

We’ll finish by considering what, if any, literary movements come after postmodernism in the 21^st century by examining the term ‘contemporary.’ These developments are studied through the analysis of major representative texts studied within their relevant cultural, intellectual and philosophical contexts. Writers studied typically include James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Zora Neale Hurston, H. D., André Gide, Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, W. G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, William Faulkner, Primo Levi, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The module intensively surveys Caribbean and diaspora literature to highlight significant movements relative to the social, political and historical contexts impacting upon this new literature. We are interested in tracing the developments within the forms of literary and artistic expression examined, to show how literary texts, forms and genres veered between consolidation and experimentation from beginnings marked by the slave narrative, a preoccupation with history and memory and a close affinity with the aural/ oral, and to further explore some of the determining forces which underpinned the transformations of the literature. We seek to trace the influence, and textual embodiment of intellectual and cultural developments in the region's literature and that of its diaspora including the impacts of Colonialism, post-Colonialism, Negritude, and Globalisation. These developments are studied through the analysis of representative texts either in English (e.g. Walcott's Omeros) or in English translation (e.g. Condé's Windward Heights)

In an era where human activities such as fossil fuel use is the key factor in shaping our environmental future, a growing body of literary work has emerged that seeks to explore the inextricability of social and natural catastrophe.

In this module, you’ll consider the engagement of contemporary American fiction with a range of environmental crises, from climate change to pollution to ecological collapse. You’ll also explore how American fiction has evolved and adapted to capture this subject matter. 

We’ll question how this fiction might play a role in generating effective and politically transformative public knowledge in the face of dissociation from the consequences of fossil fuel.

We will be asking this question and more through the exploration and scrutiny of a range of novelistic genres: e.g., realism, magical realism, postmodernism, the graphic novel, and weird, science, dystopian and speculative fiction.

This module explores interpretative theories of interculturality including creolisation, poetics of relation, postcolonialism and carnivalisation in relation to Black British and Caribbean poetics, performativity and discourses such as humanism and globalisation. We’ll interrogate questions concerning what is literature, and what meanings might be revealed by the ‘emergence’ of Black British literature mainly in the 20^th century. We’ll consider the challenges of writing across histories and cultures of the African diaspora as experienced in Britain, in order to articulate a profoundly interconnected world and possibilities other than the nation. We’ll examine how oral and literary texts, forms and genres within this body of writing through consolidation and experimentation, illustrate distinctive features of interculturality and syncretism. We’ll investigate some of the determining forces underpinning the aesthetics of the texts.

As one of two core compulsory modules within the MA Black British Literature programme, the module intensively surveys Black British Writing since the late-18^th century to highlight the nature of its ‘relation’ to the social, political and intellectual contexts in which it was written. We’ll consider the emergent literature primarily as a body of relational texts communicating across and between cultures and diversities. This writing, sometimes defined by its transnational location, problematises questions of nation, the political, identity, critical theories, and literature itself.

This module introduces you to key academic debates within the field of translation studies and addresses a range of topical issues that are highly relevant to the professional practice of translation through the illuminating framework of 20^th and 21^st century translation theory.

Touching on a range of currents of contemporary concern within the field, this module introduces you to broad theoretical questions that influence and impact upon the practice of the translator. This includes issues of 'loyalty', 'duty' and 'faithfulness' to the text-for-translation and to the audience of translation, translator ethics and the political positionality of the translator as an intercultural communicator and mediator. Behind the vision for this module is the insistence that becoming a professional translator requires not only a high degree of interlingual competence but also the development of a sophisticated critical attitude by which one evaluates one’s own strategic approach to meeting the needs and expectations of audiences within the context of a specific client brief.

In this way, a translator needs to navigate the challenges and opportunities posed by different texts and text types, and to do so within the context of changing audience needs and expectations. A translator also needs to understand their own decision-making process with regard to the source text and the audiences that will receive it in translation, in order both to reflect critically upon the challenges and opportunities presented. In addition to developing your knowledge of key debates within translation studies and core strategic approaches to translation, this module is designed to build your critical competence.

This module focuses on preparing you to develop key employability competencies as a freelance or in-house translator in the global translation and language service industry.

We’ll address core challenges for professional translators within the context of the translation employment market, such as:

• understanding the nature of freelance work and self-employment
• meeting the needs of translation agency and in-house translation employers
• the identification, evaluation and implementation of translational responses that match sensitively the demands of diverse texts and text types, within distinct domains of specialist language use and within the context of changing needs and expectations on the part of potential employers and audiences of translation

The content of the module is structured around the professional translation workflow of freelance or in-house translators and tackles key milestones in a translator’s project management cycle, including:

• navigating the translation commissioning process
• project and time management
• information, resource and research management
• linguistic and terminological mediation
• the management and implementation of computer-aided translation, machine translation and online tools for translators
• editing, revising, proofing and submission of completed work

Over the course of the module, you’ll gain experience of the principles of translation project management across a range of texts and text types, and within specialist domains of language use. You’ll learn to negotiate and implement computer-aided and machine translation platforms as well as online tools to facilitate the translation process, and to produce professionally usable translations for identified clients and within identified audience contexts.

This module focuses on preparing students to become freelance or in-house translators within the contexts of cultural tourism, cultural entrepreneurship and cultural heritage.

It addresses key challenges for professional translators within these specialist domains of the translation employment market, from understanding the nature of freelance work and in-house translation work in museums, galleries and other cultural organisations; interpretation for heritage destinations and museums; to matching sensitively the skills and expertise of the specialist tourism translator with the demands of translating diverse texts and text types, within the contexts of cultural tourism, cultural entrepreneurship and cultural heritage and in the context of changing needs and expectations on the part of museums, galleries and other cultural organisation clients.

Much significant and powerful contemporary fiction is written by those who come, or whose families have come, from outside the metropolitan and erstwhile imperial centres. This fiction is often called ‘postcolonial’ and the body of theory about the relation of the West and the rest of the world has come to be known as ‘postcolonial theory’.

In this module, we’ll focus on key samples of postcolonial fiction and theory from a range of authors, seeking to understand the complex, dialogic relations between metropolitan and non-metropolitan writing (both anglophone and francophone). Each two-hour class will be based on student presentations, combining discussion of a literary text illustrative of key issues in postcolonial culture and criticism, and of one or two sample critical pieces in the field.

‘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.

The module focuses on contemporary literature (primarily short stories, poetry and novels), which reflects the ethnic diversity of the region and its major thematic concerns. The historical context of the Caribbean and its relation to various traditions within Caribbean literature are explored. In addition, a range of critical approaches to texts will be examined alongside consideration of issues of literary production. Topics to be studied include issues of gender and genre, oral culture, slavery, the construction of black womanhood, the Creole voice and migratory subjectivities.

This module interrogates the temporality of ‘post’ in the fiction of the late 20^th century and uses it to question contemporary debates around subjectivity, relationality, environments, and structures of power, framed through historiographic, feminist, anthropogenic, posthuman and decolonial lenses.

We’ll read bell hooks, Habermas, Haraway, West, Butler, Derrida, Waugh, Agamben, Hayles, Deleuze, Benhabib and Lyotard amongst other theorists to develop critical responses to the innovative fiction of a range of writers including Beckett, Ballard, Carter, Nabokov, Rhys, Pynchon, and Morrison. The module focuses on the analysis of key novels of the post-1945 period that engage in various ways with the conditions and modalities of late 20^th century thinking.

We’ll read these novels alongside literary-critical constructions of postmodernism(s) and broader theoretical accounts of postmodernity. The aim of the course is to explore a range of sometimes contradictory theoretical paradigms and textual practices.

Areas of inquiry will include:

• the relationship between modernist, postmodernist, and realist poetics
• the politics of form
• postmodernism and historiography
• postmodernism and the decolonial
• feminism and postmodernism