Media, Communications and Cultural Studies modules

What does feminism mean these days, to whom, and with what consequence? How does feminism exist as a force in the world? What makes feminist movement a social, cultural, critical and creative enterprise, as well as a historical and geographical phenomenon?

Asking such questions, Contemporary Feminist Media Cultures invites you to participate in a collective enquiry into the history of present feminism. Offering rigorous training in feminist theory, particularly according to the fields of feminist media studies, feminist cultural studies and feminist cultural theory, the module deepens and complicates your understanding of how feminism is located in media cultures. You'll also explore the social, ethical and intellectual problems that feminism addresses, such as subjectivity, power, freedom and multiplicity, whether mediated to us as academic theory, social movement or media culture.

Through conducting a ‘politics of location’ of feminist thought, movement and feeling, you'll gain the contextual knowledge necessary for contemporary analysis.

The critique of capitalism has been an important horizon for research and theory in cultural studies since its inception. This course introduces and engages with the imbrication of capitalism and culture through a series of interlinked contexts, in the process exploring aspects of the history of cultural studies as a discipline (or anti-discipline), the cultural theory and philosophy of capitalism, and possible cultural studies responses to apparently dramatic, contemporary and ongoing shifts in the nature, operation and understanding of capitalism.

We will consider the evolution of cultural studies from its early focus on capitalism and class relations, to its integration of such critiques into a still-expanding range of areas of concern, e.g. in terms of gender, race, sexuality, postcolonialism and posthumanism. We will engage with key concepts and paradigms from cultural theory that have sought to understand the cultural dimension and functioning of capital, such as commodity fetishism, gift exchange, debt, 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 transform the relationship between capitalism and culture.

In exploring these themes and phenomena, the module considers some of the ways modern critical approaches such as Marxism, feminism, decolonial thought/praxis and critical posthumanism have addressed capitalism, and pays particular attention to the roles of fiction and imagination in both the functioning and critique of capitalism.  

In this module, you'll engage with the current practices and aesthetics of digital audiovisual industries with specific focuses on digital cinema, internet-distributed television, music video and YouTube. Following Carol Vernallis’s Unruly Media, you'll look at how contemporary audiovisual practices are based on a ‘mixing board aesthetic’ in which practice and practitioners fluidly cross previous medium boundaries by adopting flexible digital practices to produce content that will often be delivered via digital platforms from social media to Netflix. It will also adopt a post-cinematic perspective to look at how digital modes of production and consumption have radically modified moving image and sound aesthetics whether in digital cinema and television or other forms like music videos and YouTube content, including phenomena such as CGI, non-linear post-continuity editing, shifting relations and exchanges between sound and image and the emergence of new expanded audiovisual forms that go beyond existing medium categories. It will situate these transformations as not merely technically determined but as evolving alongside socio-cultural shifts from new patterns of digital consumption like binge-viewing to DIY participatory practices on social media to industry responses to #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements.

As media transfigures into intelligent machines, they also withdraw into the invisible background of everyday activities, perceptions and thoughts. Human culture, politics and aesthetics are not simply mediated by such machines but are algorithmically programmed to stir decision-making, intensify responses, and predict conduct. Taking examples from science fiction films, software, art and machine learning, the course will focus on today's possibility of "critique" of technology. It will be argued that intelligent machines are not simply passive instruments that represent or demonstrate aims, but have rather become performative of ideas, perceptions, and actions. The course will thus ask: what kind of critical theory is needed to understand these new means of control and governance, of aesthetic production and cultural expression within the panoply of what Mark Fisher would call capitalist realism? Or to put it differently, can a materialist critique offer alternative visions about the political tension between gender and machines, race and machines, class and machines? How can we invent a critical theory of technology that can be disentangled from the efficient capitalisation of human socialities, desires, and thoughts? 

The module continually explores the possibility of "critique" of technology. Each week the course explores different questions similar to these.

• How does a more than human/post-human context inform our relationship with technology? 
• Is everything a machine?
• How do we escape the dualism of machine as slave or enslaver in the historic context of alienation?
• How do technical objects interrelate to freedom & control?
• How can we think about code, borrowing from Foucault, as a mode of discipline?
• How can databases be thought of as bodies with and without organs.
• How do data map onto knowledge/power? In what ways is Data Feminism an effective reading of the knowledge/power relation?
• How have networks, from fires to fiber, telephones to wirelessness informed cultural change?
• Can our interactions with technologies be explained by embodied cognition, social cognition and extended cognition?
• What is the relationship between technical objects and ecology?
• How do we think about the future of Intelligent Machines?

Within the humanities, sciences, and outside the academy we are witnessing a ‘turn to the body’. That is, from contagions, which spread virally on social media seen to work through embodied forms of sense-making and perception, through to the amplification of the senses, attention and perception within simulated realities; the modulation of emotion, affect and feeling, and the creation of mediated intimacy across a range of media forms; through to a range of practices which target the body as the site of change, expression and transformation. The body and its capacity for mediation is central to understanding media and communications. This option will explore these debates by encouraging the student to think through their own embodied experience in relation to a number of case studies. These will include media representations and eating disorders; body image; queer and transgendered bodies; social media contagions, non-verbal and subliminal communication; affect and emotion; film and the senses (including suggestion); narrative and identity; images and the non-visual; biomediation; and mental health and the media (particularly exploring mental health and difference in the context of diasporic media).

The module draws from a wide range of debates and theories across the field of body studies, including affect studies, queer theory, feminisms, cultural studies, media studies and sociology. It will provide students with some timely and novel ways of thinking about the place of experience within contemporary governance and communication processes.

The moving image created a revolution in perception. It changed much more than the media: it opened new ways of seeing. Fairly quickly after about 1906 the standard forms of the modern cinema began to stabilise; just as later TV would stabilise around the half-hour segment and the 30-second advert. This course focuses on those who refused to settle down, and who continued the immense deregulation of perception inaugurated by the cinema in 1895.

Between the industries of cinema, TV and digital on one side and art institutions on the other, generations of artists have worked in and on moving image technologies to create alternative projections of the world. Sometimes personal, sometimes spiritual, sometimes political, this diverse body of work is both a treasury of advanced forms of creativity, and a store of techniques and ways of thinking for new generations. Experimental Media will address moving image and other recording technologies to analyse the breadth and boundaries of what might be considered an experiment, in artistic, activist and popular forms of media production. Topics may include the idea of beauty, medium-specificity, abstraction, sound, time, 'poor' and 'imperfect' cinema, DIY aesthetics, expanded media and ethical considerations.

This module aims to equip you with the theoretical tools necessary for understanding post- and decolonial transformations in today's Global South. The political imperative behind Postcolonial Studies was metropolitan multiculturalism. Multiculturalism emerged as a key agenda of progressive politics, responding largely to mobilisations around race, diaspora and the politics of gender.

With globalisation, the collapse of the Soviet empire, the decline of Fordist capitalism and the integration of multiculturalism in the official policies of the Euro-American governments, the coordinates have changed. It is no longer possible to account for the world we inhabit by invoking the East-West binary derived from a critique of colonialism, slavery and empire.

This module seeks to familiarise you with both analytical tools and activist models developed over the last few decades to comprehend, analyse and intervene in these transformations. Drawing from the tools provided during the Postcolonial Theory module and supplementing these with the "thinking and doing" of the "decolonial turn" originating in Latin America, we approach topics through the framework of "decoloniality" and "southern epistemologies". We question the ostensible decline of the nation-state and the enhanced power of supranational institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO), as well as international cultural organisations. This requires a critical examination of a range of agendas, namely: global civil society and governance, human and non-human rights, non-governmental organisations, sovereignty, new social movements, (intellectual) property rights, commons, development, financialisation, microfinance, global art, etc. The module seeks to ground these concepts in political/cultural theory and to question the normative claims of liberal theory in the age of neoliberal globalisation.

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.

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.

The module investigates critically to an advanced extent the nature of media law and ethical regulation for media practitioners in the UK. The students are directed towards an advanced analysis of media law, as it exists, the ethical debates concerning what the law ought to be, and the historical development of legal and regulatory controls of communication. The theoretical underpinning involves a module of advanced learning of the subject of media jurisprudence (the study of the philosophy of media law), and media ethicology (the study of the knowledge of ethics in media communication). The module evaluates media law and regulation in terms of its social and cultural context.

Media Law and Ethics is a dynamic subject with dramatic and significant changes and developments occurring from year to year addressing acute issues in journalism, current affairs and politics. As a result, the module content is substantially revised in response to these developments.

This module asks students to think about the ways in which our economic lives shape and are shaped by society and culture. How do social and cultural forces influence our understanding of wealth, poverty, and inequality? How is economic news reported, and why is it often difficult to understand? How might technological developments such as digital currencies or platform-based forms of exchange change our economic behaviour? How do financial advice columns shape our understanding of the ‘good life’?

This module explores the role of communication and culture in economic life through a range of theoretical approaches and case studies. It encourages students to think about the economy both as a mediated phenomenon – something that is represented in the news, in culture and in everyday life in a variety of ways – and as a set of mediating concepts and ideas (‘markets’, ‘value’, ‘worth’) that shape the way we understand the world.

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 module is organised around the following questions: What part do the media play in the democratic processes of society? What influences the media? How do different societies organise their media systems? To what extent do ‘new media’ change things? And (briefly) what influence do the media have?

This is a module about the transformations of the media and media systems. From changes in the mass media of broadcasting and print, to multimedia and the Internet, we look at different ways of making sense of these transformations and consider a range of questions concerning media power and influence. This is also a module about the political and economic organisation of the media.

We explore a central claim of political economists that there are important relationships between the content and output of media and the way in which media production is organised in a particular economy and social system. Political economy is concerned with questions about the relationship between media and society, with questions of media influence, and questions about how media power connects with other forms of power in society. It is concerned with questions about how media industries and cultural work is organised, and why this matters for the range and quality of what is produced by journalists, media professionals and creative workers.

It considers such issues as the influence of policy and regulation, market forces and commercial dynamics. In doing so, the module compares culturalist interpretations with studies emphasising the role of the state, media ownership, advertising and market structures as forms of media control.

Topics include: media globalisation and national media; political economy of the internet; media commercialism; media and advertising; new journalism and entertainment media; media convergence and policy; democracy and the media; comparing media and political systems across the globe.

Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and imperial to digital and global. Among the political movements that have been most important in the period since the invention of the movies are (neo)liberalism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, feminism and anti-colonial struggles. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts, from the early days of cinema to contemporary handheld and immersive media.

This module investigates the politics of these forms and technologies as attempts at controlling the dispositions of minds and bodies and as struggles for their emancipation. It will address a broad range of topics from the power of sounds, images and visual apparatuses in the 20^th and 21^st centuries to the relationship of politics and aesthetics, the problem of democracy, and ideology critique.

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.

This module will introduce you to contemporary conceptualisations of cultural practice and features current debates in visual art, curating, architecture and design, community art, DIY culture and digital media.

Culture involves complex networks of production ranging from the institutional and the transnational to the interpersonal and aesthetic. Driven by questions of practice, this module explores a series of more detailed analyses of specific figures: curators, users, makers, hackers - and cultural dynamics on individual areas of practice and the ways that they fit and misfit the idea and reality of an ‘industry’.

You’ll discuss theories of creativity in relation to other emerging figurations of culture, and learn from guest lectures and practitioners in the sector.

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.

More information about this module will be available soon.

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

This module considers the relationship of documentary to re-presenting ‘reality’ and its various ‘truth claims.’ It explores documentary production in its changing social and historical contexts, and across its different distribution platforms, and deals with current debates about documentary ethics and aesthetics. Taught by a range of lecturers (mainly) from the Media & Communications Department, it encompasses both Anglophone and some international documentary traditions, and historical examples from the early Soviet avant-garde to contemporary documentary.

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.

Software Studies is an interdisciplinary field that has emerged over the last decade or so amongst an international range of scholars. It combines approaches from the arts, humanities and social sciences with those drawn from computing, in order to develop a creative and critical approach to the theories and practices of computing. Software is understood to be a core, yet under-theorised aspect of contemporary culture and society. This course examines how software, and computing more broadly, is deeply imbricated in the developments of aesthetics, political forms, social agency and the generation of new forms of subjectivity. It will aim to follow a line of enquiry that draws together inventive critical thinking from technologists, hackers, computer scientists, philosophers, artists and cultural theorists and thus provide the context for a rich interdisciplinary discussion on the nature of contemporary software cultures. Crucially, it goes beyond the culture /science division at a fundamental level, assuming that software is always of both kinds.

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 examines the actors and communication processes involved in contemporary political communication. Its core concern is to explore notions of `crisis' in mature democracies as voter turnouts and `trust' in formal political institutions steadily drop, national economies struggle, and news media decline. It combines theoretical insights and case examples from the fields of media studies, journalism, sociology and political science. It mainly focuses on democracies, particularly in the US and UK, but literature and examples are also drawn from other types of political system and country.

Weekly topics combine political communication themes and contemporary examples, with discussions of related theory and concepts. Topics covered include:

• The crisis of politics and media in established democracies
• Public sphere theory
• Comparative political and media systems
• Mass media, news production and the future of news
• Political parties, from ideologies to political marketing
• Elections and referendums; government media management, mediatisation and populist politics
• Historical and cultural political communication
• Forms of public participation and public opinion
• Media effects and audiences
• Policy-making, lobbying and power
• Economics, austerity and the financial crisis
• Digital media and online politics
• Interest group campaigning, lobbying and environmental/welfare policy.

In this module you will be introduced to a series of sociological questions about the city and urban life from a perspective focusing on public culture, work, consumption and everyday life. There is an emphasis on lived space, patterns of housing, spaces of leisure and enjoyment, and the spaces for assembly and encounter that exist within an ever-shifting public/private divide. The aim will be to become familiar with the concepts and ideas developed by cultural geographers, social and cultural theorists, feminists, post-colonial and subaltern studies scholars, artists, writers and filmmakers in order to understand the development of urban space, the forms of sociability and exclusion this engenders and the sensations and subjective states of intensity which city life generates.

The module initially adopts a historical approach, critically engaging canonical accounts of urbanisation and modernity in relation to technology, gender, imperialism and class. We then focus on contemporary urban life with a particular emphasis on the dialectics of segregation and assembly, separation and encounter. We explore the impact of infrastructures on urban sociality and citizenship, dynamics of gentrification and place-making and the smart city of data capture, platforms and ubiquitous surveillance. The module culminates in a discussion of the city as the ground zero for climate change. The theoretical models for this course are drawn from critical urban studies and geography (LeFebvre, Harvey, Massey), infrastructure and technology studies (Graham & Marvin, Anand, Easterling), and from sociological and philosophical accounts of public space, encounter and difference (Arendt, Young). If circumstances permit the module will include a field visit designed to introduce walking as a method of urban investigation. Throughout the module students are encouraged to draw on their own experience of urban culture, as well as the course material in order to develop a greater understanding of the cities and urban environments in which we live.

This module sets out the key theorisations of the culture industry. While engaging with the classical readings, you'll explore contemporary multi-disciplinary global research in art theory, sociology, policy, critical theory and political economy. You'll focus on the conditions of labour in the cultural and creative industries, including debates around precarity and inequality, intellectual property in the age of digital networks, entrepreneurship, care and new forms of organising.

This module will allow you to consider the application of cultural theory to a range of cultural forms, from art and fashion to cinema, advertising and music. The emphasis is less on close textual analysis of individual works and more on the socio-economic basis of the intersections and cross-overs between current cultural phenomena.

In order to be able to make sense of what is happening now in our culture of moving images, we need to understand its past - not in the sense of teleological development but in terms of how untimely sensibilities and ideas embodied in obsolete images and technologies keep on reappearing, inadvertently perhaps, in the present. This module situates itself within the emerging field of inquiry called "media archaeology," which searches through the archives in order to account for the forces that make up the contemporary world. The module will look at the deep history of audiovisual mediations through specific "turning points" so as to understand the recurrent forces, motives and forms of experience that have animated the movement of images for the past 400 years. Furthermore, it seeks new methodological approaches to understand the history of technical images, which bridge the rift between criticism and creation - that is, between thinking about and (re)inventing images. In this way, the module requires students to critically reflect on their own relationship to moving image media, relationships that may be productive, poetic and arbitrary as much as they are disciplined, rationalised and controlled.

This module will reflect on filmmakers who were/are also theorists: their
film work has an edifying relationship to their theory, which offers a unique
opportunity to see theory in action. Moreover, the intimacy such artists have
with the image-making process makes for passionate writing and strong,
compelling ideas. Not coincidently, these are important ideas with currency
for the problems one faces in both making and understanding moving images.
The course will address the work of five theorists drawing from a large pool
that includes Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac,
Sergei Eisenstein, Hollis Frampton, Hito Steyerl, Robert Bresson, Raul Ruiz,
and Bela Balazs.

Reading List:

Brakhage, Stan (1963) Metaphors on Vision, special issue of Film Culture,
n.30, Fall; extract republished in Sitney, P Adams (ed) (1978), The Avant-Garde
Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, Anthology Film Archives, New York.
Bresson, Robert (1986), Notes on the Cinematographer, Quartet Books
Limited.
Deren, Maya (2001) Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, ed. Bill
Nichols, University of California Press.
Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed and trans Jay Leyda, Harcourt
Brace Janovich New York.
Epstein, Jean. (1981) ‘Bonjour Cinema and other writings’ trans. Tom Milne,
Afterimage no. 10
Epstein, Jean. (Spring, 1977) ‘Magnification and other writings’, October 3.
Espinosa, Julia García (2000), ‘For an Imperfect Cinema’ trans Julianne Burton,
Jump Cut, no. 20, 1979, pp. 24-26; reprinted in Robert Stam and Toby Miller
(eds) (2000), Film and Theory: An Anthology, Blackwell, New York, 287-297
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC20folder/ImperfectCinema.
html
Frampton, Hollis (2009), On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, ed.
Bruce Jenkins, MIT Press.
Gidal, Peter (1989), Materialist Film, Routledge, London.
Gidal, Peter (ed) (1976). Structural Film Anthology. BFI, London.
Ruiz, Raul (1995), The Poetics of Cinema trans. Brian Holmes, Paris Editions
Dis Voir.
Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds) Jean Epstein Critical Essays and New
Translations, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 287-310.
Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino (1976), ‘Towards a Third Cinema’
in Bill Nichols (ed), Movies and Methods, Volume One, University
of California Press, Berkeley, 44-64; also available online at http://
documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/camasgun.html
Steryerl, Hito (no date) The Wretched of the Screen, Sternberg Press, e-flux
journal
Steyerl Hito (November, 2009) ‘In defense of the poor image’ e-flux journal
Vertov, Dziga (1984) Kino Eye trans. Kevin O’Brien, University of California
Press.

The aim of this module is to critically examine phenomena such as datafication, algorithms, automation, and sociotechnical infrastructures as integral to colonial genealogies. The ubiquitous presence of `big data', algorithms and so-called artificial intelligence have generated a critical mass of academic literature. Critical data and algorithm studies, despite very significant insights, do not account for the conspicuous global inequalities associated with the production of digital technologies and the consequences of computation. This module draws on colonial and decolonial theory to make sense of contemporary digital developments. This isn't an alternative account to orthodox accounts of digital technology. The module's starting point is that any mainstream account of technology and computation needs to take into account the fundamental inequalities on which technological systems depend and which, in turn, they reproduce. In so doing, the module contributes to the call to decolonize the fields of media and internet studies which have rendered matters of matters of race, gender and migration as niche subjects rather than central to the understanding of processes of mediation.

By technology the module includes the study of infrastructures, devices (such as smartphones), data, algorithms, machine learning, artificial intelligence, biometric technologies and innovations such as blockchain. Rather than disaggregating these, as is often the case, the module acknowledges that they need to be studied together as they are co-constitutive of contemporary media environments. Given the increasing technological convergence it is impossible to study artificial intelligence without studying data, algorithms and material infrastructures. The module also innovates by examining the whole spectrum of technological mediation in a global context: from the extraction of materials for smartphone production to the disposal of e-waste; digital labour; supply chains; problems of classification and bias in algorithmic cultures; the consequences for communities and the environment and the opportunities for activism and resistance.

The module directly addresses the principles highlighted in the College's Curriculum Review, including: climate change; social justice and inequalities; race and identity; and digital society. The module is student-centred, combining different assessment methods (formative and summative; self-assessment; group work; presentations; creative work and essays) which aim to structure students' progression. 

More information about this module will be available soon.

This module introduces you to the fundamentals of video camera operation. Over 5 practical hands-on workshop sessions you learn how to effectively operate a video camera. A new topic is introduced each week and you spend the majority of classroom time developing operational skills and completing hands-on assignments.

For the remainder of the term, you work in pairs on two shooting exercises. In one exercise, you will perform the role of camera operator, and on the other you will perform the role of focus puller. Tutorial support is provided and you will participate in a group screening of completed film exercises in the final week.

Discover the hidden art of editing!

This module introduces you to the principles and techniques used to put together audiovisual material. An introductory session will reveal some of the key concepts behind the edit decision-making process. This will be followed by four further sessions of technical demonstrations and practical exercises where you will have a chance to explore and learn the craft for yourself using professionally shot footage. Throughout the module you will learn to use the editing software Adobe Premiere CC.

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.

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 module introduces you to the fundamentals of sound recording.

In the first five weeks you will learn recording, manipulation and editing techniques that are appropriate to the design of sound for narrative film and television.

For the remainder of the term you undertake a practical project with tutorial support. You present your completed project to the class in the final week and evaluate your work in a short reflective essay.

Photography has been understood as the founding innovation for all that we have in our visual world today. But what was that innovation? To bring a world in motion to a halt? The first verifiable evidence that there is such a thing as the past? The start of an all-out mania to get hold of an object or an experience with an image? When these static images were aligned in a sequence and run through a projector, we called them movies.

This module will examine the values and meanings once attached to photography and film as regards their relationship to objective reality, to history and to the part they play for our sense of intimacy in being in the world. Much of photography and film theory have required a second thought these days, as the way we make, look at, and more importantly value images has changed significantly many canonical texts. This module will question the differences between still and moving images and assess their significance in today’s visual social world.

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 explores broad questions including what narratives are, how they differ from non-narratives, what forms they may take and what functions they serve. It also looks at how elements of narrative creation and screen production contribute to the intellectual and emotional impact of various screen narrative examples.

The speakers include a mix of practitioners who work in the screen industries and theorists who study narrative in traditional, alternative, cross-cultural and new media forms. Examples will be drawn from a range of fiction and non-fiction sources, depending on the speakers’ own interests, and include short films, documentary and feature films, tv drama, and online media.

This is a practice-based module which will develop your skills in generating visual storytelling through moving image production and editing, and stills photography. You'll learn how to identify and analyse effective promotional videos and still images, respond to a brief, generate and present your own ideas for a campaign for a targeted audience.

You'll learn how to write treatments, scripts and storyboards and other necessary pre-production, production and post-production materials.  You'll gain the technical skills and techniques required to produce moving image and stills photography for your promotional campaign.  You'll gain a working knowledge of how to use cameras, audio and lighting kits and how to edit your productions into a promotional video using Adobe Premiere Pro editing software.

You'll learn how to design a promotional poster and edit original still images using Adobe Photoshop.  You'll be given the opportunity to present your work for audience feedback and critically reflect on your own practice.