BA (Hons) Anthropology & Media

The aim of this module is to acquaint you with the main bodies of theory within social anthropology and the classical sub-fields within the discipline (political anthropology, economic anthropology, anthropology of religion and kinship) and key debates within the discipline. The module begins by locating the discipline in a historical perspective before proceeding to an exploration of key theories and central themes within the discipline. Although the lectures will draw heavily on what might be considered classical texts in anthropology, which will often mean that the literature dates from the early or mid-20th century and sometimes from the 19th century or earlier, the emphasis will be on the exploring ways in which these keys areas of work within the discipline might inform our understanding of contemporary issues and problems.

As the module progresses you will hopefully gain a growing sense of what social anthropology is and feel more confident to enter discussion concerning the kinds of questions it asks. Reflecting this gradual build-up of confidence and understanding, the essay assignment for the first term has been broken down into two distinct yet related stages.

Anthropological Methods is an introduction to practices of ethnographic research. The module examines the relationship between theory and method within anthropology. We are concerned with the specific techniques that are used by anthropologists as they conduct their fieldwork. This module also draws attention to how ethnographic knowledge produced during fieldwork is both relational and contextual. We therefore consider certain historical conjectures and power dynamics that have contributed to the way ethnography is (perhaps at times rather paradoxically) at once defined as a product and perceived as a process. To this end, the module explores the epistemological and ethical foundations of anthropological methods in order to encourage you to think about fieldwork as an encounter and ethnography as the relation between anthropological practice and theory.

Over the past 120 years, moving images have developed into a major aesthetic and social force of our times. Our realities both past and present are consumed by audiovisual mediations. Our imaginations and desires are built on filmic fictions. We mirror ourselves through our doubles on screen. But how do moving images actually engage us? What is their language? How do they affect us as human beings with a body, a psyche and social awareness? What does it means to have a cinematic form of aesthetics, and how is this currently being redefined in the age of the digital?

This module serves as an introduction into the theorising and analysis of film and other audiovisual media. It presents an overview of the historical development of cinematic modes of expression and experience and their key conceptualisations. Specific questions pursued range from the realism of cinema to the expressionistic powers of montage, from cinema's primal qualities as an immersive embodied experience to narrative, story-telling forms, as well as from the classic nature of film spectatorship to the novel forms of engagement emerging today with 3D, VR and AR.

In this module you will study the historical development of the British media, and their role in the development of modern Britain. You will focus on the way in which power is concentrated and organised around media ownership and production.

Introduction to debates around the term ‘culture’, including questions of ‘high’ and ‘mass’ culture, and the development of British cultural studies. 

This module focuses on important debates concerning media power and mediated identity, and examines the different traditions and disciplines that have contributed to media analysis in this area. It looks at the roles played by ideology, politics and audiences in the making of meaning, and requires you to take a critical perspective in the analysis of specific media texts and media events. 

The module introduces the ethnography of the Caribbean region, highlighting the anthropological theories informing this ethnography. Central themes are the creation of Caribbean societies, communities, cultures and identities in response to colonialism and to contemporary opportunities and constraints, and the significance of the study of Caribbean culture-building for changing ethnographic approaches and anthropology. In this way, students will be able to make links with wider anthropological debates about the construction of society, changes in ethnographic research and the relationship between anthropology and its subjects.

The module engages with fundamental questions about governance, institutions, practices, politics, and social change through a focus on the state. We begin with some key questions related to the Anthropology of the State, which are discussed in the context of contemporary politics.

We look at how the state has been theorised, researched and whether ethnographies of nationalism, citizenship and labour are challenged by comparative ethnographic approaches. We will study institutions like the family, movements and migration in relation to questions around the state and will discuss intersectionality of gender, class, race and ethnic community in relation to citizenship, resources, labour relations, and social formations. It is crucial for this course to engage with comparative work, especially ethnographies, which will allow us to discuss the many layers in which state is experienced, researched and ultimately becomes real in different contexts.

This module introduces the fascinating domain of the anthropology of religion: a vast and wide ranging subject. It introduces some of the many ways anthropologists have approached religious phenomena and highlights what is unique about anthropology’s contribution to the understanding of religion. It raises questions concerning what counts as ‘religious’ and includes within the remit of the module consideration of a variety of non-human agents (gods, God, spirits, witches) and religious practices (meditation, worship, performances).

You will be introduced to various areas of media practice divided into three areas of interest:

• Words
• Moving image
• Still image

Through technical workshops, discussions and tutorials you will explore learn how to construct and write a non-fiction ‘story’ containing visual elements. The course will end with a website workshop to help you build a website that integrates all the media elements used in the project.

The course offers an in-depth and critical anthropological analysis of western political economy through a Marxian and post-colonial framework. Combining historical contextualization and anthropological comparison, the course develops not only an historical materialist and cultural critique of western capitalism, but also a space of hope and prefiguration of post-capitalist life.

Overview of the module content:

To introduce you to the core concepts and theories relating to economic and political organisations and the problem of accounting for change, both empirically and theoretically.

To familiarise you with a number of empirical contexts in order that you may be able to conceptualise the complex socio-economic processes that are affecting the peripheral areas that have long been the concern of anthropologists.

To explore a number of contemporary problems relating to such issues as the apparent contradiction between local or national autonomy and globalisation that do not fit easily into definitions of the "economic" or "political".

This module examines the place of ‘experience’ in thinking about our self-formation. It extends the usefulness of the concept of subjectivity for exploring certain themes and issues. These might include: personality and the rise of celebrity culture, the psychologisation of everyday life, emotional branding and promotional culture, mental health and the media, make-over culture, and how to begin to understand the complex relationships between sexuality, class, race and gender in relation to the performative force of communication practices such as magazines, film and television.

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.

This module encourages you to reflect on how the media influences collective and individual memories of war and social conflict. Media representations of military conflicts, social movements and popular struggles play a significant part in the way these events are subsequently remembered and commemorated. Media interpretations are also significant in terms of psychological affect and emotional responses to violence and upheaval. The module will equip you with the skills to understand the relationship between symbolic, mediated aspects of violence and conflict and the underlying social, political and economic processes which may be lost in the process of remembering. The module will provide you with skills to analyse visual and textual representations of war and social conflict in a variety of media material including newspapers, feature and documentary film, archive newsreels and photographs and digital sources. You will explore a number of case studies including the First World War, decolonisation and empire, civil rights in the US, genocide and peacekeeping, class and industrial conflict, gender and feminist struggles, the ‘war on terror’.

Television has undergone crucial transformations since its establishment in the mid-20^th century. From the analogue ‘age of scarcity’ characterised by a limited number of national channels, television has grown into a commercial multichannel ecology and further expanded into a multiplatform, digital environment characterised by post-broadcast network transmission. But while rapid expansion of the spectrum and diminishing costs of entry have contributed to how the medium and its future development is perceived, the established political and economic patterns continue to have their stronghold. The increased transnational trade contributed to a reconfiguration of the economic landscape of television and while promising a more global medium, they have hardly redefined its inherently national character. This module will focus on contemporary debates about television as a cultural form, critically examining its continuities and changes of its economic and political context. While the module will rely on mainly British and US examples, it welcomes examples and comparisons with other national contexts.

This module focuses on the formation of subjectivity in the context of huge social and political change and the growth of individualisation. In particular it examines the consequences of individualisation: what kind of ‘subjects’ are we now becoming? How does the ethos of individualisation operate in the context of globalisation? What does the term ‘precarious lives’ mean? What are the unequal consequences of individualisation for women, for young people, for ethnic minorities? Who are the winners and the losers of the ‘network society’? The module moves between sociology and cultural and media studies, providing plenty of opportunity to examine case studies in more depth and to engage with new research in these areas. 

This module looks at the dispersal of moving images and screen technologies in contemporary visual culture and considers what impact this has on our conceptions of spectatorship. The first section of the course provides a foundation in canonical theories of moving image spectatorship, from psychoanalytic and phenomenological constructions of the cinema spectator to historically grounded approaches to viewing conditions and cinema publics. In the second half, the course relates these theories of spectatorship to contemporary conditions for viewing moving images. Students will focus on current screen technologies for circulation and display of moving image, in conjunction with key sites, spaces and institutions in order to reflect on how new screen dynamics and conditions of encounter with the moving image are reshaping our understanding of spectatorship.

Investigates central issues in social theory as they relate to questions of media, communication and culture. The module provides a theoretical map on which to locate some of the key issues confronted in media, communication and cultural studies. Each session addresses a specific cultural or media-related phenomenon that is connected to the sociological topic under discussion. We therefore investigate a range of issues, including ‘McDonaldisation’, branding, reality television, contemporary music, celebrity and spectacle, and the formation of the nation state.

This module explores the friction and common ground between History and Anthropology. In order to understand this productive but spirited dialogue, we historicise their relationship and overlapping but divergent theoretical perspectives and methods. Modern social anthropology was formed in the early twentieth century by a rejection of evolutionism and its replacement by synchronic site-specific studies, a move that effectively eclipsed history’s theoretical significance to the discipline. Yet, dissatisfaction with the ways in which synchronic functionalist ethnographic analyses ignored history and social change brought about lasting debates about continuity and rupture; the relation between pasts, presents and futures, and the wider humanistic turn of both disciplines under the theoretical influence of Marxism, feminism, and other critical social theory since the 1960s. This module is, in many ways, an examination of the possibilities of a historicised anthropology and poses several intertwined empirical and theoretical questions about the place of structure and agency, consciousness and historicity, and memory and silences within ethnography. Through historical ethnographies and selected social historiography, we aim to understand not only how to approach the past anthropologically, but also grasp ethnographically the uses of history as a collectivist political project implicated in nationalism, racist ideology, and categories like world heritage.

This module will explore understandings and experiences of the health and illness by engaging with classic and contemporary ethnographic work to ask:

•How are health and illness understood and experienced; how are healing practices assessed?
•What is the relationship between health and inequality, both with reference to professional status and economic disparities?
•What can anthropology contribute in practice?

This module is concerned with social and cultural constructions and understandings of gender, sexuality and the body as discussed in anthropology and beyond. The main aim of the module is to 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 module explores the role of visual representation in anthropology in terms of both the history of its use within the discipline, and also the potential it holds for new ways of working. It looks at work in a wide range of media – photography, film/video, performance – and the ways in which they might be used in an anthropological context, and this will involve looking at work from outside anthropology such as photojournalism and contemporary art, as well as the work of visual anthropologists.

The intention of the module is to give students a challenging and creative view of the potentials for using audio-visual material within anthropology. It also provides a strong theoretical background for those students going on to take the AN53040A Anthropology and the Visual: Production Module in the Spring Term.

The module will provide a comprehensive overview of the study of material culture within the discipline of anthropology. Students will be asked to reflect critically on the work of global institutions such as UNESCO, engage in debates about the current role of museums in society, understand the inter-connected of human rights with rights to particular forms of material expression and engage with philosophical thinking about materiality and the immaterial world.

Work placement – 5 days per week for 2 weeks; or at least 10x8 hour days spread over a longer period to be determined by the WPM, Department, student and host organisation.

The aim is to provide experiential learning opportunities which both enhance students’ academic studies and offer the opportunity for personal development. It will therefore be an effective vehicle for delivering key aspects of Goldsmiths Learning and Teaching Strategy (Employability), including:
• The teaching and assessment of skills relevant both to academic achievement and to discipline-related career opportunities
• The delivery of effective personal development programmes
• The enhancement of academic programmes so that career-related experiences are offered, validated and supported

General Scope of the Module
Arrangements for the delivery of the module
The module will be coordinated by the WPM. The academic elements will be delivered and assessed by the academic department and the personal development elements by WPM/TALIC. It will fall within the purview of the assessment framework- including exam boards and external assessors- of each department. WPM/TALIC will be invited to the Exam Board Sub Committee.

Structure
The Placement is at the core. It will take place over a two-week period or may be spread over a longer period with a minimum of 10, eight-hour working days.

In the term prior to the Module, the WPM will hold discussions with students about placement options. It is anticipated that there will be a pool of placements and students will also be encouraged to find their own placements. In all cases, the WPM will meet with the host organisations, to ensure that they have the capacity to supervise the student and that they can offer the student activities and resources which will allow them to meet the learning outcomes. The respective responsibilities of the host organisation, student and Goldsmiths will be encapsulated in the Letter of Agreement.

A seminar, led by WPM/TALIC, will prepare students for placements. It will include: the purpose of the placement; information on what to expect/how to behave; health and safety issues; what to do if anything goes wrong; an introduction to self-assessment, including skills, values, personality traits; how to prepare the Personal Portfolio and presentation.

Prior to start of module:
Students discuss preferred sectors with WPM and are matched to placements or find their own.
Seminar (two hours) led by WPM/TALIC to prepare students for placements and to provide guidance on personal portfolio.

During module:
Three seminars (two hours) within the academic department, to help students formulate ideas for their research report and to allow them to share experiences and issues.
Student presentations (two hour session) set up by WPM/TALIC.
Office hours in department and with WPM/TALIC

How can we develop critical knowledge about migration and borders? This module explores the multiple ways migration and borders are understood and experienced in different social, geographical, and political settings, as well as in different theoretical and discursive domains. Grounded in anthropological perspectives and methods, and branching out into film, literature, and art, the module aims to destabilise dominant understandings of migration and borders. In doing so, it critically unpacks core themes at the heart of contemporary debates on transnational movement – from race to belonging, from surveillance to gender. Throughout the module we will engage with a variety of theoretical, literary, and visual materials that focus on migrant lives and border crossings to develop a critical understanding of migration and the material, political, cultural, and linguistic borders that shape it.

This module will consider the border politics involved in the making of 'transnational', diasporic', and 'local' communities. We will theorise the border as a material, political, cultural and linguistic boundary that is increasingly defining social life as well as engage with the experiences of those who cross borders. We will ask: How are borders constructed and contested? How do migrants experience borders? How is the discourse of citizenship destabilised when movement and borders become central heuristics by which to understand belonging and membership? Throughout the module we will read academic texts as well as engage with films and literature that focus on migrant lives and border crossings to develop a theoretical and practical knowledge of border politics in relationship to migratory flows.

This module revolves around contemporary debates in the anthropology of social movements. It considers the contribution of ethnographic approaches to activism and protest to the theorisation of politics, collective action and social change. The anti-globalisation movement, #occupy, the anti-corruption movement in India, the anti-foreclosures movement in Spain (PAH), the Landless Workers' Movement, right-wing extremism, feminist reproductive health activists, independent-living activism, queer movements and the Indigenous Environmental Network are some of the examples that the module will explore. Rather than 'explaining away' these movements, the pedagogical orientation of the module is based on learning from them, i.e. devising ways of conceptualising their practice, methods and transformative power. The module will also consider, as a transversal issue, the question of 'engaged' or 'militant' research - and more broadly the relationship between the production of academic and activist knowledges.

The assessment is organised around student projects that will present, in a multimedia portfolio format, the result of research conducted about/with social movements.

This module uses a range of data to focus on the relationship between Anthropology and Psychology. Although anthropology has often been described as a `bridge’ between the natural sciences and the humanities, the relationship between anthropology and psychology (or Psychoanalysis) has always been fraught with tension. This module explores these tensions and some attempts to overcome them.

Arguably modern anthropology and modern art are close in terms of both their origins and their critical reflection on the relationships between images, objects and persons, and a concern with anthropological or ethnographic issues is often an explicit feature of contemporary artworks. But despite a long history of dealing with the so-called ‘art’ of other cultures, what does anthropology have to contribute to an understanding of the kinds of artworks you might find at Tate Modern today? Using ethnographic case studies this module will consider key anthropological approaches to art both historically and thematically, and will explore how art and anthropology are entangled with each other, including suggesting ways in which anthropology can productively learn from contemporary art.

The aim of this module is to introduce you to rights in terms of their philosophical foundations, the history and shape of the UN system and anthropological contributions. We will be exploring human rights and humanitarian law as bodies of law, institutions, systems of practice and ideologies – with particular focus on the issue of cultural relativism (historically the key stumbling block for anthropological engagement with rights) and cross-cultural experiences of engagement with, or resistance to, rights.

The aim of this module is to allow students to explore the possibilities of communicating anthropological themes and issues through visual and aural media by producing practical work. 

This is a production-based module and does not follow the usual lecture/seminar format. It is centered on the development of your own individual practical visual or sound project and seeing that through to completion. As such the contact hours are made up of some joint screening sessions and group workshops, as well as some one-to-one tutorials.

The module requires you to engage in a PROCESS of making a visual piece of work, to develop and refine a project through all the various stages and forms necessary for its successful completion. Students typically produce several versions of the practical work as they refine their project over the module of the term.

This module offers an introduction to theoretical debates and methods of digital anthropology. It combines an introduction to the debates that have shaped the field with practical sessions designed to familiarize learners with digital methodologies for anthropological research. As digital technologies transform contemporary experiences of subjectivity, embodiment, sociality and everyday life, the module uses anthropological tools and methods to think through digital technologies in a range of ethnographic contexts. Topics covered will reimagine the object of anthropology through digital ethnography, and explore how the purchase of digital futures and imaginaries remake anthropologists’ conceptual toolkits.

The module will combine an enquiry into the materialities and politics of digital infrastructures, devices and social media platforms with practical learning using digital methods to produce anthropological analysis. Practical sessions will develop independent research skills including research design and ethics, working with digital video, techniques of online data collection and digital qualitative and ethnographic analysis.

This module looks at the ways in which anthropologists have dealt with violence, how we explain it, the specific problems of researching this topic, the involvement of anthropologists in military projects and other issues. We will be looking at the practices of researching; writing and engaging with violence and the problems these pose contemporary anthropologists. Some of the readings, lectures and other sources we might look at in this module inevitably deal with issues, descriptions and images of violence. Please be aware of this before taking the module and if it’s an issue discuss this with module convenor sooner rather than later.

The module aims to provide students with a critical understanding of international development as a social, political and historical field, and of anthropology’s engagement with development and processes of planned social change. The early parts of the module provide students with an understanding of, the emergence of development as an idea, the architecture and infrastructure of aid, and introduce key theoretical approaches in the study of inequality. We also examine the tensions inherent in anthropology’s long and intimate relationship with development, through the early production of expert knowledge about tradition and culture; through its critical engagement with policy processes and planned interventions, and through the professional negotiation of the fields of development anthropology and the anthropology of development.

The module then goes on to contextualise these theoretical and critical approaches to development through a series of interlinked topics and ethnographic case studies. These take students beyond the idea of development as linear progression, or as a monolithic force acting on the world, and instead reveal a field fractured by contradictions, contestations and contingencies that is produced, reproduced and interpreted across multiple locations and cultural contexts.

During the term you should acquire an overview of the relationship between anthropology, feminist theories and theoretical and applied issues within the field of development and politics. The emphasis will be on critical engagement and debate, and on a comparative approach to gender and gender systems of power in developed and developing countries. We will draw on the theories and debates covered in other modules to examine the implications of gender differences within specific economic and political systems.

This is a hands-on research module aimed at providing students with grounded, meaningful research experience. This will take the form of participation in research led by staff with the aim of contributing to real, concrete outputs with public and/or academic audiences. The preparation for research will take the form of two day-long workshops in summer term, the research itself will take place over the summer, with a third writing up/dissemination workshop in the Autumn term of the following academic year. As with the Placement module, this will be a Level 6 module which takes place in the summer at the end of the 2nd year, with assessment submitted in the Autumn term of the 3rd year.

While specific research skills will vary depending upon the research project, they are envisaged to include fieldwork skills (EG - interviewing; participant observation; field notes; audio & video data gathering), research ethics training, software use (EG - NVivo; website design packages such as Wordpress; mapping software; film editing) along with dissemination related skills such as blogging or collaborative writing up of research for other forms of publication. 

The aim of this course is to provide concrete skills and outputs that can be straightforwardly added to the CV's of students while also allowing them to participate in meaningful research. Depending upon the specificities of the research project - students will also be encouraged, where possible, to contribute towards the research design.

This module examines the actors and communication processes involved in contemporary political communication. It combines theoretical insights and empirical information 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 standard political communication topics and contemporary examples, with discussions of related theory and concepts. The following topics are covered: The crisis of politics and media in established democracies; mass media and the news production process; political parties, citizen relations and political marketing; the production of news and the future for traditional print and broadcast news media; media effects and influences, and citizen engagement and participation; historical and cultural elements of political communication, and digital politics and communication. In addition, key case study areas will be explored, including: the 2015 UK Election and EU Referendum; the economics of austerity and financialisation; media management and mediatisation of politics; and health and welfare policy.

Theories and concepts drawn upon include: Theories of democracy (from weak, representative to direct, deliberative); public sphere theory (national, parliamentary, local, global, online, and counter); Political economy and related critiques of capitalist democracy; Work, organisation, professionalization and bureaucracy; mediatisation, popular culture and politics; Primary definition, media consecration, and celebrity; New technologies, technological determinism and social shaping.

Much of the material for this module is highly contemporary, so students are encouraged to maintain an awareness of current developments in political communication in the UK and elsewhere, through newspapers, television, radio and the internet. Students are very much encouraged to bring contemporary examples into the seminar discussions and their essays.

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.

In this module students will be introduced to a series of sociological questions about the city and urban life from a perspective which focuses on public culture, consumer culture and everyday life. There is an emphasis on lived space, patterns of housing, spaces of leisure and enjoyment, spaces for multi-culturalism and for sharing public provided resources such as parks, libraries, schools and open spaces, as well as detailed considerations of changes within the retail landscape.
The aim will be to become familiar with the concepts and ideas developed by cultural geographers, social and cultural theorists, by feminists, by post-colonialist scholars, by artists, writers and film-makers about the growth of urbanism, about the sensations and subjective states of intensity which city life generates. The module will also adopt a historical approach charting the rise of urban modernity, the development of shopping and the department store, and it will consider the city as the space for crime, for prostitution and for gang culture. We will also examine processes of migration to the city, and to the way in which power relations in the city result in boundaries, barrios, ghettos, enclaves and fortresses. We will ask questions about the urban workforce, the new service sector, and jobs such as nannies and ‘baristas’. Cities have long been laboratories for sociologists and ethnographers and we will critically examine some of the results of these activities, with a view to producing short ‘urban diaries’ based on close observation of local neighbourhoods or districts in London, e.g. Changes to the East End through gentrification and development. With this in mind we will do an afternoon field trip later in the term to look at the old and the ‘new’ Kings Cross.

The wider conceptual frames for this module are drawn from postmodern theories of space (Jameson, Soja, Massey), from the writing on space by Foucault, from anthropological ideas of everyday life (de Certeau) from sociological studies of urban neighbourhoods (Wacquant), and from sociologists who examine urban micro-economies of culture and creativity (McRobbie). There will be the chance to debate the work of Richard Florida and to reflect on the ideas which inform ‘creative city’ policies. In the first 5 weeks we adopt an approach informed by cultural history and social theory. In the second half we pay close attention to the rise of the ‘creative city’, to processes of gentrification and to neighbourhood politics. Throughout the module students will be encouraged to draw on their own experience of urban culture, as well as draw on the module material to develop a greater understanding of the cities and urban environments in which they grew up.

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 will examine the place of the ‘body’ in contemporary social and cultural theory taking a number of case studies as examples. In recent years across a range of academic disciplines, from sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and psychology, there has been a move away from approaching the body as a pre-given biological entity or substance, to explore the body as a process. This shifts inquiry from asking not ‘what a body is?’, but rather ‘what can a body do’? ‘What could bodies become’? This work privileges the materiality of the body, as well as introducing creative energy and motion into our understandings of corporeality. It also directs and extends our focus away from anthropocentric understandings of the body (ie. that the human body is distinctly ‘human’) and orients our examinations of corporeality to include species bodies, psychic bodies, machinic bodies, vitalist bodies and other-worldly bodies. These bodies may not conform to our expectations of clearly defined boundaries between the psychological, social, biological, ideological, economic and technical, and may not even resemble the molar body in any shape or form.

Thus many of the dualisms that have circulated across academic disciplines have been dismantled and troubled. These include contrasts between nature and culture, the individual and society, the mind and body, the interior and exterior, and the human and animal/machine. This work has emerged for example in relation to debates surrounding bio and digital technologies, body image and eating disorders, gender performativity, animal/ human relations, affective communication, the senses and mediated perception, health and illness, psychiatric and therapy cultures, the emotions, affect and feeling, the importance of engaging with science, including the contemporary neurosciences to name some just some examples. The question is how do we, as humanities scholars, engage with the body and debates surrounding the body and what relevance might this have for understanding our relationship to media practices and technologies, and particularly for how we might theorise mediation?

This module will provide a critical forum to reflect on these issues, and will provide students from the humanities with a critical understanding of theories of society, culture and communications, which recognize that the body has a materiality and cannot simply be collapsed into text, discourse and signifying activity. This work also explores the complex and layered relationships between scientific narratives/practices, cultural narratives/ practices and our own autobiographies/ embodied practices. The module will explore to what extent we need to talk about embodiment, rather than the body in any fixed way.

The module investigates the nature of media law and ethical regulation for media practitioners primarily in the UK, but with some comparison with the situation in the USA and references to the experiences of media communicators in other countries. The students are directed towards an 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 learning the subject of media jurisprudence- the study of the philosophy of media law, media ethicology (the study of the knowledge of ethics/morality in media communication), and media ethicism (the belief systems in the political context that influence journalistic conduct and content). The module evaluates media law and regulation in terms of its social and cultural context. It is taught in one and a half hour lectures and one-hour seminars that involve the discussion of multi-media examples of media communication considered legally and/or morally problematical. 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 year after year in response to these developments.

This module aims to explore how the media operate as a focus of ritual action, symbolic hierarchy and symbolic conflict. In particular, it explores to what extent theoretical frameworks already developed in anthropology and social theory can help us analyse contemporary media and mediated public life.

This module explores various approaches, theoretical and empirical, to understand what might broadly be called the ritual dimensions of contemporary media. Among the questions the module addresses are the following:

1. What can anthropological theories of culture, ritual and power contribute to the understanding of contemporary media?
2. What might we mean by the terms ‘ritual’ and ‘ritualisation’ in relation to media?
3. How do we analyse those times when media production and usage depart from the ordinary and every day, and take on larger social resonances, for example the national broadcasting of major public events?
4. How is the growth of celebrity culture connected to questions of social power?
5. How should we interpret the media’s claims to represent ‘reality’, for example in the proliferating genre of ‘reality TV’?
6. Why do non-media people want to appear in or on the media, and with what consequences do they do so?
7. How is media’s power connected with the practices of state and corporate power and with the latter’s use of media (including for surveillance)?
8. Are media’s ritual dimensions played out differently in different media cultures?
9. How do media rituals affect contemporary public cultures, and with what ethical consequences?

Lectures move from introductory material and theoretical concepts (in the early weeks) to specific aspects of contemporary media production (in the last two-thirds of the term). Students will be encouraged in seminar discussion and in their written work to apply the theoretical concepts introduced in the module to the analysis of specific examples.

This module looks at the rise of promotional culture (public relations, advertising, marketing and branding) and 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, economic, political economy, Post-Fordist, audience, consumer society, risk society, and postmodern perspectives. The second part will look at specific case areas of promotional culture. These are in: fashion and taste, technological commodities, popular culture (film TV, music), celebrities and public figures, political parties, and financial markets. 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.

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 20th and 21st centuries to the relationship of politics and aesthetics, the problem of democracy, and ideology critique.

"Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936.

Many of the current developments in social and mobile media take place in what is often called the Global South. Innovations such as mobile money (see for example the successful platforms M-Pesa and G-Cash) and crowdsourcing platforms (such as Ushahidi) have emerged from countries such as the Philippines and Kenya where over 25 per cent of the country’s GNP flows through M-Pesa. Most new social media users are based in developing countries. But how can we understand the social consequences of social and mobile media? Are new communication technologies opportunities for social change, as it is often claimed, or do they amplify existing inequalities?

This module takes an empirically grounded and comparative approach to understanding the social uses and consequences of social media. Theoretically, the module brings together the interconnected literatures on globalisation and social shaping of technology while we will also address contemporary debates on digital media, consumption, social change and power. The lectures will follow a trajectory from the mediation of personal processes (such as intimacy through social media) to the relationship between social media and structural processes such as migration, social class formation and inequality. Ultimately, rather than reporting on a collection of international case studies, the module aims to showcase the local appropriations of digital technologies revisit assumptions about social media as well as about key concepts in social science, such as intimacy and social class. The tension between cultural particularism and social change is central to the module which will end with a broader theorisation of social media.

You will devise a major project that utilises the skills developed in the second year cross-platform module.