BA (Hons) Anthropology & Media

The module will invite you to explore being human through the relations that make and complicate us. This introduction to anthropological thinking encourages us to think about self, other and social world(s) through the relations that connect and differentiate our species. Our critical conversation on human being follows a path of thinking about social relations across multiple scales & contexts: 

• Personhood 
• Bodies: Race/Gender/(dis)Ability 
• Anthropological Selves/Others/Collaborations 
• Kinship/Relatedness/Friendship 
• Non/other-than human/ Mystical/ Devine (animals, spirits, sorcerers, gods....) 
• Infrastructures/ Objects (artefact, document, attire...) 
• Exchange/Exploitation (gifts, comrades, world systems, assemblages....) 
• Citizen/Nation/Border 
• Present Pasts/ Empire/Hauntings 
• Planet/Futures 

As you progress through the course, your thinking will move outwards from selves and persons; through bodies, kin and others; into infrastructures, world systems and planetary futures.

The aim of this module is to acquaint you with contemporary social anthropology, as well as to give you the confidence and the tools to think critically and work collaboratively. The module begins by locating the discipline within the social sciences and humanities before proceeding to an exploration of central themes, methodologies and ethical concerns.

The course is structured around lectures, seminars and workshops. Lectures and seminar discussions will draw on late-20th century and contemporary anthropological texts and debates. The emphasis will be on exploring how anthropology can give us a unique perspective on key contemporary social issues. Workshops will include practice-based activities to encourage the development of your critical awareness, thinking and reading, as well as collaborative work skills. The module will also include career-centered discussions.

As the module progresses you will gain a growing sense of what social anthropology is and hopefully feel more confident to enter discussion concerning the kinds of questions it asks. Reflecting this gradual build-up of confidence and understanding, the portfolio assignment – which will involve a series of short texts and/or visual submissions – will be guided by regular discussions, receiving interim feedback at the end of the Autumn term, before final submission and assessment at the end of the Spring term.

Anthropological Methods is an introduction to practices of ethnographic research. The module examines the relationship between theory and method within anthropology. You will learn about 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. It considers 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.

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.

This module covers the history of the British media from 1800 to the present day. It offers insights into the forces that shape the media, how the media connect to power and social change, and the ways in which the media have come to occupy a central role in the imaginative life and leisure of British society.

It ranges over a variety of topics, from the struggle for a free press and the creation of public service broadcasting through to changing representations of nation, class, race, and sexuality. It investigates whether there has been a media revolution during the last forty years and introduces the issues that are central to the contemporary politics of the media. Above all, the module introduces different ways of understanding the relationship between media and society that will be useful for all three years of your degree.

How do the media shape our worldview, sense of self and ideas about public life? Media – from television and social media to on-demand labour apps and self-tracking wearables – do not just convey or coordinate information, they are also battlegrounds for making meaning and resisting power.

Media producers, regulators, intermediaries and users constantly jostle to have a say, change the narrative or redesign the platform. This module introduces key concepts to engage with contemporary debates about control and resistance in the media.

Cultural studies is a field of study committed to the interrogation of power in society that starts with self-examination of the field and its own assumptions. As Stuart Hall, one of the most influential figures in the field, has argued, cultural studies ‘is a project that is always open to that which it doesn’t yet know, to that which it can’t yet name’ (Grossberg et al., 1992: 278).

It starts with a general introduction to the idea of culture, and some of the problems associated with defining it.

We’ll take a close critical look at some of the key texts and theories that emerged from the Centre in the 1970s. This will set the groundwork for using key cultural studies concepts such as identity, hybridity and resistance to analyse cultural products and practices such as social media, digital platforms and music.

Over the past 130 years, moving images have developed into a major aesthetic and social force of our times. Our realities past, present and future are consumed by the audiovisual mediations that we share in our cultures. Our imaginations and desires are built on fiction from films. We mirror ourselves through our doubles on screen. But how do moving images actually engage us? What’s their language? How do they affect us as human beings with a body, a psyche and social awareness? What does it mean 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 to theory 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, positioning them within various social, cultural, and political movements

Specific questions that are raised range from the relative ‘realism’ of cinema compared to its expressionistic and fantastic powers. From cinema's qualities as an immersive, embodied experience to more literary story-telling forms, and from the classical nature of film spectatorship in cinema spaces to novel forms of interactive engagement emerging today with gaming, 3D, VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality).

Our academic departments are developing exciting elective ideas to allow you to broaden your education, either to develop vocationally orientated experiences or to learn more about contemporary society, culture and politics. You’ll be able to choose safe in the knowledge that these modules have been designed for non-subject specialists and to bring students from different disciplines together. For example, you may want to take introductions to areas such as Law, Education, the digital industries, the creative industries,think like a designer or understand the history and politics behind our current affairs.

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 aim of the module is to introduce you to black, indigenous and transnational feminist analyses of the historical and sociopolitical foundations and consequences of predatory capitalism. You'll explore the challenges different communities face in relation to different forms of large-scale resource extraction and climate change, and the actions undertaken by those communities to deal with those challenges.

You'll be introduced to these themes via literature and audio-visual content that offers important ways forward, developing the critical analysis skills necessary to explore practical solutions to these problems.

You'll work towards answering the question 'How can reimagining ecology help us to rethink possible responses to large-scale extraction and climate change and to continue to fight for measures that might slow down climate change?'.

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 is concerned with key ways of thinking that have shaped and continue to shape the discipline of social anthropology. As such, the module is intended to augment what you have learned in the first year and to help consolidate your sense of how important concepts in social anthropology fit together.

The focus of the module is how the discipline’s main 20^th century schools of thought have developed, how they relate to one another and what they have contributed to our understandings of the world.

Our concern is with the different ways in which anthropologists have conceived of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ in their efforts to account for the myriad of ways in which humans live.

We shall explore how these approaches to anthropology compete with, and sometimes contradict, one another and how these dynamics have driven the discipline through the political landscape of the twentieth century to where we are now so that we can, in the last, pause to envisage where we can and should go next.

Thinking through race foregrounds several contemporary debates that bring to the fore why race – a concept which purports essential, biologized difference between humans – continues to get reproduced in policy, media representations, expert knowledge, and everyday encounter across the globe even though it was debunked in the previous century. The module also engages with ethnographic accounts that think through how race, gender, and class are experienced and inhabited in relationship to one another in the contemporary moment.

This module examines indigenous cosmopolitics (political claims, epistemologies and imaginaries which exceed the terms of ‘politics’ as understood and practiced in the global North) across the globe and their entanglements with and inspirations for diverse movements for global justice, decolonization and transformations in relations between humans and the environment. We'll read contemporary cosmopolitical practice and theory to understand the claims (philosophical, legal, political, cultural) made by diversely positioned indigenous groups, and critically position this in dialogue with the history of Western political thought. The module will chart the movements of cosmopolitical thinking across the global South and examine the modes of political and legal practice which it inspires.  

Cosmopolitical philosophies emerging from indigenous thought and practice directly address issues of social and environmental justice, decolonization, and sustainability, and these will therefore be key topics of debate and discussion. The teaching will be research-led and will draw on expertise within the department, and will utilise interdisciplinary perspectives (particularly those from Media, Sociology, Law and Art) in addressing issues of contemporary concern. 

The Anthropology of Religion module takes as its starting point the fact that religion is everywhere in the modern world, exerts a powerful influence on social life, and motivates social action in a variety of ways. You’ll explore how distinctions between the secular and the religious, and between science and magic or ‘superstition’, have been used to legitimate or devalue different/non-Western practices and indigenous cultures.

Using a wide range of ethnographic studies, the module encourages you to question the implicit hierarchy often assumed between secularism and religion, and to challenge and rethink earlier academic epistemologies. A focus on religion as a mode of social action is also explored in relation to how religious belief and practice may promote forms of social justice and activism - as well as violence and oppression.

The module also looks at the relationship between religion, race, place and identity in the context of diasporic communities. You’ll also examine how social media and digital platforms are facilitating transnational notions of religious belonging and identity. You’ll be introduced to anthropological and interdisciplinary perspectives on religion, the body and sexuality. You’ll also explore themes of embodiment and corporeality via the relationship between religion, ecology, and environmentalism. You’ll particularly focus on how nature-oriented new religious movements have sought to resist instrumentalist neo-liberal and Enlightenment disenchantments of space, place and landscape.

This module introduces you to different anthropological approaches to visual and material culture and gives you the opportunity to conduct a piece of visually oriented anthropological research.

It provides a critical introduction to the many ways anthropologists engage with the visual from their use of visual methodologies and analysis of representations to their ethnographic study of everyday visual forms. Focusing on a wide range of visual media from photography, museum exhibitions and popular representations on TV to dress, body art, architecture and other everyday visual and material forms, the module raises issues about the significance of visibility, the politics of representation, the social life of visual and material forms and the relationship between seeing and other senses.

The module provides you with an introduction to the anthropology of work and organisations alongside a practical work placement. You'll develop and apply your anthropological knowledge while gaining key career development skills. The placement will last  5 days per week for 2 weeks, or at least 10x8 hour days spread over a longer period.

The aim of the module is to provide you with experiential learning opportunities to enhance your academic studies and offer the opportunity for personal development.

Previous partner organisations offering placements have included The Migration Museum, Lawyers Against Poverty, and Lewisham Community Gardens.

The aim of the module is to introduce students to black, indigenous and feminist analyses of the historical and sociopolitical foundations and consequences of predatory capitalism, the challenges different communities face in relation to different forms of large-scale resource extraction and to climate change, and the actions undertaken by those communities to deal with those challenges.

Students will be introduced to these themes via literature and audio-visual content that offers important ways forward, both analytically and in terms of activism and community organization, and in a way that enables them to develop the critical analytical skills necessary to contribute to envisioning practical solutions to contemporary and future problems caused by large-scale extraction and climate change, while considering the ethical implications and limitations of this work.

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

The dissertation is an 8,000-10,000 word research project on a media-related topic of your choice. It provides an opportunity to work independently and in a self-directed manner on a subject of longstanding interest or that you have encountered during your studies. Your research topic must be located within the field of media and communications and should ideally draw upon at least one of the theoretical models introduced on the department’s degree programmes. You will be encouraged to undertake primary research of media texts or undertake research interviews to provide material for your case study. Support for your dissertation will be provided by regular meetings with a supervisor – a member of academic staff who will have knowledge relevant to your chosen topic.