BA (Hons) Anthropology & Media

This module introduces basic anthropological concepts of kinship, politics, economics, and religion and the history and theoretical schools of anthropology.

This module explores aspects of anthropological methods. You study the following areas: data collection techniques and implications of type and quality of data; participant observation: techniques involved, its evolution and change; analytical approaches to primary data, re-analyses of secondary sources; the philosophy of science; value free social science, interaction between observer and observed, perception and ‘fact’.

You will study either Ethnography of a Selected Region I: Africa or Ethnograqphy of a Selected Region 2: South Asia, depending on timetabling and staff availability.

Ethnography of a Selected Region 1: Africa

Module Convenor: Dr Dominique Santos 

Africa has been a key space, both geographically and imaginatively, in the development of the discipline of anthropology. This module is an introduction to anthropological studies on societies and cultures in Africa and the African diaspora. Ethnographic case studies are used to address some of the major themes that have characterised studies of Africa and debates about African identity, including sexuality, gender, colonialism, music, art, magic & sorcery, religion, power and the diaspora. Throughout the module, emphasis is placed on how the idea of Africa is mobilised in different ways for a variety of ideological purposes. 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. On completion of the module, students will have gained knowledge of key debates in African anthropology and be able to reflect critically on the history of ethnographic engagement with Africa. At the same time, they will have developed an understanding of the diversity and contingencies of everyday life in contemporary Africa.

Ethnography of a Selected Region 2: South Asia

Module Convenor: Dr Martin Webb

This an ethnography led module that introduces students to the anthropology, sociology, history and politics of India. The module begins with an introduction to significant historical events and an overview of the emergence of the post-colonial nation. We move on to consider the anthropological construction of India and then follow key themes of inequality, hierarchy, development and the nation across a series of topics which introduce ethnographies exploring: the state, youth, citizenship, love and friendship, urban lives, public culture and the idea of a global India. While the module focuses on India, where ethnographic threads or literatures connect to scholarship from across south Asia students will be guided and encouraged to follow them.

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. 

This module serves as an introduction into the theorising and analysis of film and other audiovisual media.

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).

This module 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.

Politics, Economics and Social Change introduces 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".

An introduction to media production in one of the practice options offered each year by the Department. Production skills are applied in the creation of small-scale projects.

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 you to think about the ways in which different forms of communication shape our experiences of the economy. How do the media influence our understanding of wealth, poverty, and inequality? How is economic news reported, and why is it often difficult to understand? How might phenomena such as digital currencies and online auctions change our economic behaviour? How do financial advice columns shape our understanding of the ‘good life’? You will explore the role of media and communication in economic life through a range of theoretical approaches and case studies. It encourages you to think about the economy 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 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’.

This course gives students the opportunity to analyse the changing nature of television in the 21st Century. Television has undergone radical transformations in technique, aesthetics, cultural and political roles, from its beginnings as national broadcasting with limited channels to commercial multichannel use, and thence to multiplatform and post-broadcast networked transmission.

Rapidly expanding spectrum and diminishing costs of entry have transformed the medium, but older configurations – of citizenship and domestic viewing for example – remain central features. Similarly, global trade in programming adds to but has not destroyed the national characteristics of the medium. The course analyses the plurality of contemporary televisual media in the light of their cultural, economic, social and political histories and the historical specificity of the present conjuncture. The course will provide training in how to present complex ideas in public.

The first five weeks of the course will be offered in the Spring Term with the final four weeks offered in the Summer Term.

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 introduces some of the key issues in the anthropology of art. It begins with an examination of the contested concept of 'art' in Western thought and questions its applicability in different cultural contexts.

The module covers such issues as conflicting definitions of art and aesthetics; modes of seeing within and across cultures; creativity, inspiration and the category of the artist; the body as art; issues of gender and ideology; the politics of the ownership and display of non-Western art works; imaging nationality and ethnicity through art; primitivism and the construction of the other.

This module is worth 15 credits if you study it at Level 6 and 30 credits if you study it at Level 7.

This module is designed to offer students the opportunity to conduct a short piece of research in the field broadly defined as the Anthropology of Art. Picking up on theoretical issues introduced in Anthropology of Art I, you will be expected to select your own topic for fieldwork. You may wish to analyse the practice of a particular artist (especially one whose work relates to ethnography in some way), concentrate on aspects of art institutions in London (techniques of display, audiences, exhibitions), or on lives of art objects (their production, consumption, circulation, interpretation). Key issues include: aesthetics and the culture industry: the role of the avant-garde: Frankfurt School critical theory: popular art, resistance and accommodation: the rise of film criticism: museums and collecting.

This core module will enable you to explore the theoretical concepts underpinning development, the history of development and its institutions – from NGOs to the World Bank and IMF, while considering diverse case studies from around the world. You will also explore the historical role of anthropology’s involvement in development, as official mediators between ‘the West and the rest’ through imperial conquest, colonial administration and a post-war development industry.

As a central component of the module you will critically analyse current trends that have emerged to dominate the field of global political and economic interventions and/or policies – ‘participation and empowerment’, ‘gender awareness’, ’sustainable development’, ‘community development’, ‘NGOs’, and ‘environmental conservation’.

The module examines anthropological understandings of human-environment relations and their bearing on public discourses of environmentalism. It deals with: different ways of encountering biophysical surroundings across societies; European traditions of environmental thought and their impacts; management practices, colonialism, and cultural elaboration of the idea of nature; environmental social movements, identity politics and social justice in environmentalism.

This module is worth 15 credits if you study it at Level 6 and 30 credits if you study it at Level 7.

This module explores the inter-relationship of gender, sexuality and the body both within western cultures and western social theory, and in a range of other cultural and historical contexts. Emphasising the ways in which the body and gender have been produced/imagined differently in diverse times and places, it focuses on both classical and current anthropological topics including:

• The status of the body – biological or cultural
• Decoration, modification and transformation of bodies
• Distinctions between sex and gender
• Alternative sex and gender systems
• Kinship, marriage and chosen families
• New reproductive technologies
• Identity politics and queer theory
• Theories of performance/practice
• Violence, resistance and power politics

This module examines a variety of anthropological approaches to the study of violence, ranging from evolutionary explanations for male aggression to studies of changing American attitudes toward terrorism in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. It looks critically at the theoretical, methodological and ethical questions raised in studies of violence through ethnographic case studies from around the world.

The module considers attempts to define violence as a concept in the social sciences and explores the possible causes, meanings, and uses of violent practices from a variety of different cultural contexts and perspectives. It gives particular attention to the political and economic conditions that promote war and other violent behaviour as well as specific cultural expressions within violent practices.

We will also discuss ethnographic descriptions of “peaceful societies” and examine the ways in which peace is made in the aftermath of conflict. In addition to the required and additional readings, the module will also include a number of films that coincide with weekly topics.

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.

Following on from Anthropology and the Visual II, this is a practically based module in which you will explore the techniques of video-making/photography.

This module encourages you to engage critically with the rights discourses that underpin development agendas in the contemporary world. You will consider the historical evolution of rights discourses, the institutions that have been established to uphold rights, the language of Human Rights used in international law, as well as the concept of rights as understood by development organisations, governments and multilaterals (such as the UN).

You will also analyse the cross-cutting – and often competing – claims made in the name of, for example, gender and child rights, indigenous rights, intellectual property rights, animal and environmental rights, customary law and bioethics.

The module provides an opportunity to explore the concept and discourses of rights in relation to numerous contemporary social issues (such as natural disasters, constitutional reform, war crimes tribunals, environmental disputes and gender politics), and consider the purchase of the rights concept (and its limitations) within development discourses and practices, as well as in relation to patterns of governance and social justice.

An introduction to key areas of medical anthropology, ranging from ideas about healing to social inequality and the ‘new biology’. The module addresses issues of biomedicine in the UK alongside alternative therapies and explanations of health/illness in different parts of the world, and approaches to the political economy. Specific sessions include the application of medical anthropology, ‘new’ diseases and technologies.

There are long held tensions between the disciplines of anthropology and history, although they share some common epistemological concerns.

Increasingly, anthropologists have incorporated historical accounts towards expanding ethnographic possibilities, and to explore theoretical questions of continuity, social change and periodisation, and to examine colonialism as a set of historical conditions. As part of a historicised practice, anthropologists have challenged assumptions about relationship between myth and history, and explored complex temporalities.

In turn, historians have borrowed from anthropological methodologies to underpin radical ideas about microhistories, oral history practices, which have also contributed towards the anthropological project. More recently, both historians and anthropologists have turned to memory as a way of accessing the past through practice, policy and the emotions.

This course sets up these questions through three interconnected threads: the history of anthropology, historical anthropology, and anthropologies of history.

We examine the different kinds of evidence that may be used to understand the past, and how the past is made sense of in the present, through archives, images and material culture. Together this provides us with a model for approaching the past anthropologically, in order to gain ethnographic understandings of the dynamic processes of historicity in everyday contexts, where the past can be deployed, imagined and evidenced.

Is Friedrich Nietzsche’s clarion call, ‘God is Dead’, still relevant in an increasingly reflexive cosmopolitan and pluralistic world? Starting with a critique of secularism as a self-evident category, this module seeks out ethnography that enriches our critical understandings of the misplaced distinction made between religious and secular domains.

In tracing the historical formation of the ‘secular’ - as a broad ideology with deep impact on the effects of the state on its subjects’ bodily dispositions, consciousness and desires - we approach anthropological questions of individual and social transformation through examining ethics, morality and the law in a variety of ‘secular’ contexts.

These contexts include, but are not limited to:

• Anthropological considerations of the ideological premises of mass political movements such as Nazism and Bolshevism;
• The everyday Kemalist state in Turkey
• The infrastructural power of fiscal authoritarianism
• The family resemblances between multiculturalism, Indirect Rule, and apartheid
• The very idea of the human/Humanism in prescriptive social engineering organised through the state apparatus and executed in the name of freedom and equality

This module is worth 15 credits if you study it at Level 6 and 30 credits if you study it at Level 7.

This module looks at Amazonian societies from pre-history to the present – indigenous, peasant, colonial, developmentalist – and includes discussion of modern social movements (Landless Peoples Movement) as well as classic themes of Levi-Strauss's 'world on the wane', human ecology and extractivist economies. 

There was a time when myth and ritual were seen as products of the childhood of humankind, before Science came along and disenchanted everything, a time when people languished (or gloried, depending on one’s point of view) in a kind of poetic consciousness. Nowadays, anthropologists tend to assume myth and ritual are aspects of all human societies, our own included; what they can’t agree on however is why. What is it that myth and ritual actually do? Are they ways of resolving existential dilemmas? Or reflecting on the fact they can’t be resolved? Are they ways of establishing unquestionable authority? Forms of artistic self-expression? Media for political action? Or some combination of these?

This module will explore some of these questions, by way of (hopefully colourful and interesting) concrete case studies.

As we enter the third millennium, the percentage of urban dwellers exceeds 50% of the world’s population. The sub-field of urban anthropology was born as ethnographers followed rural migrants to cities; but at the beginning of the 20th century, the emergence of anthropology as a professional discipline was intertwined with a fascination with the urban locus across a wide range of arts and social sciences.

Through historical and ethnographic perspectives this module considers the changing use and valorisation of different urban spaces at different times; how cities are represented; ideas of order and disorder, of public and domestic places, of control and resistance through carnival, informal economies and kinship networks. The module covers both third-world and Euro-American cities, and supplements theoretical discourses and ethnographies with films and novels.

Beginning with Franz Boas, the study of material culture has formed an integral part of the discipline of anthropology. The study of material culture encompasses everything from consumption practices, art, architecture, cultural heritage, cultural landscapes, dress, memorials and museums. This module will take a critical perspective to investigate how things and people relate and are related to each other, the way in which objects can mediate social relationships and the entanglements of objects and memory. 

This module is worth 15 credits if you study it at Level 6 and 30 credits if you study it at Level 7.

An introduction to key areas of medical anthropology, ranging from ideas about healing to questions of social inequality and ‘biosociality’. We will explore questions of how culture shapes understandings and experiences of the body, health and illness. We'll also examine the implications of new technologies on understandings of health, and the politics of modern global healthcare. We will engage with classic and contemporary ethnographic work.

Key questions include:

• How is health understood and experienced culturally?
• What is the relationship between health and unequal economic and technological systems?
• What can anthropology contribute to global health issues?

This module is worth 15 credits if you study it at Level 6 and 30 credits if you study it at Level 7.

This module examines three areas of anthropological enquiry into human-environment relations:

• different societies’ experience of and thoughts about their biophysical surroundings (beliefs, practices, dwelling)
• human shaping of landscapes (living in balance with nature, enhancing or destroying it)
• environmental politics, or political ecology (small and large scale resource conflict, science and policy processes, environmental movements)

Each topic is examined through one or two key studies, drawn from different regions of the world (eg Amazonia, West Africa, Indonesia) and relating to different resources (eg forests, soil, water, oil).

Throughout the module, we will also discuss the bearings of the anthropological ideas examined on public discourses of environmentalism and on conservation policy.

This module is worth 15 credits if you study it at Level 6 and 30 credits if you study it at Level 7.

This module looks at Amazonian societies from pre-history to the present – indigenous, peasant, colonial, developmentalist – and includes discussion of modern social movements (Landless Peoples Movement) as well as classic themes of Levi-Strauss's 'world on the wane', human ecology and extractivist economies. 

This module is worth 15 credits if you study it at Level 6 and 30 credits if you study it at Level 7.

Animals are famously good to think with and feature in some of the most controversial thought experiments in anthropology. This course introduces a pantheon of anthropological animals, from Bororo parrots and Lele pangolin to Derrida’s cat and Haraway’s dogs. What does it mean if people can become animals and vice versa? How do we turn animal into edible? Can dogs be heroes?

We also look at the political economy of animal production, the largest industry in the world. The consumption of animals has recently entered an unprecedented phase of extreme exploitation epitomised by the factory farms of Euroamerica. At the same time, ‘wild’ animals have been commodified in zoos and rare species preserved in parks that exclude human inhabitants. How are we to understand these apparently contradictory impulses? Why are cows food and pandas poster children for the Worldwide Fund for Nature? As we adapt to new forms of biotechnology what is at stake in our exchanges with animals, of genes, organs, diseases and labour? The module uses a wide range of resources including film, ethnography and fiction to explore these and other questions.

This module will consider the border politics involved in the making of 'transnational', diasporic', and 'local' communities. We will theorize 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 destabilized when movement and borders become central heuristics by which to understand belonging and membership? Throughout the 5 week 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 for thinking about 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, this 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.

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 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 contemporary political communication through the mass media, in its national and international contexts. Lectures explore the history of political communication, looking at questions of media ownership and regulation, party political and election broadcasts, news bias and the agenda-setting role of the media. These issues are illustrated by examples from the British, American and international political systems. Themes covered include:

• public opinion and the public sphere
• controlling and managing news agendas
• political marketing
• spin, propaganda and persuasion
• war and the media
• celebrity politics and e-democracy

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 draw on phenomenology to explore how race structures the present, often by receding into the background, as well as 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 readings include works that reflect on the experience of being or becoming strangers, or ‘bodies out of place’. We also attend to the intersection between race, gender and sexuality throughout.

This module draws on critical perspectives from media and cultural studies, sociology, urban studies and gender studies to examine dynamics of space and power, regulation, constraint and conflict in the contemporary urban environment. Among others, the module will draw on the writing of Richard Sennett (from his Fall of Public Man to the more recent Corrosion of Character), Saskia Sassen (The Global City) Pierre Bourdieu (The Weight of the World) Foucault (History of Sexuality, Discipline and Punish) and Castells (Network Society). It will also make use of anthropological and ethnographic studies of everyday life (De Certeau) on gang culture (Bourgeois, Loic Wacquand) and it will reflect on the production of urban narratives and city biographies through literary, filmic, musical and visual culture (Irvine Welsh, Helen Walsh, James Kelman, Roberto Saviano [Gomorrah], Wim Wenders, Ulrike Ottinger, Pedro Almodovar, Jamaica Kincaid).

The module will also focus on social marginalisation, dispossession and poverty, migration to the global city, and sexuality in the city.

How can sound – as distinct from images, code and text - be used to understand society, culture and technology? What can music tell us about the non-representational qualities of the communication process? How can the auditory be used as a critique of the conventions of visual dominance and visual culture? What does music have to say about our experience of the world and our creativity?

This module explores how musical meanings are conveyed and understood and how this is mediated through the cultures and technologies of production, recording 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. How for example do we recognise that music means love, anger, sadness, terror, or patriotism? 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.

What does it mean to be embodied and to have a body? Given we are so entangled with media is there such a thing as a natural body? Do bodies begin and end at the skin or rather should bodies be considered entangled processes (symbolic, technical, biological, psychological, historical)? What does it mean to bring the body into media and cultural theory and what are some of the exciting challenges that wait for us?

This module will consider these questions by drawing from a variety of perspectives that have attempted to theorise somatic forms of knowing, embodied dispositions and habits, and the role media play in augmenting, modulating, extending and amplifying feelings, emotions, sensations, intensities, atmospheres, contagions and presence. The module will draw from an exciting interdisciplinary field of body studies, which crosses the arts, sciences and cultural theory. The theories and concepts we consider will allow us to consider all the ways in which media touch our lives in registers that exceed rational, conscious experience. The module explores this field in the context of a variety of media (film, gaming, social media) but also takes the student into more unconventional fields to consider these issues: body image and body-without-an-image, affect studies, narratives of health and illness, human/animal communication, mental health and the media (including eating disorders and the phenomena of voice hearing), technologies of suggestion and attention, and the challenges that gender queer bodies make to theories of mediation.

As part of the module the student is invited to consider an aspect of their own embodied experience as a topic and resource in order to reflect on the theoretical issues at stake.

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: global(ised) economies, activism and populism. We will be investigating 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 involves a series of lectures on history and contemporary developments of international media law and ethics.

Specific topics include the legal problematising of journalism, defamation law and contempt issues, debates in media ethics, state security and secrecy, professional codes and practices, privacy, human rights and international law, and international comparisons.

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. The module begins with a general introduction to debates on the media’s social impacts (integrative or otherwise). Key theoretical concepts are then outlined: sacred and profane, symbolic power, ritual, boundary, and liminality. Specific themes relating to the media’s contribution to public life and public space are then explored: celebrity and ordinariness; fandom and media pilgrimages; media events and public ritual; mediated self-disclosure (from talk shows to the Webcam); ‘reality’ television and everyday surveillance. The module concludes with a review of ethical questions arising from the media’s role in public life and public space.

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. 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, news media and conflict in civil society, popular culture and creativity (film, TV, music), celebrities and public figures, political parties and representation, and markets and value. 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.

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.

Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and Politics of the Audiovisual Politics of the Audiovisual 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.

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.

An introduction to media production in a different area to the one you studied in the second year. You apply production skills in the creation of small-scale projects, and develop critical skills through the analysis of examples and of work produced in each area.