BA (Hons)
Media & Communications

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).

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.

How do we decide if a piece of media is worth our attention? How do we combine critical thinking about the media with making interesting media? In the age of social media and user-generated content, are we all artists now?

The module starts by looking at some of the different ways in which artists have used media and technology across different historical periods. Through this, it introduces aesthetic concerns to the study of media, raising questions about cultural appreciation, value, and taste, but also about social and political issues concerning art. It also teaches you to be critical towards many forms of media art – both old and new.

The notion of ‘art’ as a unified field of specialist cultural production is then put into question in the context of the wider discussions of creativity and amateur media practices. By studying contemporary forms of media production via social media, open web, etc., we consider whether in the age of online media and readily available digital technology everyone is potentially an artist. Blurring the boundary between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, the module attempts to get you to think about media and make media as part of the same classroom experience and module assignment.

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.

This module aims to introduce students to all of the media production practice areas currently offered by the department. The module is a series of workshops, and recent practice areas have included : Animation, Illustration, Journalism, Radio, Creative Writing, Interactive Media, Photography, Television and Media Campaigning and Social Activism. You take a practical workshop in each area, and this will enable you to compare and contrast the specific and universal properties of each production method. The workshops will also help you to make an informed decision about the two areas you would like to study more fully, before finally specialising in one area in your second and third year.

The Media Practice Option modules will allow you to focus in more depth on two practice areas from the Induction to Media Practice module. You take one in the Spring or Summer term of your first year, and one during the Autmn term of your 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.
You can choose from the following indicative list of practice areas:

• Illustration
• Interactive Media
• Animation
• Creative Writing
• Journalism
• Photography
• Radio
• Video Documentary and Drama
• Media Campaigning and Social Activism

The module provides you with a basic knowledge of the key works of some of the most significant foundational social theorists (Marx, Weber, Du Bois and Simmel) and explores how ideas continue to influence our understandings of the media, modernity and power. It should be evident that whilst media theorists have their own particular concerns, in many cases they are responding to problems posed within this classic tradition and within the context of their own times.

The social theory examined in this course asks crucial questions both about the nature of society – power, stratification, agency, regulation, identity, and spectacle – as well as about the media’s status as a key instrument of social reproduction. The module provides a theoretical map on which to locate some of the key issues confronted in media, communication and cultural studies.

In the first five weeks of the module, we’ll explore the different contributions made by Marx, Weber, Du Bois and Simmel to our understanding of modernity. We’ll also examine the work of their critics, particularly drawing on feminist perspectives. In the second half of the module, we’ll confront more contemporary approaches to social theory that critically challenge some of the foundations of Western modern thought. You’ll learn about the concerns around race and ethnicity, gender and class, processes of globalisation and the questioning of grand narratives by postmodernist thinkers.

This module will examine the place of ‘experience’ in thinking about our self-formation. What does it mean to ‘know ourselves’ and what role does psychological thinking, norms and concepts play in this process of knowing? We’ll examine arguments which suggest that psychology, as a body of knowledge and set of practices, does not actually reveal, or disclose who we are, but plays a central role in constructing whom we take ourselves to be. We’ll interrogate the relationships between psychology, media and popular culture, and systems of government and regulation. During the module, we’ll identify events where psychological ideas, norms and concepts are produced, and think about the possibilities and problems with such forms of psychologisation.

We’ll encourage you to interrogate your own self-formation and autobiography and help to situate these narratives in relation to concepts such as power, discourse, desire, imagination, affect and corporeality. The module will extend the usefulness of the concept of subjectivity by exploring Foucauldian, decolonial, queer, crip, feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to subjectivity.

We’ll illustrate their application by exploring themes and issues such as:

• cosmetic surgery and makeover cultures
• media affects and emotions
• performativity theory
• race and gender
• genealogies of sexuality
• positive psychology and the science of happiness
• historical and political aspects of the ‘media effects’ debates

We’ll also consider how we might begin to understand the complex relationships between sexuality, class, race, and gender in relation to the performative force of communication practices such as: film; print media; televisual platforms; social media practices and ‘influencers.’

This module will provide you with a critical and conceptual vocabulary for understanding some of the key dynamics of social and cultural change, with particular reference to the large social institutions the family and sexuality and the changing world of work. We track significant transformations of society from the domestic sphere to the field of employment, paying particular attention to the impact of digital media cultures across both spheres. While some social theorists claimed that this disembedding of individuals away from communities and from long-term attachments and commitments based on family and work-based identities was the outcome of welfare provisions and public investment in education, health and so on, by which means individuals are now able to ‘live the life they choose’ (i.e. the fruits of postmodernity), others argue that individualisation is a process which shifts social and economic responsibility from the state to the individual (inequality and exploitation within neoliberal capitalism).

Has society become fully neo-liberalised? What is the ongoing role of individualisation in neoliberalism? What is the role of various cultural practices in the expectation that people will be self-reliant and what kind of people and society do such expectations produce? Are we seeing this expectation of self-responsibility in contexts of a shrinking state radicalised? How is individual or cultural autonomy positioned as a site of struggle in various cultural contexts, at home, in work, and in popular and counterculture?

This module examines these processes and discusses their consequences: what kind of ‘subjects’ are we now becoming? What are the consequences of individualisation for people positioned differently in terms of structures of identity? Who are the winners and the losers of data capitalism and the networked society? How has neoliberalism been transformed by digital cultures, and in turn, how do these transform us?

This module explores the platformised future of media, communications and creative work. Digital platforms have emerged as a new business model for extracting, circulating and controlling vast amounts of data. Within this business model, a process of platformisation continues to evolve, and with it, a rapid re-organising of media and communications work, alongside roles in the creative and cultural industries.

In the past 20 years, familiar media and communications professions, such as journalism, advertising, marketing, PR and media buying, have expanded to include a host of new and overlapping roles, including audience strategy, brand journalism, digital content marketing, ‘createch’, digital asset management, influencer marketing, programmatic advertising, search marketing, social media management, and adjacent fields of data analysis and data science.

We’ll examine changing media logics and infrastructures; and shifting professional boundaries between traditional and ‘new’ media, creative and cultural professions, and occupations. We’ll also consider and evaluate the various forms of professional knowledge and capital required to navigate digital platforms and their persuasion architecture.

This module encourages you to reflect on the contribution of the media to collective and individual memories of war and social conflict. Media representations of both historic and recent events, social movements and popular struggles play a significant part in the way these events are subsequently remembered and commemorated. Media portrayals are also significant in terms of the psychological effects of upheaval and social change, both on an individual and collective level.

The module will equip you with the skills to understand the relationship between symbolic, mediated aspects of violence and conflict and the 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 struggle in a variety of media materials including newspapers, feature and documentary film, archive newsreels, photographs and digital sources. The module also highlights the importance of oral history and autobiography in recollecting the past, particularly from the perspective of oppressed and marginalised groups.

Following the introduction to theoretical approaches to memory, the module will explore the importance of memory in relation to case-studies of key events and experiences of the past the past century, including the First World War, the Holocaust, decolonization and the contemporary Middle East, Civil Rights in the US, and the North of Ireland. Throughout the module, the relationship between memory and the categories of race, gender, sexuality and class will be a central theme. You’ll be encouraged to reflect on your own identity and experience in relation to these aspects of memory and commemorative practice.

This is a module about how we live with and experience media screens and screen-based media. We look to make the familiar strange by juxtaposing screen interfaces, practices and venues from different historical periods and by thinking through a range of ideas about spectatorship across the disciplines of media, film and visual culture. We will examine how the media institutions and technologies that deliver and display screen-based moving image forms, produce the environments we inhabit and organise our visual and auditory senses, whilst considering how we negotiate these spaces and conditions. We will think about the orientation of our bodies towards screens, which are both physical, material objects and surfaces on which impermanent images flow: the different possibilities involved in sitting still or walking, being with others or alone, touching or being `touched' by, holding a screen in our hands or reaching out towards one on the horizon. Media screens and screen based media construct publics and make public space. Screen media spectatorship implicates us in ethical dilemmas as we bear witness to the distant suffering of others and acquires uncanny resonance as the dead are brought back life.

This module aims to equip you to think critically about how we see moving images as well as what we see. It encourages you to make connections between theories and concepts from a range of disciplinary perspectives and in your assessed work apply these to specific examples of media screens and/or screen-based media that you have chosen.

Television has been, since its establishment in the mid-20^th century, the medium defined by the narrative of 'transformation', 'expansion' or 'transition'.  From the analogue ‘age of scarcity’ characterised by a limited number of national channels, television has grown, firstly into a commercial multichannel ecology, only to further expand into a multiplatform, digital environment characterised by post-broadcast network transmission. 

This module focuses on contemporary debates of television's technological transformation, economic expansion, changing social practices and cultural texts critically and historically. The module asks how critical political economy approach can be helpful to understand technological expansion of the spectrum and platforms and diminishing costs of entry are framed by the stronghold of the established political and economic patterns. We’ll explore the promise of television as a 'global' medium as not yet fulfilled, despite reconfigurations of its economic landscape by transnational trade of programme content, such as TV formats.

This module will further historically contextualise debates about television as a social practice, looking at the medium as a way of 'structuring' our time (from watching live events to bingeing on streaming service content), and reconfiguring our space (from living rooms to our bedrooms and multiple screens). It will look at its changing and proliferation of promotional practices and how they shape what we watch. It will invite us to think of television as a legacy medium influencing and feeding social media platforms. It will, importantly, address issues of diversity of representation and television as a key site where politics of race, gender and sexuality are addressed.

This module explores the changing world of advertising and examines its growing prominence in the media and in wider society. It begins by investigating the origins of advertising in consumer capitalism and by developing an understanding of the main theoretical approaches to: advertising as a persuasive industry; as a set of socio-economic practices; and as media texts and cultural objects. The module looks at the fundamental role that advertising plays in financing media and in shaping media and cultural production. We also examine the centrality of celebrity in the growth of advertising and promotional content and the way that celebrity-centred business models, which anchor aesthetic values to marketing concerns, are now widespread throughout media and society.

The second half of the module examines new developments in advertising with the rise of the internet and the growth of digital media, including: new models of online advertising based on algorithms and big data; the growth of celebrity and micro-celebrity as a promotional tools, as a way of engaging consumers emotions in our age of ad blocking; the challenges of advertising regulation online; and the blurring of lines between creative content and promotional content, news/factual content and sponsored content, and the rise of native advertising. The module also examines the recent and ongoing convergence in the advertising and promotional industries, the growth of huge multinationals that now dominate and asks you to consider the consequences of the concentration of economic power in an increasingly monopolistic industry, and its growing control over content creation. This module asks you to critically examine the impact of the growth and power of advertising for our media, culture and society.

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.

Later in your second year, you'll choose one practice area which you want to study as your Media Production Specialisation. You must choose one of the practice options you have already studied in the Spring/Summer term of your first year and the Autumn term of your second Year.

Practice areas you can specialise in include: Animation, Creative Writing, Illustration, Interactive Media, Journalism, Photography, Radio, Digital Video For Web, Documentary, Screen Fiction, Media Campaigning and Social Activism.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

From #BlackLivesMatter to the ‘refugee crisis’, from the ‘war on terror’ to school shootings in the US, the framing of and responses to urgent political and cultural debates often rely on the mediation of violence. Violence is mediated as something palpable, recognizable, physical, spectacular, and something that evokes strong emotions. Increasingly, violence is also often mediated as distant, routine, and normalized, sparking fears of ‘viewer’ desensitization and fatigue. This module draws on interdisciplinary feminist, queer, and decolonial theory to unpack and interrogate violence and its mediation. It asks – What is violence and how is it represented and mediated? How is violence theorized and understood? What forms and shapes does violence take? What are the material and affective economies of violence? How does gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, and (dis)ability intersect with violence? How do social justice struggles and activisms relate to violence? By foregrounding critical feminist, queer, decolonial perspectives in cultural, social, media, and political theory, this module illuminates the intersectionalities and assemblages of power that ‘make’ and mediate violence and the racial-gendered-sexual grammars that connect the seemingly disparate locations of (everyday) violence. In the first weeks of the module, we visit key debates in the feminist, queer, decolonial theorizations of violence and its mediation. In the following weeks, we examine the mediation of violence through several ‘sites’ and ‘processes’ (such as bodies, borders, migrations, nations, nationalisms, empires, capitalism, war, torture, death, debility, trauma) using feminist, queer, decolonial theory and examples/case studies from popular media.

In this module, you'll explore how musical meanings are conveyed and understood and how this is mediated through the cultures and technologies of production and consumption. By considering questions from 'What is the value of music?' to 'How can music reinforce social hierarchies?', we'll consider how music communicates mood and meaning, not only through associated imagery and the lyrical content of songs, but as sound itself. We'll think about the processes that link production, circulation and consumption, as well as explore the ways that music connects with individual and collective identities.

We'll consider some of the following questions to research, analyse and understand the complexities 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 effects does this has?
• How do we analyse and talk about musical sound when this is often considered as having little to do with representation?

You'll be 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.

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

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

Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and imperial to digital and global. Among the political movements that have been most important in the period since the invention of the movies are (neo)liberalism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, feminism and anti-colonial struggles. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts, from the early days of cinema to contemporary handheld and immersive media. This module investigates the politics of these forms and technologies as attempts at controlling the dispositions of minds and bodies and as struggles for their emancipation. It will address a broad range of topics from the power of sounds, images and visual apparatuses in the 20^th and 21^st centuries to the relationship of politics and aesthetics, the problem of democracy, and ideology critique.

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 Marxism, populism, nationalism, feminism, anti-colonial struggles and environmentalism. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts.

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. 

Race has shaped many aspects of media technologies – from representations of social groups in entertainment to outsourcing in media production. Media provide images and narratives that help us understand ourselves and others. They also provide platforms for us to live and work.

Yet, these cultural representations and production infrastructures are patterned by racialised categorisation and commodification. This module goes beyond discussions of racial stereotypes in media representations to explore how the technologisation of race patterns in media forms and systems. Featuring readings that theorise aesthetic and infrastructural relationalities between blackness, whiteness, and Asianness, this module combines weekly lectures and seminar discussions with a few on-demand film screenings.

Building on each other, the weekly topics progress as follows:

• Relationality examines representations of race as aesthetic 'forms' within relational frameworks that connect technological imaginaries and infrastructures.
• Circulation discusses how racial stratification patterns the circulation of value in networked publics and media production.
• Contexts explores regional case studies.

This module will examine how histories of Western imperialism have shaped the landscapes of the present. Our task is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to the longer histories of empire.

In addition to introducing key concepts from critical race and postcolonial studies, lectures will also offer phenomenological interpretations of how race structures the present often by receding into the background, as well as drawing on theories of affect and emotion to explore how security regimes become racial regimes.

Our concern is with how histories of empire ‘get under the skin,’ and set reading include works that reflect on the experience of being or becoming strangers, or ‘bodies out of place.’ We attend to the intersection between race, gender and sexuality throughout.

The module explores the consequences of social and mobile media in a comparative context. What does it mean to live entangled with social and mobile media? What are the consequences of the culture of `always on' connectivity for our identities, relationships and communities? What are the implications for inequality? Are there any opportunities for protest movements or for coping during emergencies? These questions have never been as urgent as they are today. During the pandemic we have collectively experienced a huge dependency on social and mobile media as our professional and social lives migrated online. The module offers an opportunity to critically unpack some of the assumptions made about media technologies, starting by unravelling the very notion of social media.

The module pivots on the double logic of social media: while social media enable socialities and intimacies at a distance, they are also key instruments of extraction and surveillance. This tension between agency and corporate or state control through datafication is a theme that runs across all lectures. The module takes a distinctly non-western approach focusing on the experience of social media in the context of everyday life. The key texts informing our seminar discussions are ethnographies from the global south. Through this comparative approach we aim to question widely held assumptions about social media as well notions of intimacy, care, labour, protest and inequalities.

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

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

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

Much of the material for this module is highly contemporary, and you’ll be encouraged to maintain an awareness of current developments in political communication in the UK and elsewhere.

In this module, you'll 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. You'll examine 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.

You'll explore concepts and ideas developed by cultural geographers, social and cultural theorists, feminists, post-colonialist scholars, artists, writers and filmmakers about the growth of urbanism, about the sensations and subjective states of intensity which city life generates.

We'll adopt a historical approach charting the rise of urban modernity, the development of shopping and the department store, and we'll consider the city as the space for crime, prostitution and gang culture. We'll examine processes of migration to the city, and the way in which power relations in the city result in boundaries, barrios, ghettos, enclaves and fortresses.

We'll 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'll take an afternoon field trip later in the term to look at the old and the ‘new’ Kings Cross.

In this module, you'll unpack the phenomenon of celebrity by looking at the main academic approaches to the study of celebrity culture. We'll look at both contemporary and historical celebrity culture to examine how celebrity is the outcome of specific, historically situated social, cultural and economic processes. We'll examine the production of celebrity and the role of race, class and gender in celebrity culture. We'll ask, what is celebrity? To what extent is it the end result of the commodification of the individual, a pedagogic tool for new ways of living or new forms of consumption, an elaborate marketing tool, or a complex cultural symbol?

We'll also ask questions about the social function of celebrity – is it a system of power, an ideological tool in propping up the myth of meritocracy, or an industry of desire? What can contemporary celebrity culture tell us about the times we are living through? We'll examine these questions through a series of case studies ranging from analysing the celebrity image from the cinematic ‘close-up’ to the celebrity ‘selfie’, examining differing forms of fame from the icon to the rise of the influencer, and assessing different perspectives on celebrities’ symbolic values from ordinary people in celebrity culture to celebrity activism.

More and more, we're interacting with media which is not fixed and linear – as film and television are – but rather rule-governed, digitally-simulated virtual environments that we move through interactively and immersively, whether it be in games, multiscreen installations, or in VR/AR. This module asks what kinds of interesting and emergent experiences these new technological interfaces and spaces yield, and what kind of social, cultural, ethical, ecological, and economic purposes they can be turned to.

The first part of the module is dedicated to the concepts and discourses of virtual and immersive media incorporating genealogical, philosophical and critical approaches, whilst the second half of the module turns towards production and form, in terms of gaming, creative expression, and the shared cultural and economic imaginaries that determine what kind of virtual content is currently produced (including porn, dance, spiritual and psychedelic experiences, and ethical experience).

We'll include an optional, extracurricular public gallery/installation visit to experience an immersive media/art experience (contingent on an appropriate event being available and affordable). This visit will influence a group presentation (formative) on a similar immersive or virtual experience, or a text, artwork, or image that reflects on these themes.