BA (Hons) Media & Communications

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.

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, we introduce aesthetic concerns to the study of media, raising questions about cultural appreciation, value and taste, but also about social and political issues concerning art. You will learn 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 cheap 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 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.

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 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.

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’.

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

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 offer phenomenological interpretations of how race structures the present often by receding into the background, as well as drawing on theories of affect and emotion to explore how security regimes become racial regimes.

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

This module draws on critical perspectives from media and cultural studies, sociology, urban studies and gender studies to examine the 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 Almodóvar, 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 imperial to digital and global. Among the political movements that have been most important in the period since the invention of the movies are (neo)liberalism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, feminism and anti-colonial struggles. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts, from the early days of cinema to contemporary handheld and immersive media.

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

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.

Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary perspectives (including cultural studiesand anthropology) this module will address the role of ‘tele’-technologies (technologies of distance - such as the telegraph, telephone, and television) in constructing the post-modern geography of the contemporary era, The module takes a non ‘media-centric’ perspective, focusing on the different
historical and cultural contexts within which these technologies operate and on the articulation of material and virtual geographies We begin by focusing on the ‘moral panics’ that have always accompanied each new medium - from the radio, to the cinema, etc. The module highlights the role of what we have come to know as ‘television’ - as the most important medium of the last half century, with a particular focus on its contexts and modes of consumption. The question of technological change will be approached from a historical perspective, for instance, in relation
to the late 19th century – as a period featuring a particularly rapid rate of technological change, compared with our own times. We shall review a range of micro-studies of the household (and public) uses of communications and information technologies, and the module will offer a critical approach to the futurological discourses concerning the supposed powers and effects of today’s ‘new’ communications technologies. We conclude by examining the role of various media (big and small) in processes of identity/boundary construction (at different geographical scales) within the broader context of processes of globalisation. We will also address the role of the media in articulating the private and public spheres, in the construction of national,
disaporic and transnational identities, and in relation to the various mobilities (not only of information, but also of people and commodities) that characterise our era of ‘time-space compression’.