BA (Hons) Media & Communications

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 though 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 course introduces different ways of understanding the relationship between media and society that will be useful for all three years of your degree.

One of the aspects of the political nature of cultural studies is the constant need for self-examination. 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’ (in Grossberg et al, 1992: 278). Put simply, cultural studies can be described as a ‘project in the making’ in which meaning, and identity are constantly in being renegotiated.

This module serves as an introduction to the study of culture and to the emergence of cultural studies. It starts with a general introduction to the idea of culture, and some of the problems associated with defining it. It also sketches the context within which cultural studies emerged from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham in the late 1960s.

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 be followed by some detailed analyses of a number of ideas associated with cultural studies - identity, hybridity, essentialism, resistance - and several cultural products and practices – social media, platforms, music and city life.

How does the media shape our outlook on life, and the way we think about our place in the world? What influence do the media have over us and how might we understand, access, or influence these networks of power? What governs the interactions between the media and citizens? Key Debates in Media Studies investigates various approaches to these questions focusing on two main themes: control and resistance.

In this module, we’ll focus on:

• Issues of media control, structure and policy, and the ways in which media are ‘framed’ for us by powerful interests.
• The ways in which people are active in relation to media: producing their own meanings, resisting dominant structures, and creating new types of content.

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 filmic fictions. 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 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 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.’

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 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 asks students to think about the ways in which our economic lives shape and are shaped by society and culture. How do social and cultural forces influence our understanding of wealth, poverty, and inequality? How is economic news reported, and why is it often difficult to understand? How might technological developments such as digital currencies or platform-based forms of exchange change our economic behaviour? How do financial advice columns shape our understanding of the ‘good life’?

This module explores the role of communication and culture in economic life through a range of theoretical approaches and case studies. It encourages students to think about the economy both as a mediated phenomenon – something that is represented in the news, in culture and in everyday life in a variety of ways – and as a set of mediating concepts and ideas (‘markets’, ‘value’, ‘worth’) that shape the way we understand the world.

This module encourages you to reflect on 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Why does music matter? What is its value? What makes music a distinctive form of communication? In what ways does music enhance people’s lives, and produce forms of individual and collective flourishing? Conversely, how can music reinforce social hierarchies? How does music link to questions of social power, notably in terms of class, ethnicity and gender, in relation to its production and consumption? How can music lead to individual and collective forms of flourishing?

This course explores how musical meanings are conveyed and understood and how this is mediated through the cultures and technologies of production and consumption. We will consider how music communicates mood and meaning, not only through associated imagery and the lyrical content of songs, but as sound itself. We will also think about the processes that link production, circulation and consumption, as well as explore the ways that music connects with individual and collective identities.

Underlying the option are a series of wider questions about how we might research, analyse and understand the complex of sounds, words and images that constitute contemporary popular and many other kinds of music. How and in what ways may we argue that music can express, influence and affect human actions and perceptions? How are beliefs, values and identities encoded and communicated as part of a collective experience or to individual listening subjects? How is what we listen to mediated by technologies and what affects does this has? How do we analyse and talk about musical sound when this often considered as having little to do with representation?

Such questions have received relatively little attention in media, communication and cultural studies, and many of these issues remain under-researched. Hence, you are encouraged to draw on your own personal experience of music in everyday life and to make use of this material in connection with some of the theoretical approaches under discussion during seminars (as well as others you will have come across in your reading and on other courses).
This option is more theoretically demanding than it might initially appear, as it entails thinking critically about a number of everyday musical and sonic experiences that are often taken for granted. It also requires you to both bring a range of critical ideas to your analysis of music and musicians as well as musical examples (on CD, phone, mp3 file etc) to play to your seminar group. You are encouraged to read widely for seminar discussion and when writing essays, and to make connections to a number of relevant and related theoretical debates outside of the immediate popular music literature.

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

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

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

The module investigates the nature of media law and ethical regulation for media practitioners primarily in the UK, but with some comparison with the situation in the USA and references to the experiences of media communicators in other countries. The students are directed towards an analysis of media law, as it exists, the ethical debates concerning what the law ought to be, and the historical development of legal and regulatory controls of communication. The theoretical underpinning involves a module of learning the subject of media jurisprudence- the study of the philosophy of media law, media ethicology (the study of the knowledge of ethics/morality in media communication), and media ethicism (the belief systems in the political context that influence journalistic conduct and content). The module evaluates media law and regulation in terms of its social and cultural context. It is taught in one and a half hour lectures and one-hour seminars that involve the discussion of multi-media examples of media communication considered legally and/or morally problematical. Media Law and Ethics is a dynamic subject with dramatic and significant changes and developments occurring from year to year addressing acute issues in journalism, current affairs and politics. As a result, the module content is substantially revised year after year in response to these developments.

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

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

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

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

This module looks at the rise of promotional culture (public relations, advertising, marketing and branding) and promotional intermediaries and their impact on society. The first part of the module will look at the history of promotional culture and will offer some conflicting theoretical approaches with which to view its development.

These include: professional/ industrial, economic, political economy, Post-Fordist, audience, consumer society, risk society, and postmodern perspectives. The second part will look at specific case areas of promotional culture. These are in: fashion and taste, technological commodities, popular culture (film TV, music), celebrities and public figures, political parties, and financial markets. In each of these areas questions will be asked about the influence of promotional practices on the production, communication and consumption of ideas and products as well as larger discourses, fashions/ genres and socio-economic trends.

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

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

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936.

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.

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.

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’.

The dissertation is an 8-10,000 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.