BA (Hons) Media & English

This module introduces students to essential concepts in modern literary study and contemporary critical debates through a detailed engagement with literary texts, theoretical texts and literary criticism. Students will develop critical reading skills, gain a vocabulary for discussing and analysing literary works, and build up their academic writing and research skills.

The module focuses on two novels, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. It examines them through a range of critical perspectives that allow us to consider narrative as a form and explore its functions in relation to history, culture and society.

Over the past 120 years, moving images have developed into a major aesthetic and social force of our times. Our realities both past and present are consumed by audiovisual mediations. 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 is their language? How do they affect us as human beings with a body, a psyche and social awareness? What does it means 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 into the theorising 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. Specific questions pursued range from the realism of cinema to the expressionistic powers of montage, from cinema's primal qualities as an immersive embodied experience to narrative, story-telling forms, as well as from the classic nature of film spectatorship to the novel forms of engagement emerging today with 3D, VR and AR.

How do 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 looks into various approaches to these questions focusing on two main themes: control and resistance. 

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.

This module introduces a wide range of works covering the major literary genres and embodying significant interventions or influences in the history of literature. The emphasis is on reading primary texts and discovering (or rediscovering) writers and cultures so that you will be able to make informed choices among more specialised modules later in your degree. 

You'll explore the various forms of narrative fiction in media – screenplays for film and tv, plays for radio and short stories – and develop an original idea into one of these forms. You also start to develop script and prose editorial development skills in a peer workshop setting.

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 will 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. The approach to psychology we will take throughout the module is deeply historical, examining the place of psychology in systems of governance and regulation, and how we might think about our own self-formation in light of this perspective. The module will explore arguments that suggest psychology is a science of population management, rather than a science of the self or the individual. One particular issue we will examine is the emergence of ‘the individual’ as an object and target of a process that philosopher Michel Foucault called Governmentality.  

This issue will be explored by interrogating the relationships between psychology, media and popular culture, and systems of government and regulation. During the module, we will identify events where psychological ideas, norms and concepts are produced, and to think about the possibilities and problems with such forms of psychologisation.

We will begin by considering the rise of ‘therapeutic cultures’ and their role in the production of particular norms of personhood; specifically the ‘fiction of autonomous selfhood’. The student will then be introduced to some of the key concepts which will be used throughout the module to further interrogate the performative basis of psychological knowledge and its circulation within media cultures. These concepts will include; discourse, Governmentality, genealogy, subjectivity, subjectification, power, fantasy and desire.  We will explore how Foucault’s power/knowledge coupling produces a perspective on power relations that challenges more traditional notions of ‘sovereign’ power, centred on the polity or the State.

The module will encourage students to interrogate their own self-formation and autobiographies 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 both Foucauldian and psychoanalytic approaches to subjectivity and illustrate their application by exploring certain themes and issues which will include: makeover culture, body-language (specifically facial expression), the emotions, mass psychology, makeover culture, televisual affect, positive psychology and the science of happiness, and historical aspects of the ‘media effects’ debates. We will 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 magazines, film, television, etc.

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 students 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 conflicts, 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 psychological affect and emotional responses to violence upheaval and social change.

The module will equip students 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 students 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.

Following the theoretical introduction in Week One, the module will explore the importance of memory in relation to some key experiences and events over the past century. We will then shift to a more thematic discussion of how memory affects experiences according to race, gender, sexuality and class. However, throughout the module the impact of these categories upon memory will remain an important element of our work.

Television has undergone crucial transformations since its establishment in the mid-20^th century. From the analogue ‘age of scarcity’ characterised by a limited number of national channels, television has grown into a commercial multichannel ecology and further expanded into a multiplatform, digital environment characterised by post-broadcast network transmission. But while rapid expansion of the spectrum and diminishing costs of entry have contributed to how the medium and its future development is perceived, the established political and economic patterns continue to have their stronghold. The increased transnational trade contributed to a reconfiguration of the economic landscape of television and while promising a more global medium, they have hardly redefined its inherently national character. This module will focus on contemporary debates about television as a cultural form, critically examining its continuities and changes of its economic and political context. While the module will rely on mainly British and US examples, it welcomes examples and comparisons with other national contexts.

This module provides 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 of modernity, the family and sexuality, and the changing world of work. In effect we track significant transformations of society from the domestic sphere to the field of employment. Processes of individualisation have undermined the social welfare framework which was a hallmark of the post-war period. While some sociologists including Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens claim that this disembedding of individuals away from communities and from long-term attachments and commitments based on family and work-based identities are actually 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’, others including Bauman, Rose and Foucault argue that individualisation is a process which shifts social and economic responsibility from the state to the individual. In addition to this we could suggest that in times of Euro-crisis and austerity we are moving to a post-welfare era, which will to some extent upset or de-stabilise the thesis of Giddens and Beck. In a sense has the individualised society become fully neo-liberalised? People are now expected to be self-reliant , they must self-manage, and indeed the new role of ‘Governmentality’ is to encourage this ethos by means of self-help books, guidance manuals, ‘personal advisors’ and so on.

The module examines these processes and discusses their consequences, what kind of ‘subjects’ are we now becoming? How does the ethos of individualisation operate in the context of globalisation? What are the types of production processes underpinning the more individualised society? What is meant by post-Fordism? What are the consequences of individualisation for men and women, for young people, for ethnic minorities? Who are the winners and the losers of the ‘network society’? What exactly is meant by ‘neo-liberalism’ and how has this credo had an impact in social and political life? In the first few sessions we paint a wider picture considering life, love, intimacy and family life in the individualised society, we then move towards a more close-up focus on the new workplace, looking for example at the rise of new forms of self-employment in the creative economy, and at the rise of the ‘crafting’ movement. Overall we are reflecting on the ‘future of work’ in an individualised society.

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a basic knowledge of the thought of some of most prominent social theorists (Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel) and to explore how these works have influenced our understandings of the media, modernity and power. It should be evident that whilst media theorists have their own particular focal concerns, in many cases they are responding to problems posed within this classic tradition. 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 course thus provides a theoretical map on which to locate some of the key issues confronted in media, communication and cultural studies.

The course will be divided into two different parts. In the first half we will explore the different contributions made by Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel to our understanding of modernity. In the second half of the course, we confront a more contemporary version of social theory that critically challenges some of the foundations of Western modern thought by looking at postmodernism, race and ethnicity, gender, and globalisation.

In order to emphasise the link between social theory and media studies, sessions will address specific cultural or media-related phenomena connected to the sociological topic under discussion. We will, for example, investigate a range of issues including ‘McDonaldisation’, branding, reality television, celebrity and spectacle.

You'll complete a second, longer project. You may choose to write in the same form as your first project or try something new.

This module examines the actors and communication processes involved in contemporary political communication. It combines theoretical insights and empirical information 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 standard political communication topics and contemporary examples, with discussions of related theory and concepts. The following topics are covered: The crisis of politics and media in established democracies; mass media and the news production process; political parties, citizen relations and political marketing; the production of news and the future for traditional print and broadcast news media; media effects and influences, and citizen engagement and participation; historical and cultural elements of political communication, and digital politics and communication. In addition, key case study areas will be explored, including: the 2015 UK Election and EU Referendum; the economics of austerity and financialisation; media management and mediatisation of politics; and health and welfare policy.

Theories and concepts drawn upon include: Theories of democracy (from weak, representative to direct, deliberative); public sphere theory (national, parliamentary, local, global, online, and counter); Political economy and related critiques of capitalist democracy; Work, organisation, professionalization and bureaucracy; mediatisation, popular culture and politics; Primary definition, media consecration, and celebrity; New technologies, technological determinism and social shaping.

Much of the material for this module is highly contemporary, so students are encouraged to maintain an awareness of current developments in political communication in the UK and elsewhere, through newspapers, television, radio and the internet. Students are very much encouraged to bring contemporary examples into the seminar discussions and their essays.

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’.

Your final year Creative Writing project will be more narratively complex and your editorial development skills will need to demonstrate understanding of how to work with fiction writing (and writers) from the production side (film, tv, radio, publishing).