Overview
You'll take introductory-level theoretical modules in media/communications and literature in your first year, and will take a creative writing module in which you 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.
The second-year develops your understanding of approaches to studying communications and the media and gives you the opportunity to follow your interests in English. You'll also complete a second, longer project in creative writing.
In the third year, you're free to choose from a range of options, according to your interests. You'll also complete a final creative writing project, in which you'll demonstrate an understanding of how to work with fiction writing (and writers) from the production side (film, tv, radio, publishing).
Year 1 (credit level 4)
In your first year you take the following compulsory modules:
Module title |
Credits |
Approaches to Text
Approaches to Text
30 credits
This module will introduce you to essential concepts in modern literary study, enabling you to become a more observant, perceptive and analytical reader and critic in your own right. You'll explore the history and nature of literary studies, and contemporary critical debates.
You'll learn a vocabulary in which to discuss literary language, ideas of literary convention and genre, poetic rhythm and form, and the nature of narrative voice and narrative structures. You'll be introduced to debates about the relation of texts on the page to texts in performance, and to wider questions about the interpretation of texts. A series of lectures and activity-based seminars, Practical Academic Skills and Strategies (PASS), will ask you to reflect on, and to put into practice a range of academic strategies to enable you to acquire a set of reading, writing and research skills that will support you throughout your studies.
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30 credits |
Film and the Audiovisual: Theory and Analysis
Film and the Audiovisual: Theory and Analysis
15 credits
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).
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15 credits |
Key Debates in Media Studies
Key Debates in Media Studies
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Explorations in Literature
Explorations in Literature
30 credits
This module will introduce you to a wide range of works from the literary canon, from ancient Greek texts in translation to the contemporary, covering the major genres, and embodying significant interventions or influences in literary history.
You'll focus on reading primary texts voraciously and discovering - or rediscovering - diverse writers and cultures so that you can make informed choices from more specialized modules later in your degree. Not being limited to a period, genre or single approach, this module cultivates difference and chronological sweep; it aims to challenge and surprise, as rewarding ‘exploration’ should.
Lectures and seminars sustain the thematic continuity of the module by encouraging you to consider contrasts and dialogues between texts. Cohesion is also supplied by the fact that many of the texts articulate literal and metaphorical ‘explorations’, quests and searches.
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30 credits |
In addition to:
Module title |
Credits |
Creative Writing (Script and Short Story) Introduction
Creative Writing (Script and Short Story) Introduction
30 credits
This module gives you an opportunity to write an original 8-10 minute film, TV drama or radio play, or an 8-10 page (2,000-3,000 word) prose story. You'll follow the development path most common in the media industries, starting with ideas and progressing through outlining to the rough draft and rewrite.
The module is structured around an exploration of the key elements of classical narrative:
- story
- character
- 3-act structure
- plot
- theme
- style - in prose, screenplay and radio play forms.
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30 credits |
Year 2 (credit level 5)
Media and Communications
You'll take media theory options that cover the internationalisation of cultural and media studies, the psychology of communications or theories of political economy in the cultural industries.
You select 30 credits Media option modules. The list changes annually and recent examples have included:
Module title |
Credits |
Psychology, Subjectivity and Power
Psychology, Subjectivity and Power
15 credits
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.’
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15 credits |
Money, Society, and Culture
Money, Society, and Culture
30 credits or 15 credits
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.
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30 credits or 15 credits |
Media, Memory and Conflict
Media, Memory and Conflict
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Television and After
Television and After
15 credits
Television has been, since its establishment in the mid-20th 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.
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15 credits |
Culture, Society and the Individual
Culture, Society and the Individual
15 credits
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?
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15 credits |
Moving Image Spectatorship
Moving Image Spectatorship
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Media, Modernity and Social Thought
Media, Modernity and Social Thought
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
The Goldsmiths Elective
The Goldsmiths Elective
15 credits
Our academic departments are developing exciting elective ideas to allow you to broaden your education, either to develop vocationally orientated experiences or to learn more about contemporary society, culture and politics. You’ll be able to choose safe in the knowledge that these modules have been designed for non-subject specialists and to bring students from different disciplines together. For example, you may want to take introductions to areas such as Law, Education, the digital industries, the creative industries,think like a designer or understand the history and politics behind our current affairs.
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15 credits |
Goldsmiths’ Social Change Module
Goldsmiths’ Social Change Module
15 credits
Lots of students join Goldsmiths because they want to make a difference in society, to bring about positive change and develop skills and experiences which will allow them to access exciting careers. Goldsmiths’ Social Change module will allow you to do work on group projects with students from other departments to bring about change. You’ll be introduced to the UN’s Sustainable Development goals and core project management theories and practices allow you to work across a number of weeks towards a final Festival of Ideas where you’ll report work back to the academic and local community.
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15 credits |
You'll also take the following compulsory module:
Module title |
Credits |
Creative Writing (Script and Short Story) Intermediate
Creative Writing (Script and Short Story) Intermediate
30 credits
In this module, we'll cover bot hthe writing and preparatory stages of scrit and short story writing.
In the writing stage, you'll focus on experimentation with narrative, form and length (up to 16minutes script/ 5000 words prose). This may mean working in an untried form, or it may mean working in a tried form using different approaches. The seminar-style lecture sessions will focus on advancing technical skills, especially characterisation, structure, sub-plots, research and genre issues.
In the preparatory stage, you'll develop a 'step outline' and will be encouraged to take your projects through as many drafts as possible. The emphasis of the editorial development side is honing the vocabulary of constructive editorial input in readers' reports.
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30 credits |
In addition to:
English and Creative Writing (chosen from an approved list) Level 5
You take modules to the value of 60 credits from an approved list of module units available annually from the Department of English and Creative Writing. You can also choose to use part of your 60 credit module allowance on Connected Curriculum modules The Goldsmiths' Social Change module and The Goldsmiths Elective.
You can follow your interests and choose three modules from a wide range offering diverse literary, historical and contextual scope.
Year 3 (credit level 6)
Media and Communications (chosen from an approved list)
Examples of previous Media options include:
Module title |
Credits |
Structure of Contemporary Political Communications
Structure of Contemporary Political Communications
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Race, Empire and Nation
Race, Empire and Nation
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
The City and Consumer Culture
The City and Consumer Culture
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Music as Communication and Creative Practice
Music as Communication and Creative Practice
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Embodiment and Experience
Embodiment and Experience
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Strategies of World Cinema
Strategies of World Cinema
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Media Law and Ethics
Media Law and Ethics
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Media, Ritual and Contemporary Public Cultures
Media, Ritual and Contemporary Public Cultures
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Promotional Culture
Promotional Culture
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Politics of the Audiovisual
Politics of the Audiovisual
15 credits
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.
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.
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15 credits |
Social Media in Everyday Life: A global perspective
Social Media in Everyday Life: A global perspective
30 credits
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.
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30 credits |
Media Geographies
Media Geographies
15 credits
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’.
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15 credits |
You also take the following compulsory module:
Module title |
Credits |
Creative Writing (Script and Short Story) Final Project
Creative Writing (Script and Short Story) Final Project
30 credits
This module is split into two areas, editorial development and professional development.
For editorial development, you'll need to write workshop reports in preparation for each workshop session. You'll then edit this in the later stages.
For professional development, you'll examine the professional life of writers today. You'll explore visual, sound, moving image, online and other sources with a view to developing a portfolio of work suitable for presentation at the Degree Show. This may include blogs for the Golddust website, flash fiction or short dramas based in the world of story of the main project.
You'll then showcase your final project at the Degree Shows and submit your work to the Golddust website.
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30 credits |
In addition to:
English and Creative Writing (chosen from an approved list)
You take modules to the value of 60 credits from an approved list of third-year modules available annually from the Department of English and Creative Writing. This can include a 30-credit dissertation.
Teaching style
This programme is taught through scheduled learning - a mixture of lectures, seminars and workshops. You’ll also be expected to undertake a significant amount of independent study. This includes carrying out required and additional reading, preparing topics for discussion, and producing essays or project work.
The following information gives an indication of the typical proportions of learning and teaching for each year of this programme*:
- Year 1 - 17% scheduled learning, 83% independent learning
- Year 2 - 14% scheduled learning, 86% independent learning
- Year 3 - 14% scheduled learning, 85% independent learning, 1% placement learning
How you’ll be assessed
You’ll be assessed by a variety of methods, depending on your module choices. These include coursework assignments such as extended essays, reports, presentations, practice-based projects or essays/logs, group projects and reflective essays, as well as seen and unseen written examinations.
The following information gives an indication of how you can typically expect to be assessed on each year of this programme*:
- Year 1 - 75% coursework, 25% practical
- Year 2 - 100% coursework
- Year 3 - 100% coursework
*Please note that these are averages are based on enrolments for 2022/23. Each student’s time in teaching, learning and assessment activities will differ based on individual module choices. Find out more about how this information is calculated.
Credits and levels of learning
An undergraduate honours degree is made up of 360 credits – 120 at Level 4, 120 at Level 5 and 120 at Level 6. If you are a full-time student, you will usually take Level 4 modules in the first year, Level 5 in the second, and Level 6 modules in your final year. A standard module is worth 30 credits. Some programmes also contain 15-credit half modules or can be made up of higher-value parts, such as a dissertation or a Major Project.
Download the programme specification.
Please note that due to staff research commitments not all of these modules may be available every year.