BA (Hons) Media & Sociology

Cultural studies assumes that history - its shape, its seams, its outcomes - is never guaranteed. As a result, doing cultural studies takes work, including the kind of work deciding what cultural studies is, of making cultural studies over again and again. Cultural studies constructs itself as it faces new questions and takes up new positions. In that sense, doing cultural studies is always risky and never totally comfortable. It is fraught with inescapable tensions (as well as with real pleasures). (Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Routledge, 1992: 18)

If we want to trace the ‘history’ of cultural studies in the UK, we have to go back to adult education classes in the 1950s and ‘60s, where students and their tutors embarked on the challenging task of questioning what constituted culture, social distinction, nationhood and other forms of identity. Cultural studies began to put a spotlight on everyday cultural practices which had hitherto been regarded as inferior or which contradicted established notions of what constituted culture itself. In so doing, cultural studies research has uncovered the richness of daily life for sections of society whose lives had not been deemed worthy of study or who had been dismissed as ‘uncultured’. Since this period, the field of cultural studies has shown how apparently self-evident concepts and beliefs have strong ideological underpinnings dependent on the wielding of social, economic and political power. In this sense, cultural studies is a political project which is not only interested in presenting alternative definitions of culture but also in investigating the power structures which shape them. Cultural studies provides us with the opportunity to interrogate notions of national identity, such as ‘Britishness’; to explore attitudes and practices which perpetuate social inequality and to understand how key markers of identity such as gender, race, class and sexuality are cultural formations with complex and continually shifting histories.

Cultural studies is now widely taught, not only in the UK but also in the US, Australia, and many other countries. Due to its immense variety and liveliness, it has been described somewhat humorously by Colin Sparks as a ‘rag-bag of ideas, methods and concerns’ (Storey, 1996: 14) it is nevertheless united by two main concerns:

1. The study of culture perceived as a ‘whole way of life’;
2. The examination of the political, economic and social structures which shape culture (but which are at the same time part of this culture)

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 will 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 a number of cultural products and practices – soap operas, shopping, music and city life.

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 offers a broad introduction to the relationship between the disciplines of Media and Sociology, through a particular focus on the mediation of social life. Specifically, it asks you to consider a variety of answers to the question 'What is the social?' and shows how media, communication and mediation are central to each of them.

It offers the opportunity to develop your practical skills alongside your writing skills by combining readings of classic and contemporary texts with workshops (every other week) that involve you conducting original research and developing practical and/or creative ways of responding to social and media issues.

Likely topics to be covered include: the social as community; the social as network; the social as the commercial; the social as national; the social as the global; the social as 'forms of association', and more. These models of the social will be 'thought with' models of communication and mediation, including, for example, the particular modes of communication invited or instigated by social media platforms, broadcast news, face to face encounters, meetings with others in public space, collective forms of political action, and so on.

By discussing and investigating these different approaches to 'the social', you will also be introduced to a range of theorists, debates and methods, encouraging trans-disciplinary thinking. You will come to understand the complex relationships between theories of social life and modes and practices of communication, in both classic and contemporary social theory and research.

This module aims to introduce you to the ‘sociological imagination’. What is distinctive about Sociology? With a focus on knowledge and power, the module looks at how Sociology has developed, with an emphasis on the study of relations between individuals and groups in modern industrial societies.

This module will:
•introduce students to key sociological approaches to social divisions and differences
•foster students’ knowledge and understanding of the development of sociological thinking through the study of classical and contemporary accounts of social power, identity and inequality
enable students to analyse and contrast differing approaches to the study of core sociological topics, including class, gender, race, religion and nation

This module is lecture and workshop based and aims to introduce students to the methods that sociologists have developed to analyse their societies and to produce sociological knowledge. You will also develop core skills in methods of research by being introduced to the practice of sociological research. Methods are introduced in relation to key sociological topics and research traditions that are closely identified with them, thus allowing students to confront methods as real practices rather than abstractions. The aim is as far as possible to build on the concepts and the issues that are being discussed in other first-year modules.

Much attention is focused on today’s technologies, programmes, websites, innovations and media uses. Although this is understandable, it contributes to a neglect of other issues that are essential in understanding contemporary media dynamics – in particular the historical evolution of the media and the political frameworks and consequences that accompanied this evolution. This module provides you with ways of thinking about media history and media politics and is designed to contextualise more contemporary debates about media industries, practices and texts. While the module focuses largely on the UK media system, you are encouraged to reflect on the relevance of these models to international media systems with which you may be more familiar.

This module aims to develop the introduction to sociological theory that you received in the first year, whilst also preparing you to engage with critiques and the most current developments in the third year. It will help you to develop your understanding of sociological analysis through considering its origins in the classical tradition as well as discussing contemporary issues.

In the first half of the module, we explore five key thinkers and their central concerns as a way of exploring distinct approaches to social analysis. In the second half of the module, we explore five key concepts as a way of thinking through how social theory is put to work as a tool to understand and illuminate the social world.

Throughout these lectures we will explore different assumptions about the nature of social order and different approaches to practice. Throughout the module, we examine the way in which different kinds of sociological explanation are grounded in different assumptions about the way the social world works.

On completing this module, you should have a good understanding of the theoretical positions that form the point of departure of current debates in social theory and in sociological research. You will have practiced thinking in different ways and will be able to make more informed choices about the tools and concepts you use to think about the central issues in sociological analysis.

All sociologists have had to deal with some conflict between the idea of sociological knowledge as scientific, guided by reason, and human subjectivity, which gives us differing conceptions of what is real or true. This module looks at some problems in finding out about the social world, dealing with values, and interpreting social reality or realities. 

The module begins by discussing theories of culture that have been advanced in sociology and social/cultural anthropology. Then we move on to look at the intellectual roots of the sociology of culture before turning to the special contributions of cultural studies. Jeffrey Alexander’s ground-breaking work in cultural sociology comes up next; we give consideration to how cultural sociology differs from more established approaches in the sociology of culture and in cultural studies, while itself being informed by these and by social/cultural anthropology. We then turn to discourse – language in use – and consider its roots in linguistics and in literary studies; we next explore discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis. Narrative is a special type of discourse and we examine how it has been used in social research. Network/information society is the background against which any contemporary social science must operate, and we discuss some of the key ideas that have been advanced in the wake of Castells’ path breaking work. We then turn our attention to the cultural practices of gamers, hackers and ‘prosumers’. The final substantive session situates the preceding lectures in the context of globalisation.

You will be introduced to various areas of media practice divided into three areas of interest:

• Words
• Moving image
• Still image

Through technical workshops, discussions and tutorials you will explore learn how to construct and write a non-fiction ‘story’ containing visual elements. The course will end with a website workshop to help you build a website that integrates all the media elements used in the project.

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.

With migration frequently presented as a situation of ‘crisis’, this module considers broader contexts and longer histories of migration to and within Europe, and will consider the academic field migration as an inter-disciplinary field of study.

Exploring contemporary literature from writers and theorists working in a European context, the module will present students with starting points from which to consider migration using core sociological concepts, particularly of place, ‘race’ and power.

The module will follow a migration pathway, with focus points considered through lenses of leaving, moving, arriving and staying:

• Leaving - We will examine those legal frameworks and international agreements relevant to migration, and will explore the uneasy distinction between so-called forced migration and economic migration.
• Moving - We will consider borders and immigration controls, border theories, and the differentiated legal statutes of migrating people as linked to colonial and postcolonial relationships.
• Arriving - We will reflect on notions of displacement, exile, integration strategies and policies, representations of migrants and racism, and examples of activism with and by migrants. Staying – We will look at migration and cities, and focus on experiences of young migrants in particular.

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

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’.

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.