BA (Hons) Media & Sociology

Introduction to debates around the term ‘culture’, including questions of ‘high’ and ‘mass’ culture, and the development of British cultural studies. 

This module focuses on important debates concerning media power and mediated identity, and examines the different traditions and disciplines that have contributed to media analysis in this area. It looks at the roles played by ideology, politics and audiences in the making of meaning, and requires you to take a critical perspective in the analysis of specific media texts and media events. 

This module 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, this module looks at how sociology has developed, with an emphasis on the study of relations between individuals and groups in modern industrial societies.

In this module you will study the historical development of the British media, and their role in the development of modern Britain. You will focus on the way in which power is concentrated and organised around media ownership and production.

This module looks at central questions in Sociology about how to study of society. It focuses in particular on issues of agency and structure; holism and individualism; continuity and change; public and private; structure and self; laws, observation and interpretation.

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. 

This begins by focusing on how culture has been conceived in the major traditions of sociological thought and moves on to consider the significance of the development of mass communications research and cultural studies for a sociology of culture

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 examines the place of ‘experience’ in thinking about our self-formation. It extends the usefulness of the concept of subjectivity for exploring certain themes and issues. These might include: personality and the rise of celebrity culture, the psychologisation of everyday life, emotional branding and promotional culture, mental health and the media, make-over culture, and how to begin to understand the complex relationships between sexuality, class, race and gender in relation to the performative force of communication practices such as magazines, film and television.

This module asks you to think about the ways in which different forms of communication shape our experiences of the economy. How do the media influence our understanding of wealth, poverty, and inequality? How is economic news reported, and why is it often difficult to understand? How might phenomena such as digital currencies and online auctions change our economic behaviour? How do financial advice columns shape our understanding of the ‘good life’? You will explore the role of media and communication in economic life through a range of theoretical approaches and case studies. It encourages you to think about the economy as a mediated phenomenon – something that is represented in the news, in culture and in everyday life in a variety of ways – and as a set of concepts and ideas (‘markets’, ‘value’, ‘worth’) that shape the way we understand the world.

This module encourages you to reflect on how the media influences collective and individual memories of war and social conflict. Media representations of military conflicts, social movements and popular struggles play a significant part in the way these events are subsequently remembered and commemorated. Media interpretations are also significant in terms of psychological affect and emotional responses to violence and upheaval. The module will equip you with the skills to understand the relationship between symbolic, mediated aspects of violence and conflict and the underlying social, political and economic processes which may be lost in the process of remembering. The module will provide you with skills to analyse visual and textual representations of war and social conflict in a variety of media material including newspapers, feature and documentary film, archive newsreels and photographs and digital sources. You will explore a number of case studies including the First World War, decolonisation and empire, civil rights in the US, genocide and peacekeeping, class and industrial conflict, gender and feminist struggles, the ‘war on terror’.

This course gives students the opportunity to analyse the changing nature of television in the 21st Century. Television has undergone radical transformations in technique, aesthetics, cultural and political roles, from its beginnings as national broadcasting with limited channels to commercial multichannel use, and thence to multiplatform and post-broadcast networked transmission.

Rapidly expanding spectrum and diminishing costs of entry have transformed the medium, but older configurations – of citizenship and domestic viewing for example – remain central features. Similarly, global trade in programming adds to but has not destroyed the national characteristics of the medium. The course analyses the plurality of contemporary televisual media in the light of their cultural, economic, social and political histories and the historical specificity of the present conjuncture. The course will provide training in how to present complex ideas in public.

The first five weeks of the course will be offered in the Spring Term with the final four weeks offered in the Summer Term.

This module focuses on the formation of subjectivity in the context of huge social and political change and the growth of individualisation. In particular it examines the consequences of individualisation: what kind of ‘subjects’ are we now becoming? How does the ethos of individualisation operate in the context of globalisation? What does the term ‘precarious lives’ mean? What are the unequal consequences of individualisation for women, for young people, for ethnic minorities? Who are the winners and the losers of the ‘network society’? The module moves between sociology and cultural and media studies, providing plenty of opportunity to examine case studies in more depth and to engage with new research in these areas. 

This module looks at the dispersal of moving images and screen technologies in contemporary visual culture and considers what impact this has on our conceptions of spectatorship. The first section of the course provides a foundation in canonical theories of moving image spectatorship, from psychoanalytic and phenomenological constructions of the cinema spectator to historically grounded approaches to viewing conditions and cinema publics. In the second half, the course relates these theories of spectatorship to contemporary conditions for viewing moving images. Students will focus on current screen technologies for circulation and display of moving image, in conjunction with key sites, spaces and institutions in order to reflect on how new screen dynamics and conditions of encounter with the moving image are reshaping our understanding of spectatorship.

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 20th and 21st 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.

Many of the current cutting edge developments in social and mobile media take place in what is often referred to as the global south. Innovations such as mobile money (see for example platforms such as M-Pesa and G-Cash) and crowdsourcing platforms (such as Ushahidi) have emerged from countries such as the Philippines and Kenya where over 25 per cent of the country’s GNP flows through M-Pesa. With over 1.39 billion SMS sent daily the Philippines is commonly described as the texting capital of the world. But how can we understand the social consequences of social and mobile media (and the wider media environments they are part of)? Are new communication technologies opportunities for social change, as it is often claimed, or do they simply amplify existing inequalities?

This module takes an ethnographic, grounded approach to understanding the social uses and social consequences of social media in non-western contexts. Theoretically, the module brings together the interconnected literatures on globalization and social shaping of technology while we will also address contemporary debates on digital media, consumption, social change and power. Empirically, the module will draw on media ethnographies from China, Ghana, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, The Philippines and Trinidad and will address a number of substantive topics such as socialities, intimacy and parenting. The 15 credit version of the module will focus primarily on the impact of social / mobile media for personal relationships. Ultimately, rather than reporting on a collection of international case studies, the module aims to draw on these non-Western contexts to revisit assumptions about social media as well as about key concepts in social science, such as intimacy and parenting. We will showcase the local appropriations of digital technologies and in turn explore whether these are catalyzing processes of social change or entrenching existing power asymmetries. The tension between cultural particularism and social change is central to the module which will end with a broader theorisation of social media.