BA (Hons)
Promotional Media: PR, Advertising and Branding

This module examines the rise and development of the promotional industries in the twentieth century. It places their growth in the context of the emergence of the rapid expansion of the media and the growth of consumer culture. It introduces you to the main theories about consumer culture and media power. It critically examines the growth of advertising and branding, public relations, marketing as distinct industries and considers their relationships with each other and with media institutions and organizations. It will examine the longstanding role of celebrity in advertising and branding and will explore the growing importance of celebrity content across the promotional industries today. It introduces you to different theoretical approaches to understanding the spread of promotional culture and how the promotional industries have tried to influence media content. You will also study the key changes that occurred in the final decades of the twentieth century that set the stage for the transformations in the promotional industries that we witness today, in preparation for your year two module on the promotional industries in the twenty-first century.

This module will give you an introduction to marketing and help you understand the role of marketing within organisations and within society, and it aims at providing principles of marketing management.

The first part of the module focuses on what marketing is and its role within society. You'll be introduced to the definition of marketing, the history of marketing practice and thought, the role of marketing within organizations, the value of marketing within organisations and society, and the role of marketing in constructing the consumer society.  These will be enriched by providing different perspectives of marketing from different schools of thought: the traditional school of thought (an economic perspective of marketing) and the critical/interpretivist school of thought ( psychological, sociological and cultural perspectives of marketing).

In the second part of the module, you'll be introduced to foundational topics in marketing management. In the last five weeks, students will be exposed to topics such as the 4Ps of marketing, the global marketing environment, SWOT Analysis, PESTEL analysis, introduction to marketing planning, marketing research and the marketing information system, understanding consumers (C2C) and buyer behaviour. Finally, you'll be introduced to marketing ethics and sustainable marketing.

This module will develop your knowledge and understanding of a variety of styles and genres of media writing, including non-western writing genres. You will learn how to deconstruct media content and critically appraise media writing. You will learn practical skill in writing for the media in the following areas: press releases; news stories and feature writing; media reviews; social media content; advertising copy, blogging. You will learn the basics of researching, brand strategy, concept development, and academic writing skills. For the portfolio assessment you will produce a written deconstruction of one existing piece of writing. You will also do an oral presentation basis on that deconstruction which will be a formative assessment. You will be provided with one piece of content from which you will be required to produce different pieces of writing for different formats and audiences. Each written element of the portfolio assessment will be given a separate weighting that accumulate to 100 percent. You will keep a journal in which you reflect on your encounter with promotional media drawing on critical concepts introduced on the module.

How do we decide if a piece of media is worth our attention? How do we combine critical thinking about the media with making interesting media? In the age of social media and user-generated content, are we all artists now?

The module starts by looking at some of the different ways in which artists have used media and technology across different historical periods. Through this, it introduces aesthetic concerns to the study of media, raising questions about cultural appreciation, value, and taste, but also about social and political issues concerning art. It also teaches you to be critical towards many forms of media art – both old and new.

The notion of ‘art’ as a unified field of specialist cultural production is then put into question in the context of the wider discussions of creativity and amateur media practices. By studying contemporary forms of media production via social media, open web, etc., we consider whether in the age of online media and readily available digital technology everyone is potentially an artist. Blurring the boundary between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’, the module attempts to get you to think about media and make media as part of the same classroom experience and module assignment.

Cultural studies is a field of study committed to the interrogation of power in society that starts with self-examination of the field and its own assumptions. 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’ (Grossberg et al., 1992: 278).

It starts with a general introduction to the idea of culture, and some of the problems associated with defining it.

We’ll take a close critical look at some of the key texts and theories that emerged from the Centre in the 1970s. This will set the groundwork for using key cultural studies concepts such as identity, hybridity and resistance to analyse cultural products and practices such as social media, digital platforms and music.

This is a practice-based module which will develop your skills in web design and enable you to develop a content-management-system website that will host a promotional campaign. You'll learn how to build a web and social media presence and how to use some analytics software to track the performance of your website. You'll learn the differences between various CMS website solutions, and how to choose the best one for your projects, assessing how users navigate websites. You'll present a web design draft plan as part of your portfolio which will be a formative assessment for which you'll receive a pass/fail grade. You'll also learn basic legal requirements in using found images. Starting with a Wordpress.com site, you'll learn about how to select an appropriate theme, customising a theme with plug-ins, and the potential for advanced functionality such as e-commerce and social media campaign management.

You'll learn how to design graphics, edit images in Photoshop, and gain an understanding of the coding that underpins all web-development. Along the way, you'll be introduced to UX (User Experience), UI (User Interface), HTML (Hypertext Mark Up Language, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The portfolio assessment will contain a website plan for formative assessment, a website based on found images and original text, a self-reflective essay containing information about your design decisions (1000 – 1500), and a short report on your website analytics (500 – 800 words). Each element in the portfolio will be appropriately weighted to give a total of 100 percent.

This module introduces you to the rapid and far-reaching changes in the main promotional industries: advertising, public relations, branding and marketing. The promotional industries are adapting to digital technologies and as a result, there has been a realignment of the practices of promotional industries and their markets and the growth of new celebrity-based promotional strategies such as the rise of influencer marketing. You will study these changes in the context of mergers in the promotional industries and media convergence. You will examine convergence from a number of angles including economic convergence, convergence in technology, content, and job roles. You will critically evaluate the processes and consider their impact on the wider media landscape and promotional cultures.

This is a practice-based module which will develop your skills in generating visual storytelling through moving image production and editing, and stills photography. You'll learn how to identify and analyse effective promotional videos and still images, respond to a brief, generate and present your own ideas for a campaign for a targeted audience.

You'll learn how to write treatments, scripts and storyboards and other necessary pre-production, production and post-production materials.  You'll gain the technical skills and techniques required to produce moving image and stills photography for your promotional campaign.  You'll gain a working knowledge of how to use cameras, audio and lighting kits and how to edit your productions into a promotional video using Adobe Premiere Pro editing software.

You'll learn how to design a promotional poster and edit original still images using Adobe Photoshop.  You'll be given the opportunity to present your work for audience feedback and critically reflect on your own practice.

This module explores the changing world of advertising and examines its growing prominence in the media and in wider society. It begins by investigating the origins of advertising in consumer capitalism and by developing an understanding of the main theoretical approaches to: advertising as a persuasive industry; as a set of socio-economic practices; and as media texts and cultural objects. The module looks at the fundamental role that advertising plays in financing media and in shaping media and cultural production. We also examine the centrality of celebrity in the growth of advertising and promotional content and the way that celebrity-centred business models, which anchor aesthetic values to marketing concerns, are now widespread throughout media and society.

The second half of the module examines new developments in advertising with the rise of the internet and the growth of digital media, including: new models of online advertising based on algorithms and big data; the growth of celebrity and micro-celebrity as a promotional tools, as a way of engaging consumers emotions in our age of ad blocking; the challenges of advertising regulation online; and the blurring of lines between creative content and promotional content, news/factual content and sponsored content, and the rise of native advertising. The module also examines the recent and ongoing convergence in the advertising and promotional industries, the growth of huge multinationals that now dominate and asks you to consider the consequences of the concentration of economic power in an increasingly monopolistic industry, and its growing control over content creation. This module asks you to critically examine the impact of the growth and power of advertising for our media, culture and society.

This module requires you to bring all of the skills, knowledge and understanding you have developed in the first three terms of your course to develop and launch a promotional campaign in a team. You'll develop a brief and a campaign plan - including a fully developed brand strategy; pitch your plan in a group oral presentation, which will be a formative assessment, and you'll choose to fully develop one of the promotional elements from your plan. You'll reflect on your project management and consider strategies for assessing the effectiveness of the campaign.

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.

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.

This module explores the platformised future of media, communications and creative work. Digital platforms have emerged as a new business model for extracting, circulating and controlling vast amounts of data. Within this business model, a process of platformisation continues to evolve, and with it, a rapid re-organising of media and communications work, alongside roles in the creative and cultural industries.

In the past 20 years, familiar media and communications professions, such as journalism, advertising, marketing, PR and media buying, have expanded to include a host of new and overlapping roles, including audience strategy, brand journalism, digital content marketing, ‘createch’, digital asset management, influencer marketing, programmatic advertising, search marketing, social media management, and adjacent fields of data analysis and data science.

We’ll examine changing media logics and infrastructures; and shifting professional boundaries between traditional and ‘new’ media, creative and cultural professions, and occupations. We’ll also consider and evaluate the various forms of professional knowledge and capital required to navigate digital platforms and their persuasion architecture.

Television has been, since its establishment in the mid-20^th century, the medium defined by the narrative of 'transformation', 'expansion' or 'transition'.  From the analogue ‘age of scarcity’ characterised by a limited number of national channels, television has grown, firstly into a commercial multichannel ecology, only to further expand into a multiplatform, digital environment characterised by post-broadcast network transmission. 

This module focuses on contemporary debates of television's technological transformation, economic expansion, changing social practices and cultural texts critically and historically. The module asks how critical political economy approach can be helpful to understand technological expansion of the spectrum and platforms and diminishing costs of entry are framed by the stronghold of the established political and economic patterns. We’ll explore the promise of television as a 'global' medium as not yet fulfilled, despite reconfigurations of its economic landscape by transnational trade of programme content, such as TV formats.

This module will further historically contextualise debates about television as a social practice, looking at the medium as a way of 'structuring' our time (from watching live events to bingeing on streaming service content), and reconfiguring our space (from living rooms to our bedrooms and multiple screens). It will look at its changing and proliferation of promotional practices and how they shape what we watch. It will invite us to think of television as a legacy medium influencing and feeding social media platforms. It will, importantly, address issues of diversity of representation and television as a key site where politics of race, gender and sexuality are addressed.

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.

This module will provide you with a critical and conceptual vocabulary for understanding some of the key dynamics of social and cultural change, with particular reference to the large social institutions the family and sexuality and the changing world of work. We track significant transformations of society from the domestic sphere to the field of employment, paying particular attention to the impact of digital media cultures across both spheres. While some social theorists claimed that this disembedding of individuals away from communities and from long-term attachments and commitments based on family and work-based identities was the outcome of welfare provisions and public investment in education, health and so on, by which means individuals are now able to ‘live the life they choose’ (i.e. the fruits of postmodernity), others argue that individualisation is a process which shifts social and economic responsibility from the state to the individual (inequality and exploitation within neoliberal capitalism).

Has society become fully neo-liberalised? What is the ongoing role of individualisation in neoliberalism? What is the role of various cultural practices in the expectation that people will be self-reliant and what kind of people and society do such expectations produce? Are we seeing this expectation of self-responsibility in contexts of a shrinking state radicalised? How is individual or cultural autonomy positioned as a site of struggle in various cultural contexts, at home, in work, and in popular and counterculture?

This module examines these processes and discusses their consequences: what kind of ‘subjects’ are we now becoming? What are the consequences of individualisation for people positioned differently in terms of structures of identity? Who are the winners and the losers of data capitalism and the networked society? How has neoliberalism been transformed by digital cultures, and in turn, how do these transform us?

This 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.

This module will examine the place of ‘experience’ in thinking about our self-formation. What does it mean to ‘know ourselves’ and what role does psychological thinking, norms and concepts play in this process of knowing? We’ll examine arguments which suggest that psychology, as a body of knowledge and set of practices, does not actually reveal, or disclose who we are, but plays a central role in constructing whom we take ourselves to be. We’ll interrogate the relationships between psychology, media and popular culture, and systems of government and regulation. During the module, we’ll identify events where psychological ideas, norms and concepts are produced, and think about the possibilities and problems with such forms of psychologisation.

We’ll encourage you to interrogate your own self-formation and autobiography and help to situate these narratives in relation to concepts such as power, discourse, desire, imagination, affect and corporeality. The module will extend the usefulness of the concept of subjectivity by exploring Foucauldian, decolonial, queer, crip, feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to subjectivity.

We’ll illustrate their application by exploring themes and issues such as:

• cosmetic surgery and makeover cultures
• media affects and emotions
• performativity theory
• race and gender
• genealogies of sexuality
• positive psychology and the science of happiness
• historical and political aspects of the ‘media effects’ debates

We’ll also consider how we might begin to understand the complex relationships between sexuality, class, race, and gender in relation to the performative force of communication practices such as: film; print media; televisual platforms; social media practices and ‘influencers.’

The module provides you with a basic knowledge of the key works of some of the most significant foundational social theorists (Marx, Weber, Du Bois and Simmel) and explores how ideas continue to influence our understandings of the media, modernity and power. It should be evident that whilst media theorists have their own particular concerns, in many cases they are responding to problems posed within this classic tradition and within the context of their own times.

The social theory examined in this course asks crucial questions both about the nature of society – power, stratification, agency, regulation, identity, and spectacle – as well as about the media’s status as a key instrument of social reproduction. The module provides a theoretical map on which to locate some of the key issues confronted in media, communication and cultural studies.

In the first five weeks of the module, we’ll explore the different contributions made by Marx, Weber, Du Bois and Simmel to our understanding of modernity. We’ll also examine the work of their critics, particularly drawing on feminist perspectives. In the second half of the module, we’ll confront more contemporary approaches to social theory that critically challenge some of the foundations of Western modern thought. You’ll learn about the concerns around race and ethnicity, gender and class, processes of globalisation and the questioning of grand narratives by postmodernist thinkers.

This module explores the function, impact and status of news in an increasingly "deterritorialised" and volatile globalised media environment. The module will cover a comparative study of different news media systems in the world and examine global news flows together with technological, institutional and professional issues in international news production.

We’ll explore the news media’s relationship with international institutions and non-state actors, including NGOs, activists and whistleblowers. We’ll investigate access to news in the Information Age and the extent to which audiences might constitute alternative news networks and a putative globalised public sphere. You’ll learn how new digital technologies have transformed the way news is made, disseminated and consumed.

The module provides a critical consideration of the economics, culture, politics, and sociology of news in a globalised context and examines fundamental issues, theories and developing news practices. This module aims to enable you to understand the impact of rapid technological changes, the globalised nature of news and implications for the future of the news media.

During this module we’ll consider the social, commercial, political, and technical structures in which journalism is embedded. We’ll also explore how sociologists understand the role of journalism in society.

Does ownership define what news is prioritised, or are journalists free agents? Are global news flows still dominated by Western values and what is the impact of digital platforms on global flows? What is the role of publicly owned media on the one hand and advertising dominated commercial media and platforms on the other? How do commercial imperatives influence professional and ethical values and regulation? Finally, we’ll consider emerging structures for the future of journalism.

This module will examine how data is visualized and analysed. You will be introduced to techniques for gathering data from the internet and other electronic sources, including some of the currently available tools of analysis and visualization. You will learn how to scrape the web for data and how to read and understand three forms of data: 1) audience insights, 2) performance analysis, 3) use of data for storytelling. You will learn to use web-based software and data analytic tools to source information from the internet in order to gain knowledge about how to track campaign performance. You will also learn how to use intermediate excel tools and will submit an excel spreadsheet as part of your portfolio.  The assessment portfolio will contain an evaluation of an existing campaign report and a comparative report which analyses data for two real-life products in order to demonstrate the ability to track campaign performance. You will explore critical approaches big data and algorithms and the knowledge they construct, considering issues of data justice. You will write a short critical analysis as part of your portfolio. All written elements of the portfolio will be weighted appropriately with a combined value of 100 per cent.

The central objective is to enable you to take up a workplace learning experience which will benefit your studies, your skillset, your networks and your CV.

The work placement will take place over a two-week period or can be spread over a longer period. The project you undertake whilst on placement and/or the data to which you have access will be invaluable in developing your Essay. You will also deliver a presentation, based on your experience. You will be supported, in preparing your assignments, through three seminars and individual discussions.

Please note: we will endeavour to source placements from across a wide range of areas but cannot guarantee specific placements. You should be flexible and appreciate that any broadly-related experience can be valuable.

This module is a bringing together of all that you have learnt to produce an individual Promotional Campaign Portfolio. You will use your conceptual skills, planning skills, brand management skills and practical skills to develop a cross platform promotional campaign and produce content for it. You will develop your project management skills, learn how to select appropriate platforms, activities and content for your campaign - from apps, to social media influencers, to events, videos, photographs, blogs and other forms of promotional writing. You will be expected to produce written material, visual material, and digital material in a project that showcases your abilities and demonstrates your ability to select appropriate promotional content and reflect critically on your work, showing evidence of the development of your ideas. All elements of the portfolio will be submitted on a weekly basis for formative assessment; you will receive weekly feedback on your work and will adapt and resubmit work in a final portfolio. You will launch your campaign and track its analytics making adjustments in line with what you have learned from your data analysis. Your portfolio will be made of up your campaign plan, your campaign materials (which will include texts, images and digital content selected by their appropriateness to your campaign from the array of promotional forms and meanings you have been taught across the three years of the programme), a reflective essay and a report on the analytics of your campaign. Each element of the portfolio will be weighted appropriately to a cumulative value of 100 percent.

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.

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 the 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, 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.

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.

What does feminism mean these days, to whom, and with what consequence? How does feminism exist as a force in the world? What makes feminist movement a social, cultural, critical and creative enterprise, as well as a historical and geographical phenomenon?

Asking such questions, Contemporary Feminist Media Cultures invites you to participate in a collective enquiry into the history of present feminism. Offering rigorous training in feminist theory, particularly according to the fields of feminist media studies, feminist cultural studies and feminist cultural theory, the module deepens and complicates your understanding of how feminism is located in media cultures. You'll also explore the social, ethical and intellectual problems that feminism addresses, such as subjectivity, power, freedom and multiplicity, whether mediated to us as academic theory, social movement or media culture.

Through conducting a ‘politics of location’ of feminist thought, movement and feeling, you'll gain the contextual knowledge necessary for contemporary analysis.

In this module, you'll engage with the current practices and aesthetics of digital audiovisual industries with specific focuses on digital cinema, internet-distributed television, music video and YouTube. Following Carol Vernallis’s Unruly Media, you'll look at how contemporary audiovisual practices are based on a ‘mixing board aesthetic’ in which practice and practitioners fluidly cross previous medium boundaries by adopting flexible digital practices to produce content that will often be delivered via digital platforms from social media to Netflix. It will also adopt a post-cinematic perspective to look at how digital modes of production and consumption have radically modified moving image and sound aesthetics whether in digital cinema and television or other forms like music videos and YouTube content, including phenomena such as CGI, non-linear post-continuity editing, shifting relations and exchanges between sound and image and the emergence of new expanded audiovisual forms that go beyond existing medium categories. It will situate these transformations as not merely technically determined but as evolving alongside socio-cultural shifts from new patterns of digital consumption like binge-viewing to DIY participatory practices on social media to industry responses to #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements.

In this module, you'll unpack the phenomenon of celebrity by looking at the main academic approaches to the study of celebrity culture. We'll look at both contemporary and historical celebrity culture to examine how celebrity is the outcome of specific, historically situated social, cultural and economic processes. We'll examine the production of celebrity and the role of race, class and gender in celebrity culture. We'll ask, what is celebrity? To what extent is it the end result of the commodification of the individual, a pedagogic tool for new ways of living or new forms of consumption, an elaborate marketing tool, or a complex cultural symbol?

We'll also ask questions about the social function of celebrity – is it a system of power, an ideological tool in propping up the myth of meritocracy, or an industry of desire? What can contemporary celebrity culture tell us about the times we are living through? We'll examine these questions through a series of case studies ranging from analysing the celebrity image from the cinematic ‘close-up’ to the celebrity ‘selfie’, examining differing forms of fame from the icon to the rise of the influencer, and assessing different perspectives on celebrities’ symbolic values from ordinary people in celebrity culture to celebrity activism.

This is a module about the political and economic organisation (‘political economy’) of the media with particular reference to Western industrial democracies. We'll examine the issues raised by commentators who explain media processes and the relationship of mass communications to society in terms of political economy. We'll step outside the confines of this tradition of thought to consider other explanations of the functioning of the mass media. We'll explore broad-based discussions of the role of the media in society, what shapes the media, how it should be organised and what influence it has, viewed from a variety of viewpoints.

Topics covered include the power relations between advertisers and media producers, who controls the news, the political economy of celebrity, media work, the function of entertainment and the culture industries. As you'll see, there are liberal and radical political economy answers to all these questions. But there are also other answers as well. You'll have to make up your mind about which positions you think are most convincing and best supported by the evidence. This module is designed to help you navigate the literature, guide you through the relevant debates and assist you to reach your own conclusions.

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.

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.

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.

From #BlackLivesMatter to the ‘refugee crisis’, from the ‘war on terror’ to school shootings in the US, the framing of and responses to urgent political and cultural debates often rely on the mediation of violence. Violence is mediated as something palpable, recognizable, physical, spectacular, and something that evokes strong emotions. Increasingly, violence is also often mediated as distant, routine, and normalized, sparking fears of ‘viewer’ desensitization and fatigue. This module draws on interdisciplinary feminist, queer, and decolonial theory to unpack and interrogate violence and its mediation. It asks – What is violence and how is it represented and mediated? How is violence theorized and understood? What forms and shapes does violence take? What are the material and affective economies of violence? How does gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, and (dis)ability intersect with violence? How do social justice struggles and activisms relate to violence? By foregrounding critical feminist, queer, decolonial perspectives in cultural, social, media, and political theory, this module illuminates the intersectionalities and assemblages of power that ‘make’ and mediate violence and the racial-gendered-sexual grammars that connect the seemingly disparate locations of (everyday) violence. In the first weeks of the module, we visit key debates in the feminist, queer, decolonial theorizations of violence and its mediation. In the following weeks, we examine the mediation of violence through several ‘sites’ and ‘processes’ (such as bodies, borders, migrations, nations, nationalisms, empires, capitalism, war, torture, death, debility, trauma) using feminist, queer, decolonial theory and examples/case studies from popular media.

More and more, we're interacting with media which is not fixed and linear – as film and television are – but rather rule-governed, digitally-simulated virtual environments that we move through interactively and immersively, whether it be in games, multiscreen installations, or in VR/AR. This module asks what kinds of interesting and emergent experiences these new technological interfaces and spaces yield, and what kind of social, cultural, ethical, ecological, and economic purposes they can be turned to.

The first part of the module is dedicated to the concepts and discourses of virtual and immersive media incorporating genealogical, philosophical and critical approaches, whilst the second half of the module turns towards production and form, in terms of gaming, creative expression, and the shared cultural and economic imaginaries that determine what kind of virtual content is currently produced (including porn, dance, spiritual and psychedelic experiences, and ethical experience).

We'll include an optional, extracurricular public gallery/installation visit to experience an immersive media/art experience (contingent on an appropriate event being available and affordable). This visit will influence a group presentation (formative) on a similar immersive or virtual experience, or a text, artwork, or image that reflects on these themes.

Race has shaped many aspects of media technologies – from representations of social groups in entertainment to outsourcing in media production. Media provide images and narratives that help us understand ourselves and others. They also provide platforms for us to live and work.

Yet, these cultural representations and production infrastructures are patterned by racialised categorisation and commodification. This module goes beyond discussions of racial stereotypes in media representations to explore how the technologisation of race patterns in media forms and systems. Featuring readings that theorise aesthetic and infrastructural relationalities between blackness, whiteness, and Asianness, this module combines weekly lectures and seminar discussions with a few on-demand film screenings.

Building on each other, the weekly topics progress as follows:

• Relationality examines representations of race as aesthetic 'forms' within relational frameworks that connect technological imaginaries and infrastructures.
• Circulation discusses how racial stratification patterns the circulation of value in networked publics and media production.
• Contexts explores regional case studies.

Images are a vital part of journalism. During this practical module, you’ll learn how to use cameras and smartphones to create simple and effective images suitable for use in journalism, using available light. You’ll be given weekly assignments and be encouraged to share and critique each other’s work. You’ll develop an understanding of the importance of building a rapport with your subjects.

We’ll learn about the ethical and legal issues involved in photography, consider the possible uses of photography on social media and think about the context in which your work will be used and how that might impact your decisions.

This module explores intelligent arts journalism in the digital era. Within the unit, we’ll be tackling creative cultural writing across a variety of fields, most notably music, fashion, film, and TV, developing your skills in reviewing, interviewing and feature writing.

With guests from the industry to further your experiences, we’ll also examine the relevant skills of a freelance journalist, across pitching and personal branding, culminating in a portfolio of assessment pieces due for submission at the end of the unit.

Through a series of workshops, you will be introduced to examples of best practice in podcasting that will enable to you critically respond to difference in genre, style, subject matter and delivery. You'll then be asked to use that knowledge to create and deliver a podcast, maximum duration ten minutes, in any appropriate format. 

You'll explore the sector and understand how to craft a podcast destined for a target audience.

Other key topics covered will include learning how to engage listeners using pacing and dynamics. You'll be taught how to use microphones to record both yourself - as the presenter or interviewer - and at least one appropriate external contributor. You'll also learn how to use editing software during the post-production process to create your podcast.

A dissertation is an extended piece of original research conducted with the help of an academic supervisor, rather than a taught module. It provides an opportunity to work independently and in a self-directed manner on a subject of longstanding interest or that you have encountered during your studies. Your research topic must be located within the field of media and communications and should ideally draw upon at least one of the theoretical models introduced on the department's degree programmes.

Writing a dissertation can be an isolated experience. It is important you prepare for this and maintain networks and contacts that will support you. It is also a programme of study that requires self-motivation. You need to plan ahead, create a regular work pattern and regulate your own progress. The workshop programme is designed to help you fine-tune your dissertation proposal and to develop an appropriate research method. Your supervisor will provide further guidance in these aspects.

The experience of writing a dissertation is invaluable. You will develop skills of research and learn to assess methods of finding things out. You will need to gather materials and keep a trail of the sources of all that you find. You will have to assess the strengths of your research, and comment reflexively on this. You will be developing ideas and structuring an argument across a large body of text. And you will of course be honing your written style and skills of expression. These skills and experiences will prepare you for postgraduate work where you will be working in similar conditions. They are also skills that you will need in the workplace. The final product of a bound dissertation is an impressive piece of work that you may want to take with you to interviews as a demonstration of your ability.