In your final year, you’ll undertake work experience and develop your own promotional campaign.
You'll also complete 60 credits of option modules from a list provided annually by the department. Option modules may include the following:
Module title |
Credits |
Structure of Contemporary Political Communications
Structure of Contemporary Political Communications
15 credits
This module examines the actors and communication processes involved in contemporary political communication. Its core concern is to explore notions of ‘crisis’ in mature democracies as voter turnouts and ‘trust’ in formal political institutions steadily drop, national economies struggle, and news media decline. It combines theoretical insights and case examples from the fields of media studies, journalism, sociology, and political science. It mainly focuses on democracies, particularly in the US and UK, but literature and examples are also drawn from other types of political system and country.
Weekly topics combine political communication themes and contemporary examples, with discussions of related theory and concepts. Topics covered include:
- The crisis of politics and media in established democracies.
- Public sphere theory.
- Comparative political and media systems.
- Mass media.
- News production and the future of news.
- Political parties, from ideologies to political marketing.
- Elections and referendums.
- Government media management.
- Mediatisation and populist politics.
- Forms of public participation and public opinion.
- Media effects and audiences.
- Lobbying and power.
- Economics, austerity and the financial crisis.
- Digital media and online politics.
- Interest group campaigning, lobbying and environmental/welfare policy.
Much of the material for this module is highly contemporary, and you’ll be encouraged to maintain an awareness of current developments in political communication in the UK and elsewhere.
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15 credits |
Race, Empire and Nation
Race, Empire and Nation
15 credits
This module will examine how histories of Western imperialism have shaped the landscapes of the present. Our task is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to 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.
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15 credits |
Music as Communication and Creative Practice
Music as Communication and Creative Practice
15 credits
In this module, you'll explore how musical meanings are conveyed and understood and how this is mediated through the cultures and technologies of production and consumption. By considering questions from 'What is the value of music?' to 'How can music reinforce social hierarchies?', we'll consider how music communicates mood and meaning, not only through associated imagery and the lyrical content of songs, but as sound itself. We'll think about the processes that link production, circulation and consumption, as well as explore the ways that music connects with individual and collective identities.
We'll consider some of the following questions to research, analyse and understand the complexities of sounds, words and images that constitute contemporary popular and many other kinds of music:
- How and in what ways may we argue that music can express, influence and affect human actions and perceptions?
- How are beliefs, values and identities encoded and communicated as part of a collective experience or to individual listening subjects?
- How is what we listen to mediated by technologies and what effects does this has?
- How do we analyse and talk about musical sound when this is often considered as having little to do with representation?
You'll be encouraged to draw on your own personal experience of music in everyday life and to make use of this material in connection with some of the theoretical approaches under discussion during seminars.
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15 credits |
Strategies of World Cinema
Strategies of World Cinema
15 credits
This module examines a selection of films generally understood as examples of “world cinema”. It analyses the critical and conceptual approaches which have come to define the academic study of national and international film cultures, specifically ideas of “third” and “third world” cinema, and theories of regional and transnational cultures of production and reception.
Divided into three sections, the module will address a body of movies from Africa, Latin America and Asia that have been released over the last forty years according to three guiding themes: global(ised) economies, activism and populism. We will be investigating these films’ formal strategies and thematic concerns; their social and cultural specificity or “universalism” (alongside the politics of that distinction); their industrial and institutional contexts; and their national and international status (for example, in their home countries and in the festival circuit). How different forms of colonisation are absorbed and interrogated will be a question that threads through the entire module.
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15 credits |
Contemporary Feminist Media Cultures
Contemporary Feminist Media Cultures
30 credits or 15 Credits
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.
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30 credits or 15 Credits |
Digital Audiovisual Media: New Aesthetics and Practices
Digital Audiovisual Media: New Aesthetics and Practices
30 credits or 15 credits
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.
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30 credits or 15 credits |
Theorising Celebrity
Theorising Celebrity
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Political Economy of the Media
Political Economy of the Media
15 Credits
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.
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15 Credits |
Embodiment and Experience
Embodiment and Experience
15 credits
This module will examine the place of the ‘body’ in contemporary social and cultural theory taking a number of case studies as examples. In recent years across a range of academic disciplines, from sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and psychology, there has been a move away from approaching the body as a pre-given biological entity or substance, to explore the body as a process. This shifts inquiry from asking not ‘what a body is?’, but rather ‘what can a body do’? ‘What could bodies become’? This work privileges the materiality of the body, as well as introducing creative energy and motion into our understandings of corporeality. It also directs and extends our focus away from anthropocentric understandings of the body (ie. that the human body is distinctly ‘human’) and orients our examinations of corporeality to include species bodies, psychic bodies, machinic bodies, vitalist bodies and other-worldly bodies. These bodies may not conform to our expectations of clearly defined boundaries between the psychological, social, biological, ideological, economic and technical, and may not even resemble the molar body in any shape or form.
Thus many of the dualisms that have circulated across academic disciplines have been dismantled and troubled. These include contrasts between nature and culture, the individual and society, the mind and body, the interior and exterior, and the human and animal/machine. This work has emerged for example in relation to debates surrounding bio and digital technologies, body image and eating disorders, gender performativity, animal/ human relations, affective communication, the senses and mediated perception, health and illness, psychiatric and therapy cultures, the emotions, affect and feeling, the importance of engaging with science, including the contemporary neurosciences to name some just some examples. The question is how do we, as humanities scholars, engage with the body and debates surrounding the body and what relevance might this have for understanding our relationship to media practices and technologies, and particularly for how we might theorise mediation?
This module will provide a critical forum to reflect on these issues, and will provide students from the humanities with a critical understanding of theories of society, culture and communications, which recognize that the body has a materiality and cannot simply be collapsed into text, discourse and signifying activity. This work also explores the complex and layered relationships between scientific narratives/practices, cultural narratives/ practices and our own autobiographies/ embodied practices. The module will explore to what extent we need to talk about embodiment, rather than the body in any fixed way.
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15 credits |
Promotional Culture
Promotional Culture
15 credits
This module looks at the rise of promotional culture (public relations, advertising, marketing and branding) and promotional intermediaries and their impact on society. The first part of the module will look at the history of promotional culture and will offer some conflicting theoretical approaches with which to view its development. These include: professional/ industrial, economic, political economy, Post-Fordist, audience, consumer society, risk society, and postmodern perspectives.
The second part will look at specific case areas of promotional culture. These are in: fashion and taste, technological commodities, popular culture (film TV, music), celebrities and public figures, political parties, and financial markets. In each of these areas questions will be asked about the influence of promotional practices on the production, communication and consumption of ideas and products as well as larger discourses, fashions/ genres and socio-economic trends.
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15 credits |
Politics of the Audiovisual
Politics of the Audiovisual
15 credits
Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and imperial to digital and global. Among the political movements that have been most important in the period since the invention of the movies are (neo)liberalism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, feminism and anti-colonial struggles. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts, from the early days of cinema to contemporary handheld and immersive media. This module investigates the politics of these forms and technologies as attempts at controlling the dispositions of minds and bodies and as struggles for their emancipation. It will address a broad range of topics from the power of sounds, images and visual apparatuses in the 20th and 21st centuries to the relationship of politics and aesthetics, the problem of democracy, and ideology critique.
Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and imperial to digital and global. Among the political movements that have been most important in the period since the invention of the movies are Marxism, populism, nationalism, feminism, anti-colonial struggles and environmentalism. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts.
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15 credits |
Social Media in Everyday Life: A global perspective
Social Media in Everyday Life: A global perspective
15 credits
The module explores the consequences of social and mobile media in a comparative context. What does it mean to live entangled with social and mobile media? What are the consequences of the culture of `always on' connectivity for our identities, relationships and communities? What are the implications for inequality? Are there any opportunities for protest movements or for coping during emergencies? These questions have never been as urgent as they are today. During the pandemic we have collectively experienced a huge dependency on social and mobile media as our professional and social lives migrated online. The module offers an opportunity to critically unpack some of the assumptions made about media technologies, starting by unravelling the very notion of social media.
The module pivots on the double logic of social media: while social media enable socialities and intimacies at a distance, they are also key instruments of extraction and surveillance. This tension between agency and corporate or state control through datafication is a theme that runs across all lectures. The module takes a distinctly non-western approach focusing on the experience of social media in the context of everyday life. The key texts informing our seminar discussions are ethnographies from the global south. Through this comparative approach we aim to question widely held assumptions about social media as well notions of intimacy, care, labour, protest and inequalities.
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15 credits |
Mediating Violence: Feminist, Queer, Decolonial Perspectives
Mediating Violence: Feminist, Queer, Decolonial Perspectives
15 Credits
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.
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15 Credits |
Virtual and immersive media experience
Virtual and immersive media experience
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Race and Technology
Race and Technology
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Photo-journalism
Photo-journalism
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Arts and Fashion Journalism
Arts and Fashion Journalism
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Podcasting
Podcasting
15 credits
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.
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15 credits |
Tutored Personal Research
Tutored Personal Research
30 credits
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.
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30 credits |