Course description
This course offers students an interdisciplinary approach to the study of new media and communications practices. It focuses on a critical understanding of the rapid changes in media and communications and their social and cultural consequences within an international context. The course combines theoretical and empirical study of the media including issues of media audiences together with the study of developments in information and communication technologies.
Course Details
Modules are subject to variation and students are advised to check with the School on whether a particular module of interest will be running in their year of entry.
Modules (all core)
* Media Audiences
Main topics of study: theoretical approaches to media audiences, gender and genre: cross-national and 'subversive' audiences; Domestic technologies; media power and 'minority' readings; media production and audiences; television audiences and contemporary public issues (news and politics, health and illness, sexual violence); media effects/ influence debates; 'active' audience theory.
* Qualitative Methods in Social and Cultural Research
Main topics of study: developing research questions; research philosophies; ethnography; interviews; focus groups; surveys and sampling; quantitative and qualitative data analysis; politics and ethics of research.
* The Information Society
Main topics of study: the relationships between current transformations in the areas of new media communications and global governance; the interplay between new media, the public sphere, and processes of globalisation; the work of key information society and communications theorists such as Castells; the work of contemporary cultural and social theorists of global capitalism such as Hardt and Negri, Beck, Jessop and Urry.
* Global Media and Popular Culture (subject to approval)
Globalisation, media and culture - Introduction
The Hegemony of Liberal Political Economy: Media Markets
Mediating 'the clash of civilisations'
Anarchy in Action? The anti-Globalisation movement and the alternative media
Pornography, Power and Representation - Feminism and 'the Porn Wars'
Celebrity and Popular culture
Media and National Identity
Post-modernity and the Rise of the Cultural Industries
Advertising and the Aesthetization of Everyday Life
Cultural Industries and the City
* Dissertation
A dissertation of approximately 15,000 words is completed over the summer period in consultation with a supervisor. You are encouraged to conduct primary research in an area relevant to the course in preparation for the dissertation.
Examples of recent dissertations undertaken by students on the course include:
o British Press Coverage of the Iraq Invasion
o TV Consumption, Identity and Lifestyle: A study of the Chinese Community in Los Angeles
o The construction of femininity in Sex and the City
o Media bias and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
o Constructing a female cyberspace? A case study of Chinese women and the web
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Assessment
Assessment is by a mixture of essays or report writing.
Teaching Methods
Taught modules are delivered via the traditional lecture/seminar format along with workshops and other set group activities (eg, critical analysis of print and audio visual media; keeping diaries of technology consumption).
Careers
Students typically go on to further advanced academic research or to pursue careers within the media industires (eg, press/communications officer).
