Cultural Studies: Current Undergraduate Modules

Please note that not all of these modules are offered in any given academic year.

Year 1

Reading Culture

The concept of 'culture' is the site of fundamental disagreements over values, meaning, truth, tradition, identity and their future. The different approaches to studying culture - be they literary, sociological, political, scientific, religious or otherwise - are themselves expressions of these disagreements. This module offers a road map of some of the key themes, theories and problems that have influenced contemporary arguments about 'what culture is for'.

Introduction to Film

This module introduces students to a variety of ways of approaching the study of film. It looks at a broad range of critical perspectives - including cultural, historic, artistic and economic - in order to explore the social significance and impact of the world's most popular form of entertainment. It also introduces students to ways of writing effectively about film, through critical reviews and academic essays. The module provides a valuable foundation for the study of film in advanced modules.

Introduction to Popular Culture

This module will introduce students to the ways in which changing forms of popular culture have provoked a wide range of debates and theories about 'the popular', from mass culture theory and the Frankfurt School to postmodernism and cultural populism. Students will be asked to consider several key questions that have guided these theories: what is 'popular'? How can we judge when popular culture is good or bad? What is the place and function of popular culture in modern society? Students will examine a wide variety of cultural forms - television, popular music, text based popular fiction, film, magazines, internet-based subcultures (fanzines) - and consider e.g. the relation of mass society and mass culture, the culture industry, myth and social narratives, power and ideology, consumer culture, genres and audiences.

Modernity and its Discontents

This module introduces students to ideas, theories and debates, which are responses to the changing dynamics of modern society. The module engages with cultural, artistic, political and experiential themes, which are explored in relation to the broader question of whether 'modernity' is passing, or has passed, into a state of 'post-modernity'. The module will broaden students' knowledge of cultural studies, and provide an overview of social theory useful for advanced level modules.

Culture and Identity

What makes me 'me'? The idea of being an 'individual', with a unique set characteristics and qualities, is a relatively recent one: it is fundamental to the development of the modern state and democratic institutions as well as smaller scale political concepts such as the family, gender, race and sexuality.

This module unpicks and replays the key arguments about cultural identity to cast light on contemporary social and political questions, such as nationalism and multiculturalism.

Media Culture Journal

This is a project-based module in which students work in teams to carry out research into specific areas of popular media culture. The research findings of each team are then presented in the form of a website. The module is designed to develop research skills, project management skill and web authoring skills as well as to encourage a deeper understanding of media industry practices.

Year 2

Cultural Theory and Politics

The word 'theory' is often identified with abstraction, having little to do with 'real life' or practical matters. Yet all knowledge and every practice is already shaped by theoretical concerns - about how forms of knowledge or practices are constructed, for example. This module identifies the key cultural theories that have shaped Cultural Studies, and shows how they challenge us to rethink some of our fundamental conceptions of identity, truth, knowledge, reality and meaning.

Understanding Hollywood

This module will enable student to develop an advanced understanding of the ways in which 'film' as an academic discipline, is approached from a Cultural Studies and Film Studies perspective, by using Hollywood as a paradigm in order to introduce the study of film as a commercial, cultural and aesthetic institution. It will critically examine those paradigms as they operated in the classical period, and on through the post-classical Hollywood of the late 1960s to the present day. An abiding theme will be one that understands film as a site of cultural debate.

Culture and Barbarism

This module introduces students to the legacy of the Enlightenment period, for bad as well as for good. It begins with a four week introduction to the main ideas of the historical Enlightenment period, before going on to look at the critiques of the emphasis on reason, progress and science that this period instigated. as part of this critique students read texts as writers as diverse as Mary Shelley's (Frankenstein), the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche and Adorno.

Understanding Television

This module offers you an accessible introduction to the study of television genres. It will identify significant codes and conventions in a range of popular programming ranging from the teen drama to reality television and ask you consider whether this is an appropriate approach for an examination of contemporary television.

Popular Cinema and Culture

This module analyses the various places from which we experience contemporary film cultures, whether as spectators, consumers, collectors or "connoisseurs".  It begins from the premise that "film" is not a separate and distinct entity, but is embedded within a realm of products - magazines, reviews, toys, games, music, fashions, and "tie-ins".  Drawing on key strands of cultural and film theories, we examine contemporary popular cinema as both a social and an aesthetic practice, with particular emphasis on the formation of "taste" cultures across fields of cinematic production, distribution and consumption.

Film and British National Identity

This module explores British National Identity/Identities through an examination of 'British Cinema'. Combining the study of film and cultural identity allows not only an in-depth investigation of the history, aesthetics and structures of British cinema, but also allows for an understanding of the growing importance of the diversity of British identities and of film as a site for the negotiation of Britishness in the 20th century and beyond. Other cinematic institutions and representation practices outside the British film industry and their influences and relationships to British cinema will be explored.

What Women Want: Psychoanalysis, Gender and Identity

This module introduces students to the ways in which Freudian psychoanalysis has theorised gender and identity, paying particular attention to theoretical formulations of femininity.  The history of feminism is considered alongside this, thus enabling students to gain an understanding both of theories concerned with sexual difference and those which seek to challenge dominant patriarchal discourses. 

Stardom and Celebrity

This module will provide you with the opportunity to study the key debates in the field of star studies and celebrity culture. The module will enable you to look at the emergence of the star system, the issue of control and star images in the studio era and the idea of the celebrity as commodity in the contemporary period.

Year 3

Love and Desire in Contemporary Cultures

The desire for someone or something is at once the most basic, commonly shared form of expressing our sense of who we are, and yet represents what is most unique, possibly most bizarre about each of us. This module draws on challenging ideas from psychoanalysis, philosophy and cultural theory to map some of the perverse pathways of human desire and their centrality to debates over cultural expression, politics, freedom and identity.

European Cinema

European cinema has had an extraordinarily rich and varied history. This module offers students an opportunity to study some of its key movements and moments. Themes such as national identity, aesthetics and politics, the avant-garde, realism and anti-realism, modernism and post-modernism, will be explored in relation to French, Italian, German, Danish, British and Russian film. European cinema's origins and subsequent development - often as the self-conscious antithesis of the 'Hollywood' style - will be considered, as will its current status within an increasingly globalised cultural arena.

Drug Cultures: Intoxication and the Modern World

This module looks at the history of attitudes to intoxication from the 'gin craze' to recent concerns over binge drinking. It looks at issues such as the role of intoxication in cultural production (such as art and popular music), the history of addiction treatments, changing policies towards drink and drug control, and the ways in which attitudes to intoxication are shaped by attitudes to gender.

Power, Pleasure and Feminist Film Theory

This module will provide you with the opportunity to study the key debates in feminist film theory and encourage you to examine the representations of sexuality and gender in relation to a diverse range of mainstream Hollywood films ranging from the pseudo-soft-core to the shopping film.

The Cultural Politics of Friendship

We might grow up with many or few friends, even none at all, or just an imaginary one, but however ubiquitous 'friendship' remains a difficult object to pin down. As social researchers claim that friends are more crucial to our social and cultural well-being, and TV shows display 'models' of urban micro-communities, this module explores different ways of constructing our knowledge of friendship, from philosophy and sociology to queer theory and popular culture.

Black American Popular Culture

This interdisciplinary module investigates three, specific but interconnected, forms of black American popular cultural expression within the central framework of "Cultural Icons and Cultural Identity". This allows for an examination of African American popular culture, an investigation of the contributions of the black creative icon/artist to that culture and the formation of black cultural identity throughout the twentieth century and beyond. The three units of the module are:

Cultural Manifestations of Evil and Wickedness

'Evil' and 'wicked' are terms that we tend to use without really examining what we think they actually are. This module first introduces students to the history of the concept of evil and examines the problems that we have when we try to 'pin it down' as a fixed concept. Then we take a variety of examples of events/situations that could be termed evil, and/or wicked, and try to take apart the usual ways of thinking, to look behind the 'spin' and think why certain things/acts are labelled evil. The module travels right up to date to end with the concept of 'the axis of evil' coined by George W. Bush in January 2002.

Cultural Studies Dissertation

The dissertation allows final year Cultural Studies students to investigate a research question that they have themselves proposed. This independent research will be supervised by a member of the Cultural Studies staff, through a regular series of tutorials and meetings. The dissertation is a chance for final year students to really show what they can do with the range of skills and knowledge they have acquired during their studies and translate this into an extended piece of assessed work.

Creative Project

This module is designed to provide an opportunity for students in Cultural Studies to undertake a sustained item of creative work as part of their programme. The Creative Project requires you to put into operation a combination of creative, academic and intellectual skills acquired by this point. It provides the opportunity for those students who have selected the creative pathway through their degrees to undertake a specific project in a clearly defined area. It is anticipated that this work would normally be in the areas of (a) film and media studies, or (b) creative writing. Subjects will be chosen and approved in consultation with the module co-ordinator, who will liaise with the appropriate Department Heads with regards to the supervision of the project.

Creative Enterprise Project

The module allows students to extend their knowledge of their subject area by taking their interests out into the 'real' world via negotiated project work.

This module is project based. Projects can take a wide variety of forms. All projects are shaped by in-depth negotiation of methods and aims between students and tutors. Skills workshops, master classes and technical support will be provided via ArtsWork's Creative Writing lab.

All projects will involve taking some aspect of your subject and exploring it in the context of current market forces/demands/needs. Your project may entail a placement, but will almost certainly involve some contact with a creative and/or culture industry. Students can work individually or in groups.