Media Communications: Current Undergraduate Modules

Year 1

Understanding Media Communications

This module introduces students to key themes in the study of media communication. It encourages students to develop their analytical skills through looking not only at media texts, but also media institutions, media practice, the globalisation of media communications and wider debates over media influence and effects. More detailed information about the module is available.

Popular Media Culture

Love it or loathe it media popular culture - from lifestyle magazines to reality TV shows - is a major component of all media platforms, from publishing to broadcasting and film. This module examines the response of critics to this major phenomenon and encourages students to develop their own critical understanding, through topical investigation and applied analysis.

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.

New Media Project

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.

Media and Democracy

This module looks at the role of the mass media in modern democracies. It looks both at the historical emergence of the free press and at recent debates over censorship, media ownership, media influence and political communications. Students on this module are invited to evaluate critical thinking on the democratic role of the media and to apply their ideas to relevant contemporary events.

Introduction to Television

In the UK we tend to watch over twenty hours of television every single week, and as such, it is necessary for us to examine what is being presented in this popular medium.

Analysing Media Communications

This module is the companion first year module to Understanding Media Communications and will introduce you to some of the different ways of studying and researching Media Communications.

 

Year 2

Media Power and the Everyday

In today's society the mass media continuously bombard us with messages, symbols and images; they are seemingly all pervasive. Small wonder, perhaps, that strong claims are often made about media influence and impacts, or that media influence is typically construed in negative terms. This module invites students to consider, think seriously and critically engage with major media theoretical approaches and their claims of media power.

Understanding Magazines

Understanding Magazines provides students with a comprehensive introduction to the magazines industry and offers critical perspectives with which to analyse magazine texts.

Digital Generation: Young People and New Media

Taking as its starting point the rejection of the idea of direct causal link between the media and children's behaviour and beliefs, this module aims to explore the ways in which recent work in the field has generated new insights into young people's interactions with new media forms. By examining a range of new media including mobile phones, the Internet, computer and videogames alongside television, the module will explore the ways in which young people utilize and appropriate new technologies.

Television, Representation and Gender

This module will provide students with the opportunity to study key debates surrounding the representation of gender on the small screen.

Popular Cinema and Culture

This module analyses the various places from which we experience contemporary film cultures, whether as spectators, consumers, collectors or 'connoisseurs'.
 

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.

Conflict News: Journalism in a Divided World

Have you ever wondered about particular the images and ideas of conflict presented by news journalism? This module examines close-up media portrayal of such major conflicts as terrorism, the gulf wars, anti-capitalist protests, crime and deviance, and international famine relief and disasters.

Music Cultures, Media and Markets

The music industry is a major player in the global media environment, connecting with customers, fans and listeners every second of the day. This module traces the relationships between global production, recording and distribution of the music text; how it is communicated, interpreted and consumed. It also asks why recorded popular music has been at the heart of so much heated debate about youth cultures, alternative politics and social change.

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

Media, Audiences and Reception

In the past, how audiences made sense of and formed interpretations of the things they watched, listened to or read, was often ignored or simply assumed from 'effects' models or theories of media power. This module looks at the approaches and studies that have changed the way we think about audiences and their 'activity', including studies of children, women, fans, families and cinema goers.

Power, Pleasure and Feminist Film Criticism

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.

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.

Media Technology and Change

We are living in an era in which technological change seems to be accelerating at an astonishing rate. Computers, mobile phones, iPods, digital cameras and home entertainment systems are increasingly an integral part of our lives. This module invites you to think seriously about some of the many issues that are thrown up by the arrival of new communication technologies and their impact upon our lives. It explores the historical development of a range of these technologies and their possible effects - for better or worse - upon society, culture and global relations.

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:

Reporting Panics, Risks and Fear: Journalism in an Age of Anxiety

Today ideas of panics, risks and fears are subject to intense news attention and speculation. This module invites students to consider the multiple roles performed by news journalism in relation to the communication of hazards in today's so-called 'Risk society'.

Media Communications Dissertation

The dissertation allows final year Media Communications students to investigate a research question that they have themselves proposed. This independent research will be supervised by a member of the Media Communications 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 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 industry. Students can work individually or in groups.