Media, Communication, Cultures

Core Modules

Interpreting New Media

Gain an introduction to the critical techniques you will need to study new media. You will develop your ability to interpret media technologies and practices, and you will hone your analytical and theoretical skills. You will be introduced to a range of challenging and topical case studies and to recent modes of interpretation through training in critical analysis, research, debate and presentation.

Cultural Studies

This module will introduce you to the central debates and critical concepts in cultural studies. You will explore key issues such as the nature of `culture?, how media products work, how audiences experience culture, how cultural products make meaning, how the media represents the social world, and the role the media plays in cultural politics and power.

Media Interactions

Develop an understanding of theories and debates in contemporary and 'new' media with a particular focus on the transition from analogue to digital media. You will discuss how people experience, consume and interact with the media forms they encounter in everyday settings.

BBC Radio: Cultural Talk, Public Purposes

Gain an introduction to the organisation of cultural talk on contemporary BBC radio. You will explore the way cultural talk is administrated to fulfil the BBC?s public purposes.

Cinematic Identities: Gender, Class & Race

This module uses American cinema from the 1940s to the present as a prism through which to investigate questions of history, gender and representation. You will use gender as the key organising principle but also examine issues of class and race.

Researching Television

You will study key approaches to researching TV texts, audiences and institutions. Your studies will equip you with the skills to critically apply models from TV studies to the content and consumption of 21st-century TV.

Core Modules

Media: Past & Present, Where & When

Explore the variety of resources, questions and contexts that underpin the historical, political and geographical development of media and cultural studies. You will study the 'modern' media culture and look at a range of historical and analytical issues associated with this complex arena. You will gain a historical, political and geographical grounding and context for your studies, as well as broader perspectives on current issues in the study of media.

Media Theory

Study a range of theoretical perspectives on media in their mass and social communications forms and develop skills in critical thinking and analysis. You will focus on the original work of theorists whose ideas continue to be significant to the study of media, communications and culture today.

Popular Music & the Moving Image

Explore the relationship between popular music and the moving image by looking at the use of music in silent and sound cinema, Hollywood musicals, Disney and Bollywood, popular music and television, promotional video, music and advertising, new media and `live? performance. You will learn to analyse the economic, technological and cultural elements which influence the production and consumption of popular music and its visual representation.

Researching Media & Culture

Gain a detailed overview of research methods including qualitative and quantitative methods. You will understand the ways in which media and cultural studies research can be carried out.

Option modules may include:

Comedy, Media, Diversity

Examine comedy in contemporary media and society. You will explore the analytical and theoretical literature on comedy's purposes and structures before exploring up to three forms of comedy in detail. Firstly, you will study stand-up, secondly the sit-com genre on television and, thirdly romantic comedy in cinema.

Youth, Crime, Culture

This module will see you explore the relationship between young people, crime and media culture. You will approach the study of youth and crime cultures through various historical, theoretical and sociological perspectives and address a range of themes including deviance, resistance, labelling, policing, violence, and crime as a fiction/film genre. You will critically consider these themes in relation to different theories of youth and criminality including delinquency, antisocial behaviour, countercultures, subcultures, club cultures, gangs, drug use and surveillance.

Media Professionals' Workshop

Explore some of the features of professional working practices within the media and cultural industry sectors. During this module you will have the opportunity to work on a practice-based project and learn from visiting tutors who are working in areas such as online marketing, publishing, television and radio production. You will also undertake a series of online-workshop reflective tasks covering aspects of a range of professional skills to help you identify your strengths, develop your skills and prepare you for your future career.

Applied Humanities: Live Brief Learning

Understand the way that humanities disciplines and skills intersect with a range of professional working contexts. You will complete 36 hours of live-brief learning to gain first-hand experience of planning, delivery and evaluating a professional working brief set by an industry partner organisation. You will work as a group across 10 weeks alongside a tutor to design, deliver, present and evaluate the brief to industry standards. As well as conducting a reflective case study of your brief, you will complete a CV, cover letter, LinkedIn profile and undertake a recorded mock interview.

Core Modules

Dissertation

You will demonstrate a full range of skills, knowledge, and competencies developed over three years of study. This module provides an opportunity for you to choose and explore a field of study that has particularly engaged your interest.

Option modules may include:

New Media Geographies

You will use the work of Leeds-based filmmaker Louis Le Prince as a starting point for an exploration of the interpenetration of media, space and place. You will draw on a range of core themes such as modernism, postmodernism, the local and global, and the public and private to understand the transformation of material and symbolic spaces and places that media technologies now enable. Studying this module will place the new media debate in historical context and assess key transformative moments in media history and the implications this has for the cityscape. You will explore a range of media and cultural texts to examine the tensions between the representation and the lived experience of space and place, using Leeds and its cultural venues alongside your own personal media technologies throughout to interrogate critical and theoretical debates.

Genre Bending, Genre Blending

Build on your learning from years one and two to complete an in-depth study of genres, their relationship to visual texts, audiences and institutions, and role in everyday life. This module will investigate key studies in film and television and explore ways in which these studies can be linked with broader areas of cultural theory. You will be equipped with the skills to critically analyse models of genre in visual studies and explore the role of genre in making meaning from media texts.

Race, Culture & Media

Explore 'race' as a mechanism used to justify oppression, slavery and genocide. But what exactly is `race'? How do racisms manifest and change over time? How can we challenge racial discrimination within the media and wider society? These are some of the important questions that this module critically investigates. You will examine and understand the historical and contemporary significance of `race', ethnicity and culture before beginning to apply your knowledge to different aspects of popular culture such as film, TV, social media, advertising and fashion, music, and sport.

Sports Media

Examine the complex relationship between media and sport at both the industry and audience level. You will understand the role sports coverage plays across print, broadcast and online media in all contexts: local, regional, national and global.

Popular Music, Dissenting Cultures

Explore the historical connection between popular music and the dissenting voice through a series of indicative case studies beginning with bar-room ballads, soldiers' songs and worksong traditions that include non-Anglophone sources. You will also look at 20th-century modes of dissent including popular song, folk, rock, jazz and soul models. Alongside post-1970 modes of protest, you will look at the use and abuse of sound and technology such as radio and new music media to convey protest.

Lifestyle, Media, Identity

This module draws on recent social theory and on the work of Pierre Bourdieu as a means of examining how identities of class and gender are represented in contemporary media culture. You will use ethnographic case studies to look at the ways audiences consume and interact with lifestyle texts.

Media Celebrity & Film Stardom

Gain a critical introduction to celebrity studies and literature on film stardom. It also explores their recent cross-overs, hybridisation and yet continuing distinction in the contemporary world. Media celebrity gives focus to television, radio and new media; the dynamics of contemporary celebrity and the theory, analysis and research necessary to make sense of contemporary media celebrity. Particular use is made of the journal Celebrity Studies to explore the cutting edge of developments in ideas and research and methods. Historical contexts of film stardom are addressed yet the key focus is on recent developments of such stardom and research exploring its contemporary dynamics.

Digital & Media Cultures

Gain a critical overview of the historical, social, technological and cultural context surrounding digital media such as mobile devices, software apps and computer games. This module explores definitions and interpretations of the term 'digital reality' and how it is used in contemporary culture. You will be encouraged to critically engage with the issues surrounding digitally mediated experiences, especially in relation to interactivity, creativity, community and embodiment.

Contemporary Genres

Study contemporary genres with an emphasis on their innovativeness and their interaction with socio-cultural developments of the new millennium. You will engage with cutting edge texts to consider their innovations in and interactions with the contemporary world.

Cultural Crossings

Gain an understanding of the cultural connections between Africa and the African Diaspora through the analysis of a range of key literary works. Through close reading and analysis of the modules primary texts and the interrogation of postcolonial theoretical debates, you will be encouraged to explore the intersections and tensions between issues of race, gender, identity, education and language within the contexts of slavery, colonialism, migration and exile.

Life Writing

Study the autobiographical branch of creative non-fiction.You will complete a number of creative writing exercises and regular workshops to help you refine your work with feedback from fellow students and tutor feedback in class, online, verbally, and in writing. This module will see you read a range of exemplary works of autobiographical non-fiction with a critical eye to begin making connections between the techniques and approaches of published works and your own.

Masculinity in the long 18th Century

Engage with debates about masculinity which took place during the long 18th century. You will read a range of literary texts, including novels and poetry and focus on important models of 'manliness' which were prevalent in the period. This module will encourage you to situate texts in relation to historical context, and also to engage with theory.

Modern American Drama

Study a selection of American plays from the 1920s to the 1990s, focusing on the ways in which they dramatise the relationship between public issues and private concerns. This module investigate the ways in which American drama stages the enduring conflict between the search for individual happiness and the making of social and political bonds in a society based on an ideology of competitive individualism. The module will provide opportunities to refine your skills in collaborative work, oral presentation, guided research, and independent study.

Postcolonial Cities

Understand how writers and film-makers have imagined city spaces and identities in a range of postcolonial locations. Through an exciting range of literary and cinematic texts, and drawing on theories of urban space, place, and postcoloniality, you will explore issues that are of central importance to the world many of us live in today, including migrant labour, asylum seekers, refugees, and illegal immigrants; crime, conflict, and policing; memory, history, and urban space, class, gender, race, sexuality, and the postcolonial city amongst others.

The Gothic: Literature, Culture, Theory

Explore the development of the Gothic from its literary origins in the mid-18th century through to the mid-20th century. You will analyse the literary and cultural properties of Gothicism as it has shifted and diversified over this period and you will be encouraged to engage with Gothic novels alongside a range of forms across a wide cultural and historical spectrum. This module will also introduce you to theoretical and critical methods of analysing the Gothic such as Freud's concept of the uncanny and Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection.

Writing in a Time of Violence

Examine the relationships between writing and the Northern Ireland conflict (1966?1998). You will consider the ways in which writing responds to serious and prolonged political and social crisis and how it offers insights into issues normally considered to be purely within the realm of party or national politics. This module will enable you to understand the way literature negotiates the tensions between the demands of artistic integrity and independence and the pressures to speak out or to contribute towards the resolution of violent political division. You will also look at texts produced after 1998, a time of somewhat uncertain `peace and reconciliation?.