What you will study
This course is designed to provide a critical overview and survey of today's media landscape and media environments. The coursework is a mixture of academic research and media practice, allowing you to build a wholesome professional portfolio of media projects.
The classroom teaching is supported by extracurricular activities including journalism lectures, publishing masterclasses, marketing and media industries events, and organised educational visits to media hubs in and around London.
You'll have to take three compulsory modules, including a dissertation, worth 120 credits in total, and then choose from two optional modules worth 30 credits each. In total you'll have to complete 180 credits.
Please note that this is an indicative list of modules and is not intended as a definitive list.
Modules
The compulsory core modules provide you with a comprehensive grounding in the theoretical and empirical approaches to studying media institutions, texts and communication practices.
With a broad choice of option modules, you can specialise in research areas that interest you, and examine various media industries and communication practices within their historical, economic, political and social contexts.
Core modules
Media and Communication Dissertation
60 credits
This module enables students to demonstrate their ability to undertake a sustained piece of independent project in media and communication at an advanced level on a topic of their choice agreed in conjunction with their dissertation supervisor. Dissertations may be based on some primary research into a particular case study, archive or canon in combination with an engagement with secondary material, criticism or literature review. Students can either undertake a standard dissertation (12- 15,000 words) or a practice-based dissertation (plus a maximum of 5,000 word reflection on practice and/ or the creative process). The second part of MD7001 provides the teaching for this module, and covers research skills such as constructing a proposal, editing and composition, reflection on practice, referencing, and on online and electronic research methods.
Media and Globalisation
30 credits
The culture of the West is no longer the sole driver of globalisation. All nations around the world are enjoined to compete on multiple media platforms and cultural arenas where culture and economy are conjoined across globalized communications networks. At the same time, even as national cultures seek to position their ‘brands' in the global ‘marketplace', they are challenged by trans- and post-national corporations, particularly new media companies among the wealthiest in the world.
The rise of popular social and nationalist movements contesting the inequalities represented by these elites take place, similarly, across global media networks. This module explores the current debates around the cultural politics of the new globalization that is continually being transformed by the radical changes being introduced by technological ‘disruptions' that have collapsed familiar spatial and temporal dimensions of the world. Through addressing pertinent theoretical perspectives and case studies from different parts of the world, the module examines the political, social, cultural and moral issues that arise in the context of the new realities and conflicts being produced and facilitated by globalized media and communication.
From Mass Media to New Media: Theories, Approaches, Applications
30 credits
This module provides a broad-based exploration of the conceptual history of electronic and digital media technologies and their effect on society, culture and politics. Contemporary case studies from everyday media are used to evaluate the usability of different theoretical frameworks discussed in the first part of the module. These are organised into three major topics.
1) The transition to managerial governance, cultural politics, consumer cultures and the media industries.
2) The analogue-digital interface in media aesthetics and media art.
3) Emerging trends in theorising new media and digital cultures.
Optional modules
Freedom, Censorship and Subversion
30 credits
This one semester module is an elective primarily offered to students taking an MA in Media & Communication or an MA in Film but it is also relevant to those taking postgraduate degrees in politics, political communication, human rights and conflict. It deals with some of the most hotly debated issues in different societies about how to balance core freedoms (expression, press and protest) with the state protecting what and who may be potentially harmed by certain forms of expression through censorship. Even then these remain open debates as new forms of subversion and resistance emerge with new technologies or through the use of the body to express protest. The module explores these at two levels. The first outlines different approaches to and principles governing censorship depending on whether expression is through images; words, ideas and beliefs; information; and action. These are then explored in more depth in sessions that draw on staff specialisms here, for instance, in film, news, information-privacy, protest movements, etc.
Cinematic Animals: Monsters, Beasts, and Humans on Film
30 credits
This module examines the way in which the genres of Horror (and Cartoon Comedy) splice animals and humans together to create frightening (or comical) visions of both. There is a long history in cinema of humanising the animal (‘anthropomorphism') and animalising the human (‘theriomorphism'), through hybrids of animal and human beings (werewolves, insect-men, lizard men), or animal and human behaviour, as when feeding (vampires, zombies, cannibals) or in political behaviour (invading alien monsters). We will analyse the narrational methods, cinematic technologies, ethics, and politics of these films by looking at contemporary examples including The Fly, Red Dragon, District 9, Antz!, and Beauty and The Beast.
Creating Magazines: Content and Context
30 credits
This module aims to provide you with the practical skills necessary to work as successful journalists, underpinned by an understanding of the constraints and tensions inherent in magazine offices, and online operations developing in a changing industry. You will examine the structure of this fast-expanding sector, with a particular emphasis on the role played by freelance journalists and production staff in generating content.
You will have the opportunity to acquire the core skills for producing online and print publications which will include the use of social media/analytics/branding/research and interview techniques. You will be equipped with multimedia reporting, production and design skills in demand in the journalism industry and will be confident about telling stories through video and audio as well as the written word.
The module offers valuable opportunities for you to work together to produce and run your own group website, and magazine, developing your teamwork skills and experiencing the reality of different job roles in a multimedia operation. This classroom experience will provide a valuable introduction to the two-week work placement all students will be required to undertake as part of the module.
Special Study: Multi-Platform Political Communication
30 credits
This special study module is an introduction to political communication from the lens of hybrid media environments. It enables students to examine the new research agenda and the emerging practices in this field of study beyond the limits of the media effects approach applied to traditional or mass media. The topics covered on the module are partly linked with the research interests and projects of teaching staff and will enable students to benefit from research-informed teaching in their final year of study. Students will undertake extensive exploration of the new challenges facing political communication in multi-platform contexts, drawing on pertinent theoretical debates and current media stories. Students will deliver an assessed presentation, and produce an extended and focused practice-based or essay-based project on a particular topic negotiated with the module leader.
Marketing and Communication in Publishing
30 credits
This module considers the various individuals and communities (colleagues, shareholders, retailers, distributors, agents, customers and other stakeholders) involved in the business of content sale and delivery, and how to disseminate information and influence behaviour in order to promote effective marketing and sales.
The module will enable students to understand marketing and sales principles, and develop associated skills in applying them to meet the demands of modern publishing.
Television Production
30 credits
This is a practical module designed to enable you to experience and work in a professionally-focused industry environment, and develop television production skills such as multi-camera operation, sound, mixing and teleprompting.
You will learn how to work and operate a professional broadcast studio as well as developing TV production skills. In addition, you will build on and reinforce employability skills such as problem-solving, time management and dependability sought by employers looking to fill graduate positions. You will be encouraged to reflect on your professional practice and critically evaluate your teaching and learning contributions.
This module builds practical and theoretical knowledge and skills towards the creation of a final year production piece. You can make either TV drama or TV documentary but must use the production studio for at least part of their production. This caveat will contribute to the wide range of skills that the industry demands of graduates.
Optional placement year
The Professional Placement module is a core module for those students following a masters programme that incorporates professional placement learning, following completion of 120 credits. It provides students with the opportunity to apply their knowledge and skills in an appropriate working environment, and to develop and enhance key employability skills and subject specific professional skills in their chosen subject.
You may wish to use the placement experience as a platform for your subsequent major project module, and can use it to help inform your decisions about future careers.
