Digital media today affect all aspects of everyday, professional and public life, and understanding its significance requires interdisciplinary knowledge. Based at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) at the University of Warwick, the MA Programme in Digital Media and Culture is an advanced one-year postgraduate degree that addresses the role of digital technologies, media, and infrastructures in relation to culture, economics, politics, and society.
Drawing on multiple disciplines, the degree supports critical approaches to key topics in digital culture, including:
- Platformisation
- Participatory culture
- Media activism
- Digital labour and political economy
- Privacy and surveillance
- Behavioural design
- Data critique
- Environmental sustainability
Our teaching combines theory, research methods, and creative practice. By selecting from a diverse offering of modules, students will have, for instance, the opportunity to learn data analytics and visualisation, to engage with speculative design and media art, and to discuss concepts in fields ranging from software studies to environmental humanities.
Based at a research centre promoting cutting-edge scholarship in these areas, our degree is primarily research-driven. MA students will be encouraged to select their own path through the degree and contribute to the culture of CIM by attending invited talks, participating in workshops, and organising interdisciplinary symposiums.
Core modules
Approaches to the Digital
Computer networks, devices and infrastructure today undergrid nearly all form of societal, political and cultural life. Police and hospitals, schools and transport, traffic lights and government bodies, elections, museums and artists rely on software systems for their everyday performance.
Whether used for tracking, organising, evaluating, creating, designing or communicating, digital technology and its use irreversibly transforms the fabric of everyday life, defining the horizon of the future. Given the widespread implications of such ‘digitalization,’ this module offers an introduction to how different disciplines beyond computer science have approached the digital methodologically and epistemologically.
Digital Objects, Digital Methods
Emerging digital research methods also become means through which such objects are sustained, thus co-creating dynamic objects, such as networks, databases, platforms, data visualizations, maps and many other new forms of social, cultural and public life.
This module offers an insight into these new and emerging societal and cultural entities and methodologies. We will take a number of digital objects relevant to the social sciences and humanities and analyse them using digital methods, including network analysis, software studies, content analysis, issue mapping, and others. Digital media research sits alongside social studies of computational technologies and cultural theory as the fields that emerging digital methods take inspiration from.
The module is open to students from all disciplines; no specific prior knowledge is required.
Dissertation
The CIM Masters dissertation is a piece of work (10,000 words) which addresses a single student-selected subject. The topic may concern any aspect of the subject matter of their Masters programme.
The dissertation is an exercise in independent study in which you can pursue a topic of interest. It allows you to further develop a range of independent research skills, including literature search and bibliography construction, theoretical argument, and generation/appraisal of empirical evidence.
Optional modules
Optional modules can vary from year to year. Example optional modules may include:
- Media Activism
- Urban Resilience, Disasters and Data
- User Interface Cultures: Design, Method and Critique
- Visualisation
- Digital Cities
- Digital Sociology
- Ethnography, Knowledge and Practice
- Ecological Futures: Science, Culture and Media
- Data Science Across Disciplines: Principles, Practice and Critique
