• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1 credits

Digital technologies are re-wiring established media cultures, transforming traditional media systems (television, cinema) and introducing new media networks (internet, mobile devices). This module explores aspects of this techno-cultural transformation, through both a practical exploration of the form and by considering critical debates exploring the power, force, significance and form of a series of new media texts, artefacts and systems. The module situates practices related to these forms in a media studies/cultural studies perspective and with reference to multi-disciplinary debates.

The module consists of a series of theory orientated seminars and project based workshops that are designed to give you a practical introduction to a range of software authoring tools widely used within the media. Early sections of the course are taught through discrete group-based tasks. During the latter stages of the module, you produce your own short terms papers and creative projects investigating an aspect of a new media artefact or system.

The module will equip you with the necessary production skills and theoretical frameworks to schedule and deliver these projects. This grounding will provide you with basic authoring skills, will give you the capacity to develop your skills further through individual study, and will also equip them to think critically about the forms and contents of contemporary media systems.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module critically surveys developments in the expanding field of new media and explores the dynamics driving digital convergence, which is viewed as an industrial, political, social, economic and technological process. You will consider what drives convergence between previously discrete industries, technologies, and contents, and what limits convergence processes. You will explore key developments in the field of new media, including phenomena such as social networks, pervasive and locative technologies, new forms of knowledge organization and gathering.

The module is both theoretical and practical, with seminars exploring the areas outlined above through critical reading, while a series of workshops provide you with an understanding of core technologies underlying contemporary developments, and help you gain literacy in approaches to content development in this field.

• 60 credits
• All Year Teaching, Year 1 credits

The digital media dissertation consists of dissertation workshops, individual tutorials, participation in a 1-day research in progress conference and independent research and study. The dissertation builds on the taught courses to enable the development of a digital media dissertation chosen by you. The process entails the development of a research proposal and development of a bibliography in the first teaching block and execution of original and independent research in digital media cultures and practices in the later stages of work.

• 60 credits
• All Year Teaching, Year 1 credits

The digital media work placement is a student-led placement developed in close consultation with the course convener. The work placement is assessed via a portfolio and a 5,000 critical analysis (essay). Supported through dissertation workshops, tutorials, work in progress demonstrations, portfolio development and independent work, the course enables you to critically reflect on the role of digital media in the workplace.

Work Placement Submission Organisation:
Each work placement must be submitted as a portfolio including the critical analysis (essay)

The work placement portfolio must include:
Title page (including both the work placement title and critical essay title)
Summary of the work placement (approximately 100 words)
Letter from employer confirming the placement and your role
Project or work place brief which clearly sets out the nature of the company and the purpose of the placement, your role, duration, kind of work task entered into this can be written by you or included in the letter above
Reflective work placement diary or log (between 20- 40 entries of approximately 100-150 words) if you use a blog for this you will need to submit a printed version
Samples of work carried out with an indication of the extent of your responsibility and initiative
A critical essay that interrogates a dimension of the work placement and situates it in relation to digital media theory. This essay must follow the conventions of academic practice and make a contribution to the field of digital media theory.

Work placement process
Develop the work placement in consultation with the MA convenor (consultation needs to start late autumn term). If you don't have a company already in your sights then use the Linked in digital media alumni group, Wired Sussex, the enterprise and careers office (e.g. Enterprise Thursdays), Lighthouse, and the school of MFM. Network, meet people, get a sense of what is going on here, identify internships and set this up. We can help with CVs references - contacts - and recommended companies and internships but in the end you'll be the most significant person in setting this up.

The work placement should be conducted in the summer term but there can be flexibility to this. Agree the work placement with an employer and confirm this with the convenor. This requires that you have the agreement of the MA convenor. In addition you must obtain a letter confirming the details from the employer. Make sure this is very clearly organised with no last minute or word of mouth arrangements. The placement must be secure and agreed on both sides in advance.

From the Summer term onwards you take up the placement and keep a work diary and samples of your work for submission (check out any ownership issues).

Research the literature on working in the digital media industries and culture industries more generally.

Decide on the direction for your critical essay - this is not a review of your experience but should interrogate one dimension of the work place.

Research the academic literature that connects with your essay topic and use the workplace as your case study.

• 60 credits
• All Year Teaching, Year 1 credits

The practical project and written submission combines practice and theory in digital media. The requirement is for a practical project demonstrating digital media practice plus a 9,000 word extended essay. Through a combination of workshops, tutorials, project proposal development, and a work in progress conference the module enables you to develop an area of practice and to explore what they want to make and why.

The module supports you to develop the following:

• Research your topic and ideas
• Develop your initial ideas by reading about connected examples and critical work on the themes that you are looking at
• Look at other examples of practice with links to your own ideas
• Identify skills, materials, work process and timetable
• Is it doable? Is it coherent?
• Make a clear and realistic production plan and develop your work in relation to this
• Collect all the materials for submission together and decide how you are going to present these in a user friendly way
• Try out your practice on other people - can they access it, does it work in the ways that you intended make sure that you user-test the project and incorporate feedback

The accompanying written submission allows you to examine the theoretical questions that are suggested by the practical project. This project is the case study for an extended critical essay. Projects might examine questions about networked identity, interactivity, augmentation, memory, or digital methods and mapping, for example.

Questions include: does it demonstrate anything or experiment with anything? Does it throw up new research in the field of digital media? Develop your ideas into a structured and well informed argument that draws on the practical project as a case study or research.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module looks at what happens when media forms overlap and interact. What new forms are created? What histories can be drawn upon? How does collaboration inform creative practice?

Through the exploration of global concepts such as (but not limited to) narrative (and anti-narrative),  time and space,  dreams, and  memory, you  will experiment and collaborate in ways that reflect the formal and thematic implications of the concepts discussed. Topics may include: theorisations on hybrid forms; expanded cinema; history of collaborative practice and experimentation; interactivity; notions of the avant-garde; synesthesia; site-specific media installations; and immersive technology.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module seeks to explore relationships between the 'hardness' of technology and the 'softness' of the body. Moving through cyber-feminism and cyber-queer studies to critiques of social networking and reconfigurations of space - both public and private - the module seeks to engage with the diverse range of connections made daily between gendered subjects and technologies of media production and reception.

The aim is to provide you with an array of critical approaches that will allow you to discuss, analyse and critique such connections at a depth commensurate with M-Level work. While popularly conceived as an opposition to the organic, the corporeal and the subjective, technologies of mediation are intrinsically linked to and indelibly marked by issues of embodiment just as our understanding of the body has historically been coded through technologies of media production and reception.

Hollywood deploys the post-organic as a means of expressing contemporary cultural anxieties, while mobile phones are being used as a platform for gendered software. Online, the digital divide cuts across more than just geographical lines providing a space for both the re-inscription and subversion of hegemonic masculinity in multiple ways. This module addresses intersections, advances and ecologies across an array of media technologies and associated practices and cultures.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1 credits

You examine the forms and cultural contexts of a wide range of post-1945 non-Hollywood films and learn to analyse these films through studying theories of 'globalisation' and 'world cinema'.

Key topics may include:

• the development of art cinema
• New Waves
• Third Cinema
• postcolonial and indigenous cinemas
• cosmopolitanism
• the economics of film festivals
• modern film industries
• transnational cinemas.

You will study films from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Europe, as well as the relationships between these geopolitical regions and film movements.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1 credits

The module offers you the chance to explore at an advanced level a number of principal theories and methods within a cultural studies approach to media studies, and to consider how these shape the ways we might think about and research particular media industries, forms and issues. The theory element aims to introduce you to the key thinkers, traditions and debates in media and cultural studies and contributing disciplines. It investigates media as institutions and systems of representation and explores problems of production and consumption in a variety of social and geo-political contexts. You will be encouraged to prepare informal presentations and to engage in discussion with other members of the seminar group. Each week there will also be a short introduction to the following week’s topic in the lecture given by members of the Media and Film faculty.  The research element aims to develop a systematic and critical understanding of the practical, epistemological and ethical issues involved in conducting different kinds of media and cultural research. It also aims to make you methodologically self-conscious in your own research and written work.

• 30 credits
• Autumn Teaching, Year 1 credits

You study the historical, social and ideological work of the critical and creative industries, linking questions of culture to those of business, skill, technology, law and power.

Using frameworks such as the Frankfurt School, Cultural Studies and the digital humanities, you will address key debates in the field, including public-private relationships, intellectual property and access, consumption, fair trade, capital, time and value.

You will also consider the identities and lived experiences of those working in the sector and the meanings and possibilities for cultural innovation and promotion today.

Assessment is through pitch-presentation and an essay which will help you to develop industry skills.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

Social movements have historically struggled to get their message reported clearly, accurately and effectively through the lens of mainstream media. This has lead to the rise of alternative media practices and strategies to break through or unsettle the corporate and state-run media systems around the world. In order to challenge hegemonic discourses, activist media seeks to circumvent and dismantle traditional media's communicative strategies either through a disruptive aesthetic or through a reconfigured mode of civic engagement. Whether through radical leaflets, pirate radio, graffiti, protest music, performance art, activist videos, political documentaries, or social media and the internet, today's media landscape has evolved into a range of complex transnational networks that can be activated by independent counter-hegemonic media practices and expressions.

This module asks you to learn about various forms of cultural resistance (through readings, screenings, lectures and discussions) in order to to formulate an effective form of activist media provocation. This piece of activist media may take the form of a video, a website, site-specific performance, series of photographs, media prank, etc. You will also be asked to write a reflective essay that contextualises the finished piece within the conceptual debates of the module.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

First Person Film examines the ways in which film can be used as a personal, subjective medium, whether in fiction or documentary. Autobiographical or analytical, abstract or essayistic, professional or amateur, the first-person modality is increasingly present in all filmmaking practices. This module seeks to introduce you to theories of subjectivity whether from psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and/or literary theory considering the multiple theoretical incursions on the unity of the subject from Lacan to Butler and Nancy, and even the outright denial of the author (Barthes). We will explore questions of subjectivity such as: what constitutes a subject? from what position does s/he speak? and what or who is the 'I' that speaks? From this will arise further questions regarding the address: to whom does s/he speak and to what avail? who is being interpellated as audience? and how is identification constructed? The module will survey a range of first-person filmmaking, including the fictional autobiography, artist's experimental films, first-person documentary, the essay film, the home movie and the proliferation of YouTube direct address.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module explores the function, impact and current status of international journalism in an increasingly 'deterritorialised' media environment. The module will cover a comparative study of different news media systems in the world, the global news flow, institutional and professional issues in international news reporting, and the transformation in international journalism. It will also investigate the extent to which the audiences of global journalism might constitute alternative news networks and a putative global public sphere. New technologies from blogging to multiplatform television, twitter to online distribution, have also transformed the way news is made, disseminated and consumed. This module provides a critical consideration of the economics, culture, politics and sociology of journalism on a global scale. It examines fundamental issues in theories and practices of journalism and assesses ongoing developments in the area of journalism development, expansion, ethics and policies. The module aims to enable you to understand rapid technological changes and further internationalisation of journalism and the impact and consequences for future of journalism.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

The module focuses on the methods, processes and research techniques involved in the development of interactive media projects from initial concept to distribution -- with close analyses of how the different stages of a project are related, planned and connected to other media.

You will learn how to identify original sources and subjects with a view to creating a distinctive style and approach through practical exercises and the creation of a test or pilot project. The module will aid you in the development of the tools required to conceptually frame your interactive practice and help them communicate clearly and critically. During the module you will be given time to explore media projects in a variety of media and to consider the implications of those projects for your own work. You will be asked to study and discuss a number of different methods for the critical appraisal and theorisation of creative media projects across genres and will be expected to show initiative in undertaking a wide range of research to help develop your ideas and skills (viewing, listening, reading, observing, testing of techniques, etc).

The module is taught through a combination of presentations by the module tutor as well as individual students, group-critiques and one-on-one critiques. 

The module uses an application form containing questions drawn from industry and research council funding and commisioning calls as a structure for you to focus and present your work. At the end of the module, you will produce a proposal in the form of a contextualising essay answering all the questions on the application form, a work plan, a pilot project demonstrating the style and forms of itneraction in your project and a journal demonstrating how you have thought through you ideas, what has emerged from the discussion and in-class critiques. This combination of essay and pilot will be the framework for you self-directed project.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module explores key changes in the media over the past 120 years and how these have both reflected and shaped our cultural life in profound ways. 

By focusing on the emergence of 'new' media, such as radio and cinema in the early 20th century, television in the later 20th century and the internet on the eve of the 21st century, the module looks at key transitional moments in electronic media forms. It assesses how these media were the products of the cultural life of the time and how they subsequently enriched or, arguably, damaged this broader culture. 

The module is arranged in three sections that:

1. Explores the emergence of broadcasting and cinema between the 1890s and the 1930s, and discusses them in the context of new ideas in America and Europe about communication, mass culture and social psychology, and in the context of new artistic ideas such as modernism.
2. Explores the rise and spread of television between the 1940s and the 1990s, and discusses it in the context of wider debates about visual culture, the consumer society, the Cold War, the witnessing of global media events, national identity and globalisation
3. Tackles the spread since the 1990s of internet and social media, discussing them in the context of fierce international debates about the changing nature of knowledge and literacy and in particular the alleged creation of a 'distracted' mindset and a superficial and banal popular culture 

In drawing on specific case studies at each stage, the module aims to enhance your skills in using historical evidence, including written and audio-visual archives and oral history testimony, to develop arguments about media.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

The module offers you the chance to explore at an advanced level a number of principal theories and methods within a cultural studies approach to media studies, and to consider how these shape the ways we might think about and research particular media industries, forms and issues. The module begins with a focus on questions concerning media production, distribution and consumption. In the latter part of the module, we pay attention to a variety of methodological approaches which draw attention in particular to different ways of conceptualising the relation between the media and concepts like subjectivity, identity, perception and experience.

The theory element aims to introduce you to the key thinkers, traditions and debates in media and cultural studies and contributing disciplines. You will investigate media as institutions and systems of representation and explore problems of production and consumption in a variety of social and geo-political contexts. You will be encouraged to prepare informal presentations and to engage in discussion with other members of the seminar group. Each week there will also be a short introduction to the following week’s topic in the lecture given by members of the Media and Film faculty. The research element aims to develop a systematic and critical understanding of the practical, epistemological and ethical issues involved in conducting different kinds of media and cultural research. It also aims to make you methodologically self-conscious in your own research and written work.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

During the past fifty years the parameters of musical performance have expanded enormously. For John Cage all musical performance was inherently theatrical since it engaged both eye and ear. The visual aspect of musical performance, and the relationship of music to the spatial and to the embodied, has often been overlooked, and has led composers such as, eg, Cage himself, Mauricio Kagel and Heiner Goebbels to explore the extended theatricality of musical performance in directions beyond opera. Other artists like Meredith Monk, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson have restored the term 'opera' to refer to music theatre works that reconfigure the traditional media of opera (music, language, voice, sound, body, space, image) in new ways. More recently muscians such as Michel van der Aa have incorporated sonic and visual media in a live performance context.

The module will examine both theories and practices of experimental music theatre and multi-media performance through critical and practical engagement with the ideas that lie behind such practices. The module will be assessed by an essay, through which you will demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of key theories and practices in experimental music theatre or multi-media performance.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

During the past fifty years the parameters of musical performance have expanded enormously. For John Cage all musical performance was inherently theatrical since it engaged both eye and ear. The visual aspect of musical performance, and the relationship of music to the spatial and to the embodied, has often been overlooked, and has led composers such as, eg, Cage himself, Mauricio Kagel and Heiner Goebbels to explore the extended theatricality of musical performance in directions beyond opera. Other artists like Meredith Monk, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson have restored the term 'opera' to refer to music theatre works that reconfigure the traditional media of opera (music, language, voice, sound, body, space, image) in new ways. More recently musicians such as Michel van der Aa have incorporated sonic and visual media in a live performance context.

The module will examine both theories and practices of experimental music theatre and multi-media performance through critical and practical engagement with the ideas that lie behind such practices. The module will be assessed by an essay, through which you will demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of key theories and practices in experimental music theatre or multi-media performance.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module critically surveys developments in the expanding field of new media.  You will explore the dynamics driving digital convergence, viewed as an industrial, political, social, economic and technological process. You will ask what drives convergence between previously discrete industries, technologies, contents, and what limits convergence processes. You will also explore key developments in the field of new media, including phenomena such as social networks, pervasive and locative technologies, new forms of knowledge organisation and gathering. This version of the module is theoretical; seminars explore the areas outlined above through critical reading, seminar discussion and presentation, and you will also write a 5000-word term paper.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module introduces you to a wide range of work in the documentary and landscape genres, both historical and contemporary, but with an emphasis on `conceptual documentary' and contemporary politicised landscape photography. You will also focus on the problematics of documentary and photojournalism, such as ethical issues and questions of efficacy, and the use of text and sound in documentary publications, gallery installations and websites.

The module will be taught through tutor-led discussion in seminars, and regular `group crits' of student work-in-progress in the lab. Early on in the module you will conceive and research your own idea for a photographic project, and start producing images for class viewing. The module will equip you with the necessary production & critical skills to continue working independently on your projects during the Easter vacation before the assessment deadline in early Summer.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module offers you the chance to explore lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer contributions to, and perspectives on, the key fields of popular culture, including film, television, the press, popular music, fashion and style. Topics for detailed study will include lesbian representation in mainstream television genres; cinematic homosexualities and their historical context; lesbian and gay 'community television'; contemporary lesbian and gay magazines and newspapers; queer pop from David Bowie to the Pet Shop Boys and beyond; sexuality and style politics; and the pleasures and problematics of camp.

You will investigate issues of representation, consumption and interpretation; unravel debates over stereotyping, subcultures and sensibilities; and ask whether a specifically 'queered' critique of the existing academic discourses used in the study of popular culture is conceptually feasible and/or politically desirable. You can expect to sharpen and deepen your skills in interdisciplinary cultural analysis, and there will be a particular emphasis on a self-reflexive examination of (y)our own popular cultural tastes and practices, exploring the connections and contradictions between theoretical accounts of popular images and forms and our experiential investments in them as consumers located in (or interested in) sexual minorities.

The approach on this module is unrepentantly interdisciplinary - there is no overarching theoretical model to which you will be obliged to subscribe. Students with or without backgrounds in cultural studies will be made equally welcome.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module explores the intersection of race, culture and analogue/digital media.

It begins by looking at the origins of these debates and introduces how their transformation can be approached through discourse and performance.

It then moves to explore key theoretical lenses through which this module’s topic can be engaged, including a discussion of:

• whiteness
• class
• gender
• post-colonialism

Following this conceptual grounding, the course explores a number of contemporary debates that highlight different transformations of race, culture and the media.

These include explorations of the War on Terror, drone warfare, urban multiculture (sound systems, pirate radio and YouTube music videos), #blacklivesmatter, and debates on post-race. Through these means the module complements the School’s offerings in the areas of media, digital media, culture and social change in addition to complementing Global Studies options.

Subjects may include:

• origins and transformations: race, culture and media
• whiteness
• race and class
• race, gender and difference  
• post-colonialism and orientalism
• the War on Terror: Twin Towers to Jihadi John
• drone warfare
• urban multiculture: from analogue to digital
• #blacklivesmatters
• post-race and rehumanistion

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module examines the interplay between body and cinema. This includes not only the representation of the body in films but also how the body of the spectator and cultural formations of the body influence and shape cinema itself. You will draw on a wide range of theoretical frames (including film studies, psychoanalysis, gender studies, philosophy, feminism and cultural theory) to consider a variety of themes including: the body as resistance and force; notions of beauty and the sublime; the hysterical body; discipline and punishment; the body as desire. The module will also consider recent developments in film, including the idea of cyber-cinema and its impact on the body.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module is not about advertising per se or the marketing 'tools' usually suggested by the term promotion but an exploration of 1) how advertising has crossed over into domains beyond the commercial with an alleged collapse of boundaries, and 2) how branding seems increasingly to take over aspects of the lifeworld. According to Andrew Wernick, from whom the term promotional culture is borrowed, advertising 'has come to shape not only culture's symbolic and ideological contents, but also its ethos, texture and constitution' (1991: viii).

The module is about understanding contemporary promotional culture via a grasp of historical developments. These include the development of the capitalist market, the rise of a sign-culture and women as key consumers.

The module opens up theoretical ideas and debate via a series of case studies which may include 'the department store', 'spin', 'celebrity politics', PR journalism, 'the spectacular university', 'the branded self'. The questions it is concerned with include: does it matter that commercial advertising has been overtaken by branding and promotion extending into politics, public services, the arts and charity organisations? Does this mark a problematic undermining of a 'public sphere'? Or can the 'inauthenticity' of promotional culture be democratically enabling in so far its practices lay open the malleability of social life? Do the developments of other modernities (eg. South/East Asia) suggest we should think about the rise of the market, branding and promotion in different ways than is suggested in a Western literature?

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

This module addresses the changing scope and experiences of working in the creative industries.

Work is situated in the context of neoliberal economic-political developments and the discursive shift from ‘cultural’ to ‘creative’ industries. It focuses on your own work lives and empirical case studies (from sociology, media, urban and cultural studies) to explore and understand the tensions and contradictions of such work: competitive and collaborative, creative and repetitive, passionate and precarious.

Critically it draws on a range of ideas including immaterial labour and precarity; field, capitals and cultural intermediary; emotional/affective labour; governmentality and individualisation; prosumer/co-creation and ‘gifted’ labour.

• 30 credits
• Spring Teaching, Year 1 credits

The module will cover topics including:

• The essentials of storytelling: what do all stories have in common?
• What is a Screenplay?: is it a Blueprint? Literature? How is it formatted?
• The restorative act structure
• Alternatives to the restorative act structure
• Creating convincing characters
• What is motivation?: how does it manifest?
• Dialog and the art of subtext
• Writing visually: writing stage direction for spec scripts
• Script reports: how to analyse a script
• Script readings and feedback