MA, 1 year full time/2 years part time
Subject overview
In the Department of Media and Film at Sussex:
- we offer exceptional opportunities for graduate study, with innovative taught MA degrees and a range of supervision for MPhil and PhD research in theory and practice
- we have a thriving research culture in media theory and practice, with around 50 research students working alongside faculty each year
- we are rated joint 8th in the UK for research in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). 100 percent of our research was rated as recognised internationally
- we are ranked in the top 10 places to study in the UK in The Times Good University Guide 2013, in the top 15 in the UK in The Sunday Times University Guide 2012 and The Complete University Guide 2014, in the top 25 in the UK in The Guardian University Guide 2014, and in the top 100 in the world for communication and media studies in the QS World University Rankings 2013
- we offer opportunities to make practical creative projects alongside conceptual and theoretical study
- we have dedicated state-of-the-art digital production facilities and links to the thriving creative and media scene in Brighton
- we are home to the Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies and the innovative Centre for Material Digital Culture.
Programme outline
This broad-based MA offers you an exciting opportunity to address important and challenging questions about forms of communication and culture in contemporary globalised society.
Via lectures and small-group seminars taught by active researchers in a highly rated and internationally acclaimed department, the core modules provide a comprehensive engagement with key thinkers, traditions and debates in media and cultural studies, bridging both the arts and social sciences. They equip you with the critical and methodological skills to research a wide range of media – print and broadcasting, the film and music industries, the internet and other social media.
This MA is aimed at both media and cultural studies graduates who wish to advance their study and those with a relevant undergraduate degree in the humanities or social sciences who wish to enter the field for the first time.
You study the media as institutions, texts and systems of representation and communication, exploring their role in the exercise of political, social and cultural power in a variety of contexts:
- you will develop a rich portfolio of skills in critical and textual analysis, creative thinking and high-level research planning and methods
- you can choose from a wide variety of options, allowing you to define the shape of your degree
- you are encouraged and trained to set your own research agenda, culminating in your dissertation.
We continue to develop and update our modules for 2013 entry to ensure you have the best student experience. In addition to the course structure below, you may find it helpful to refer to the 2012 modules tab.
The MA is structured either around a core module and one option in each of the first two terms, or, for graduates in media and cultural studies, there is the alternative of taking two options per term. In the final term, you undertake a supervised research-led dissertation on a topic of your choice.
The core modules Media Theory and Research and Media, Communication and Culture offer an opportunity to study thematic, conceptual, methodological and institutional issues. At the centre is a concern with communication as a process: with the production, consumption and regulation of social and cultural definitions, meanings and values in modern society and in everyday life. Although they concentrate on contemporary media and culture, the concerns are also historical and extend to wider social and political processes.
In the autumn and spring terms, you take either a core module and one option, or two options, which may include Approaches to Film Noir • Cinema: Histories, Institutions and Technologies • Cultural Identities and Social Practices • Culture, Experience, History • Curating Film Culture • Emotion, Representation and Culture • Feminism and Film • Gender and Representation • Gender, Sexuality and Digital Culture • Global Cinema • Global Journalism • Inside Hollywood • Latin American Cinema • Media Audiences • Media Histories and Political Change • Media, Technology and Everyday Life • Promotional Culture • Queering Popular Culture • Rethinking European Cinema • Science, Communication and Culture • The Cinematic Body.
Assessment
All modules are assessed by 5,000-word term papers. You are also required to submit a dissertation of 18,000 words.
Current modules
Please note that these are the core modules and options (subject to availability) for students starting in the academic year 2012.
Core modules
Options
Cultural Identities: Social Practices
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
How do our beliefs create material realities? This module examines discourses: fields of meaning within culture that produce and reinforce identity, subculture, community, and everyday social practises. Using a range of critical approaches from Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, Beverley Skeggs and Sara Ahmed, you will study key social paradigms such as space, gender and sexuality, habitus, emotion, politics and protest, religion and spirituality.
You look at contemporary subjectivities and everyday life, thinking about the social effects of cultural narratives embodied within (for example) emotions such as shame, new spiritualities and paranormal culture/occultures, global/local political resistances, contemporary relations of power and their social embodiments, and queer activisms and utopias. You will consider how such discourses carve out meanings and behaviours in individuals, and how they are contested, resisted, and redefined.
Using material drawn from cultural politics and social change, you will explore how people perform, and/or are performed by, cultural narratives, and how the politics of representation can be challenged by cultural activisms.
Expanded Media: Forms and Practices
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
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.
Film Studies: Theories and Methods
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
This module presents you with a mapping of the intellectual histories, key approaches and theoretical debates within the field of film studies. You will begin with early debates around realism and auteurism, moving to genre theory and ideological and structuralist approaches. Later sessions deal with psychoanalytic and feminist approaches. The module finishes with contemporary critiques of both the textual focus of traditional film studies and the concept of representation itself. Throughout, the concern is to link theoretical approaches with methodologies inviting you to explore, critique and reflect on the discipline's intellectual history.
Gender and Representation
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
This module addresses the gendered nature of both mainstream and minority discourses and representations in history and culture. It will introduce you to the conceptual and theoretical frameworks which facilitate understanding of the production and reception of powerful representations of masculinities, femininities and sexualities, and how gendered discourses operate in different spheres.
The first part of the module concentrates on key issues in feminist and queer theories, focusing specifically on the concepts of gender, representation, and constructions of masculinities, femininities and sexualities.
The second part of the module considers these theoretical constructs within the frame of various media-centred case studies. We will also examine the way in which theories of gender and representation across a number of academic disciplines are located within specific cultural and historical contexts which themselves are both structurally and institutionally gendered.
Global Journalism A
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
This module sets out to explore the role of journalism in an increasingly deterritorialised media environment and in an era when 'the global' has to inserted as a category of news between 'foreign' and 'domestic' stories. The module will examine information flows and institutional relations in the coverage of global issues such as climate change, the "war on terror", and the global economy. It will also investigate questions of transnational news production, and the extent to which the audiences of global journalism might constitute a putative global public sphere. One aspect of this discussion centres around the ethics of covering stories of 'distant suffering'. The areas outlined above are explored through critical reading, seminar discussion and presentation, and then via the written assessment.
Media Audiences
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
On this module you will explore and evaluate the broad tradition of critical research into media audiences which has developed over the past two decades. You will consider, through an exploration of this tradition, how we should understand the nature of media texts, and in particular how meanings, uses, (dis)pleasures and responses are produced in the complex interactions between audiences and texts, in specific social settings. This module gives you the chance - and to develop the skills to be able - to carry out a small piece of original audience research. Key methods encountered on the module include interviews, semi-structured focus group discussions, open-ended questionnaires, respondents' letters, and participant observation.
Media Theory and Research
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
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.
Media, Culture and Communication
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
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.
Media, Technology and Everyday Life
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
On this module you will explore historical and contemporary examples of technological innovation within the public and private spaces of the everyday. You will considers major theoretical approaches to the study of media technology and ask how a variety of new media forms – including television, radio, mobile communications, the internet and computers - are socially shaped, re-shaped, and experienced, and how everyday life itself might be theorised and/in relation to media. By the end of the module, you will have developed a critical awareness of your own relationship to media and information technologies, and be able to relate your experience to wider empirical evidence and historical and theoretical perspectives.
Promotional Culture
30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1
This module allows you to understand and analyse contemporary promotional imagery. You will get to grips with its social and economic underpinning, and with the cultural and political impact it might have on our lives. Taking familiar case studies that build on knowledge of your home country - billboards, mainstream and alternative politics, celebrity culture, the shopping mall - you will use these as a way into current debates and issues about promotion. Whilst engaging with contemporary processes you will also gain an historical understanding of them, exploring the relation between modernity and postmodernity and the consequent challenge to the binary oppositions of entertainment and information, consumer and citizen, private interests and the public sphere represented by promotional culture.
Queering Popular Culture
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
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.
The Cinematic Body
30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1
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.
Entry requirements
UK entrance requirements
A first- or upper second-class undergraduate honours degree in media, film or another discipline in the humanities or social sciences. We also welcome applications from those with relevant professional experience.
Overseas entrance requirements
Please refer to column A on the Overseas qualifications.
If you have any questions about your qualifications after consulting our overseas
qualifications table, contact the University.
E pg.enquiries@sussex.ac.uk
Visas and immigration
Find out more about Visas and immigration.
English language requirements
IELTS 6.5, with not less than 6.5 in Writing and 6.0 in the other sections. Internet TOEFL with 92 overall, with 21 in Listening, 22 in Reading, 24 in Speaking and 25 in Writing.
For more information, refer to English language requirements.
Additional admissions information
If you are a non-EU student and your qualifications (including English language) do not yet meet our entry requirements for admission directly to this degree, we offer a Pre-Masters entry route. For more information, refer to Pre-Masters.
For more information about the admissions process at Sussex
For pre-application enquiries:
Student Recruitment Services
T +44 (0)1273 876787
E pg.enquiries@sussex.ac.uk
For post-application enquiries:
Postgraduate Admissions,
University of Sussex,
Sussex House, Falmer,
Brighton BN1 9RH, UK
T +44 (0)1273 877773
F +44 (0)1273 678545
E pg.applicants@sussex.ac.uk
Related programmes
Fees and funding
Fees
Home UK/EU students: £5,5001
Channel Island and Isle of Man students: £5,5002
Overseas students: £13,0003
1
The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
2
The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
3
The fee shown is for the academic year 2013.
To find out about your fee status, living expenses and other costs, visit further financial information.
Funding
The funding sources listed below are for the subject area you are viewing and may not apply to all degrees listed within it. Please check the description of the individual funding source to make sure it is relevant to your chosen degree.
To find out more about funding and part-time work, visit further financial information.
Sussex Graduate Scholarship (2013)
Region: UK, Europe (Non UK), International (Non UK/EU)
Level: PG (taught)
Application deadline: 16 August 2013
Open to final year Sussex students who graduate with a 1st or 2:1 degree and who are offered a F/T place on an eligible Masters course in 2013.
Faculty interests
Our internationally respected research explores questions around the materialities, technologies and politics of cultural forms and formations. Researchers work on, across and through a range of media: film, television, radio, photography, and ‘new’ and interactive forms.
They specialise within three interlocking themes:
Cultural histories/cultural politics
Research is focused on histories of journalism and the public sphere and the relationships between cultures, technological change and social and political change. It also encompasses an analysis of the construction of national identities and borders, and their institutionalised histories and marginalised others.
Media technology, form and experience
The relationships between technology, form and experience are explored through studies of techno-cultural innovation, sense perception, and embodied experience. A key aspect, which builds on expertise in the Department, is the development of new critical frameworks for the exploration of new media forms and practices as they emerge in everyday life.
The politics of representation
The Department of Media and Film has long been a centre of excellence for research on gender, sexuality and representation. We continue to build on this through a concern with the images and narratives of popular culture, and the ways in which these construct identities and play on pleasures, fears and desires.
Individual research interests are briefly described below.
Dr Caroline Bassett New media technologies, most recently working on narrative and new media. Published widely on new media and gender.
Dr Michael Bull Works extensively on the nature of auditory experience. Specialises in the work of The Frankfurt School.
Wilma de Jong Researcher, scriptwriter, director and producer. Media and activism, independent production, documentary and news.
Andrew Duff Production tutor. Specialises in exploring reactive and interactive multimedia, experimental digital and analogue audio.
Melanie Friend Documentary photographer. Representations of conflict and trauma, asylum detention in the UK.
Lee Gooding Senior production tutor. Has produced a range of programmes for a number of organisations.
Adrian Goycoolea Film-maker addressing issues of identity, exploring the intersections of personal memory with social and political histories.
Dr Ben Highmore The culture of daily life. Author of A Passion for Cultural Studies (2009); Ordinary Lives (2009).
Dr Gholam Khiabany Academic leader of the journalism degrees.
Dee Kilkelly Production tutor. Co-runs APT new media, a collective responsible for art events and club nights in and around Brighton.
Mary Agnes Krell Media artist whose work spans performance, digital media and narrative practices.
Dr Kate Lacey Gender, media and the public sphere. Has published widely on radio history and theory. Current work focuses on listening publics.
Andy Medhurst Post-war British popular culture; media representations of masculinity and homosexuality.
Dr Monika Metykova Lecturer in media communications/journalism studies.
Dr Sharif Mowlabocus Digital cultures, gender, sexuality and representation. Author of Gaydar Culture (2010).
Professor Sally R Munt Queer studies, cultural studies, identity and emotion. Co-author of Queer Spiritual Spaces: Sexuality and Sacred Places (2010).
Dr Kate O’Riordan Cultural studies of science and technology. Author of Human Cloning and the Media: from Science Fiction to Science Practice (2008); The Genome Incorporated (2010).
Dr Martin Spinelli Produces award-winning literary and experimental radio projects. Interests include radio art and sound poetry, and cultural studies.
Lizzie Thynne Film-maker who has exhibited widely in broadcast, festival and gallery contexts. Interests include auto/biography and surrealism.
Janice Winship Published on women’s magazines, advertising and consumption in the 20th century.
Kirk Woolford Media artist who engages in practice-led research to explore concepts that defy textual representation.
Careers and profiles
Our graduates have gone on to pursue careers in the media and cultural industries, publishing, research, teaching, journalism, PR, and development work, and some have gone on to further study.
Linda's student perspective
‘I chose to study for an MA in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex because it has an excellent international reputation and a fantastic learning atmosphere that enabled me to thrive. Sussex inspires each student to engage with their learning and become a part of the University community. Brighton is also, of course, a vibrant and exciting place to live.
‘The interdisciplinary approach to academic study I experienced at Sussex enabled me to learn about the social and individual aspects involved in interpreting the mass media. I’ve gained the analytical skills to consider how they work and to recognise my role and position in the world informed by both Chinese and English cultural perspectives.
‘After I graduated I returned to China and gained my current job as a Student Counsellor working with a study abroad agent, using my knowledge of English culture and life experience in the UK.’
Linda Huang
MA in Media and Cultural Studies graduate
For more information, visit Careers and alumni.
School and contacts
School of Media, Film and Music
The School of Media, Film and Music combines rigorous critical and historical studies of media, film, music and culture with opportunities for creative practice in a range of musical forms and the media of photography, film, radio, and interactive digital imaging.
School of Media, Film and Music,
University of Sussex, Falmer,
Brighton BN1 9RG, UK
T +44 (0)1273 873481
E mfm@sussex.ac.uk
School of Media, Film and Music
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