Activist Media Practice

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

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.

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.

Documenting the Real

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module enables you to develop your own practice through exercises and projects informed by a exploration of the history and contemporary evolution of the documentary in national and international contexts. You will examine and evaluate key theoretical formulations of the genre, with particular reference to questions of realism, representation, documentary's truth claims, ethics, and the impact of technological and industrial change on modes of production, distribution and consumption. you will interrogate concepts of documentary form through practical work with a view to enabling you to articulate a critical and creative approach to the relationship between practice and theory. The term culimates in a substantial project and accompanying critique which build on the experimentation and conceptual reading undertaken through the module.

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.

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.

New Developments in Digital Media 1a

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

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.

Photography: Documentary, Landscape, Politics

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

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.

Research and Project Development for Documentary Practice

30 credits
Spring teaching, year 1

This module focuses on the methods, processes and research techniques involved in the development of documentary projects from initial concept to distribution, with close analyses of how the different stages of a production are related and may be planned. 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 shooting of pilot material. You will study and undertake the development process in relation to acquiring a critical understanding of the markets and other exhibition possibilities for projects from galleries and festivals to the web and television. You will look at how to locate and utilise archives, contributors, interviewees, performers, locations and facilities. Key areas to be explored include scripting, budgeting, scheduling, copyright and contracts, with reference to contemporary and historical examples. You will also look critically at a range of production methods and ways of working through looking both at case studies of specific productions and companies. You may undertake short optional placements as part of your research for this unit.

Sound Environments (Theory)

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

This module examines sonic media creations and sound architectures, which may be physical, digital or hybrid, through alternating seminars and workshops. Seminars will provide interdisciplinary context and review a range of practices, while workshops afford a space for you to develop your ideas through practical work and theory. We consider the rapid development of interdisciplinary sound creation beyond the concert hall. Urban spaces as venues for creative work are considered alongside creative, curatorial and critical practices arising from networked sound technologies (streamed radio, distributed performance works, podcasts etc.) We also consider architectures where performance is integral. Earlier examples of the integration of architecture, space and organised sound include Sempers Fespielhaus in Bayreuth and LeCorbusier/Xenakis's Philips Pavilion. Today, digital processing opens up new performance possibilities including new notions of 'performative architectures'. You will write a term paper of 5,000 words in response to these ideas.

Theory and Practice of Interactive Media

30 credits
Autumn teaching, year 1

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.