Culture and the Everyday

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module explores 'doing culture' in everyday life. If the 'everyday' refers to the mundane, the unremarkable - to the forms of life routinely taken for granted - it is also through the practices of everyday life that we experience who we are, how our lives are invested with meanings and we engage with change. In the modern world (especially in the developed north), it is difficult to think about cultures of everyday life without also considering the media: its contribution to the structuring of daily life; its varied use in daily life; and its discursive construction and engagement with aspects of everyday life. The module introduces critical approaches to everyday life, including those engaging with media, before concentrating on a series of case studies. Topics are likely to be organised around the twin foci of 'embodiment' and 'mobility' and include, for example: getting dressed, meal times, time for love, driving and shopping. You will have the opportunity to reflect on your own experiences and to consider, where appropriate, media in relation to everyday life. In addition to this the module will also provide historical and cross-cultural material and encourage study of other cultures.

Debates in Media Studies A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

If the emphasis in Introduction to Media Studies 1A and 1B was on how media matters in our social world, in this module the stress is on different theoretical approaches to the study of media and the debates circulating around those approaches. Media can be analysed as ritual, (global) industry, meaning-maker, technology, dreamworld, everyday life, work place, or sensual pleasure machine. Focus can switch from media production and organisation, to analysis of media output, to exploration of consumption and use, to the bigger issue of media in society.

In carving a way through this complexity the module will introduce you to a few key frameworks – for example political economy, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, feminist media theory – and alert you to how differences of approach have emerged depending on the specific medium or cultural form (radio, TV, cinema, internet, newspaper, advertising, music, etc). However, a repeated reference point for the module is the cultural output of media and methods analysis, especially modes of textual analysis.

Digital Environment

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Digital media saturates everyday life, re-organises cultural productions of all kinds, and re-mediates the teaching and learning environments which you will inhabit at Sussex. The module aims to examine this digital environment through both practical and theoretical perspectives. It enables you to understand and use digital tools to enhance and explore your study and to take a critically informed stance on your existing practices.

The module examines developments in new media with a particular emphasis on different uses of digital media, enabling you to make distinctions between kinds of material, genres and platforms. Through a practical approach it equips you to use digital media confidently to both enhance study and to understand the digital environment as media and cultural form.

The module covers topics including data visualisation, searching for resources, citation, catalogues, mapping, archiving, using social media, privacy, copyright and surveillance, digital media as a research area (e.g. how to research and ethics of researching Tweets/Wikipedia/social forums) and the politics of software.

The module will draw upon a range of digital research platforms, including those owned and/or subscribed to by the university in order to provide a solid foundation for you to embark on future independent research.

Questioning the Media A

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces the study of media forms, texts and systems and their contribution to social life. You will begin to explore the breadth of media studies through attention to the ways in which media matter. In what ways, and how significant are the media in the formation of individual identities and in the practices of everyday life? In the more public world, to what extent are media key to providing knowledge and enabling the debate necessary to the practices of democracy? The module enables you to build on your own experiences of media as a consumer and user. But it also encourages critical attention to how the field of media studies has historically been forged: through argument and contestation between different academic approaches and disciplines.

The module ranges across media and genres, engaging with both contemporary and historical material. Topics may include: audience pleasure and identity; representations and power; development of different broadcasting systems; the social impact of the rise of digital media.

Key terms may include: pleasure, identity, representation, semiotics, power, ideology, hegemony, discourse and subject, public service, public sphere, news values, networks, cultural and political citizenship.

Creative Production: Digital Media

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's course will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to interactive media and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You learn key processes and techniques involved in producing a simple web project. You will work individually to realise set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed website to a specified brief.

Creative Production: Digital Media

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module will introduce you to using a range of desktop publishing tools in the creation of visual information design. You will learn, and critically reflect upon, key processes and techniques involved with visual research, page layout and composition incorporating the use of graphics and text. You will also work individually to produce a series of digital artefacts to a set brief.

Creative Production: Photography

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to using the still image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in digital imaging: research, composition, exposure, editing. You will work individually to on set exercises in and out of class and produce a completed series of images to a set brief.

Creative Production: Photography

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to the still image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in digital imaging: research, composition, exposure, and editing. You will work individually to complete set exercises both in and out of class, and produce a series of images to a set brief.

Creative Production: Sound

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to sound production, and will encourage you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your and others' work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in sound design, such as research, acoustics, voice recording and editing. You will undertake exercises in and out of class, and produce a completed sound design piece to a set brief.

Creative Production: Sound

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to sound production and will encourage you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your and others' work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in sound design, such as research, acoustics, voice recording and editing. You will undertake exercises in and out of class, and produce a completed sound design piece to a set brief.

Creative Production: Video

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's programme will be considered for a place on these modules, and only then if places are available.

This module introduces you to narrative using the moving image and encourages you to reflect critically on issues of form and representation in relation to your own work. You will learn key processes and techniques involved in video production: research, scripting, camera, sound and editing. You will work in a team to complete set exercises both in and out of class and produce a video project to a set brief.

Creative Production: Video

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module will introduce you to using a range of desktop publishing tools in the creation of visual information design. You will learn, and critically reflect upon, key processes and techniques involved with visual research, page layout and composition incorporating the use of graphics and text. You will have the chance to work individually to produce a series of digital artefacts to a set brief.

Film Analysis: Hollywood Narrative and Style

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

Film Analysis 1 explores the diverse uses to which filmmakers put such key techniques of cinematic expression as narrative, cinematography, mise-en-scene, editing, sound, performance and special effects. You will explore not simply how such techniques are accomplished (ie the creative choices available to filmmakers) but also the potential they have for generating meaning and pleasure when combined together to produce filmic texts. The module is based around a series of reading assignments, which will be discussed in seminars along with the week's set film and extracts from other films. In particular, Film Analysis 1 examines one of the most influential and most pervasive models of cinema: the classical narrative film produced during the era of the Hollywood studio system (from approximately 1915 to 1960). You will consider several films from this era, as well as films produced subsequently, in the light of influential propositions by David Bordwell and other film scholars regarding the systematic organisation of stylistic and narrative norms within classical Hollywood storytelling.

Media, Music, Performance, Location: Making Site-Specific Artworks

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This is a practice-based module that will engage you in the making of site-specific performance in public spaces. You will explore through lectures and practical workshops the relation of space, place and sound, and the social meanings of specific locations. The module will examine a range of contemporary artistic approaches and theoretical ideas, as well as introducing you to practical methods for making site-specific work with music.

Popular Music Cultures

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module will provide you with an introduction to the critical discourses regarding jazz and popular music. This module will broaden your historical awareness and critical understanding of different traditions in jazz and popular music, although it is not designed to be a historical overview.

Likewise, while some technical understanding is required, the primary focus is not on minute analytical distinctions between different styles or practical instruction in song-writing, production or performance. Rather, we will concentrate on the social and cultural functions and meanings of the popular music cultures studied and the reasons why they exert such a powerful hold on audiences and practitioners alike.

Every week we will focus on a critical issue that has been central in discussions about popular and jazz music. Deliberately, these issues transcend the boundaries of style (or 'genre') and historical period. Thus, rather than honing in on the minutiae of individual styles, we will seek to contextualise them more broadly and see what, perhaps surprisingly, they have in common and what historical lineages connect them. It is the intention that this wider awareness of historical, social and cultural contexts will also enable those of you who are musicians to reflect more critically on their own artistic practice, thus enriching their work.

Practising Cultural Studies 1b

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 1

This module introduces you to the ways in which cultural studies as a theoretical approach can be used to explore aspects of life in the 'globalised world' of the 21st century. The first weeks are devoted to mapping and debating some of the terms cultural studies draws on. In the second half of the term you will try out cultural studies approaches in cross-cultural contexts through the exploration of three selected areas. These may include a social issue (eg migration or 'culture on the move'), a topic engaging with personal experience (eg 'passionate attachments' whether for people, things or ideas), or a topic engaging with cultural objects (eg focusing on the competition in relation to culture – the Turner prize, Booker or Young Musician of the Year on the one hand, Strictly Come Dancing or Master Chef on the other). You will undertake focused cross-disciplinary study through carefully directed research tasks and reading on these topics. Teaching and learning will involve a mix of lectures, seminars, workshops, screenings, individual and group work. Assessment is by submission of an exercise, essay, and group presentation.

The Meaning of Things

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This is a module specifically designed to question received opinion: what do 'things' mean, how do they acquire meaning and/or value, and do they mean as much to 'other people' as they do to 'us'. It is arguably only through examination of the ways in which social groups acquire, define and privilege things as part of their material culture that those groups can be explored and understood. Material culture is the physical evidence of human experience. It includes the vast number of objects that people use in every aspect of their lives. The study of 'things' is an expanding area on which art historians and anthropologists as well as economic and social historians are converging. This module is designed to address that interdisciplinary approach to the study of culture.

Working with Film

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 1

This module is designed to help you to develop your study skills in preparation for working with film in more advanced ways in years 2 and 3 of your degree. The skills we will work on in particular include those of detailed, scholarly, film analysis and interpretation, critically, historically and theoretically informed film studies research, and multimedia forms of academic presentation and writing.

By focusing on a single set film [in 2012-13, this is intended to be Los olvidados/The Young and the Damned (Luis Bunuel, Mexico, 1950)], the module will offer the space and guidance to enable you to develop your own critical case study. Weekly lectures will introduce you to the film, its production and reception contexts, as well as to a wide range of potentially relevant issues to consider when establishing how you will go on to work with it. The lectures will also introduce you to a range of film studies skills and methods, including ways of conducting and presenting film research afforded by multimedia technology. In seminars you will analyse the set film, and its possible connections with other films, and explore your ideas and research methods under the close supervision of a tutor, as well as present your work in progress.

News, Politics and Power A

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module explores media and politics and, more broadly, the media and questions of power. It focuses on current affairs with a stress on news; although other forms of factual content (for instance TV docudrama, web blogs, broadsheet lifestyle spin-offs) are also covered. This module considers the role media can play in producing our understanding of the globalizing world in which we live. It asks how media frames, organises, and contextualises events, both as they take place, and in relation to the collective memories that emerge after the event. It also asks how the media themselves are managed, manipulated, and influenced – variously by governments, media owners, professional newsrooms codes, and/or by public pressure.

You will examine the role the media play in relation to the citizen and the state. It is through the optic of citizenship, particularly in relation to the public sphere, that questions concerning the power of the media are addressed. You will also explore how a wide range of media contribute to the maintenance or erosion of a democratic society and an informed citizenship.

Advertising and Social Change A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

In the context of the rise of consumer culture and the expansion and proliferation of media systems, this module addresses the historical development of advertising. A key theoretical framing is provided by debates about the shift from modernity/fordism to post-modernity/post-fordism, about 'knowledge' industries and the emergence of a 'risk' society.

Themes explored include advertising's relation to social change and its exploration and contribution to social identities. Engaging with contemporary practices, the module also balances attention to how the industry perceives itself with critical perspectives of its place in society. Through case studies and examples, the module offers ways of approaching ad texts and the consumption of advertising as well as ways to understand the changing industry of the 21st century. It offers opportunity to address advertising in the UK and elsewhere.

American Cinema B

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

An awareness of how Hollywood cinema was shaped, how it acquired its position of dominance, and the forms and aesthetic conventions that characterise it, is essential to an understanding of cinema more generally. Accordingly, this module will focus on the formation of Hollywood in the 1910s through to the post-World War 2 era, with particular emphasis placed on the development of the 'studio system' and Hollywood's 'golden age' of the 1920s to 1950. You will view a range of representative Hollywood films made during the period and analyse them in relation to the industry and its practices. You will also situate Hollywood cinema within the political and social life of the United States in the period.

Creative Media: Animation 1

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. It allows you to focus on the creation of an animation. You will also expand your knowledge of the theories and practices employed when using digital media to develop animations.

Creative Media: Digital Media

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. It allows you to focus on the creation of an animation or piece of interactive media while expanding your knowledge of the theories and practices common to digital media.

Creative Media: Documentary Video

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. You will create your own video, while continuing to expand your knowledge of the concepts and approaches common to documentary film forms.

Creative Media: Photography

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

Please note: space on Media Practice modules is very limited. Only students for whom a practice module is a requirement of their home institution's course will be considered for a place on these modules, and always subject to availability.

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in Approaches to Media Practice: Photography, which is a pre-requisite. You develop and produce a photographic project, making use of photographic documentary theory and history, as well as enhancing your knowledge of research methods, production techniques and processes. You will reflect critically on your project, drawing on your critical and practical study of relevant genres. You will work to realize set exercises in and out of class, and produce a completed project to a set brief.

Creative Media: Script Writing

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

On this module you will focus on the production of a script, while expanding your knowledge of the theories and practices central to script writing.

Creative Media: Sound

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module builds on the practical and conceptual skills acquired in the first year. It allows you to focus on the creation of a sound design piece, while expanding your knowledge of the theories and practices common to sound design.

Culture, Race and Ethnicity

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the relationship between ideas of culture, race and ethnicity both historically and in contemporary society. You will examine a range of empirical examples that demonstrate how the concepts have been used – sometimes separately, sometimes in interlocking ways – in political projects or movements. There will be particular focus on contructions of 'whiteness'. Examples may include the use of race in 19th-century colonial administration, the politics of ethnicity in postwar London or the rise of the new right in contemporary Europe.

Digital Cultures B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module examines interactive leisure forms and practices based on digital technologies. It understands digital media as a significant and expanding new media formation; one that is transforming both the content and economics of the culture industries. The module will consider the cultural, political and social implications of new forms of interactive media designed for leisure and entertainment. Areas covered will include computer gaming, networked new media such as networked games, networked social spaces, pornography and other on-line entertainment. In addition the module will consider new forms of convergence between previously discrete media forms - for instance Net-TV collaboration and net-served films.

Gender, Space and Culture

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Why is space important to our understanding of communication? How do subjects travel through space in order to construct narratives of identity? How are spaces moralised, sexed and gendered? How do they accrue significance or symbolism?

In the last decade there has been a convergence across many academic disciplines to comprehend spatiality. Social spaces are never empty or static, they are full of the shifting dynamics of power and politics. On this module you will study to what extent gender is articulated in public and private spaces, so that they may be considered to be predominantly feminine, masculine, queer or transgendered. You will also examine how spaces and places are dynamic, unstable and mutable in relation to competing social differences. We will look at a variety of sites of the everyday, from the domestic to the visual, from bodies to landscape and virtual realities using key theoretical concepts such as 'performativity', 'representation' and 'transectionality' to interpret how our culture is thoroughly imbued with gendered and spatialized assumptions.

Topics may include: thinking about gendered journeys such as package holidays or migration; the boundaries and borders of the self; the national and the global; social inclusion and exclusion; and representations of the feminized underclass, or the masculinized professional. We will also consider queer cultural geographies as represented in films; 'freaky bodies' and transexuality online; and the spatial politics of protest on the streets and in the home.

Industry Projects

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module is organised around a live industry project working with partners in the creative sector. The project will normally be a live project with a brief set by the partner/client. The aim is to use the experience from previous placements as an opportunity to develop work of a professional standard in a working environment with real clients.

The module will enable students to further develop their team-working skills as well as their written and verbal communication skills. On this module students will also be required to reflect upon their work experience through an online journal and a reflective statement.

Journalism and Crisis B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Global Journalism in Crisis offers a diversity of approaches for studying journalists and journalism around the world. It charts the opportunities, challenges and crises facing journalism in an increasingly global field. The module examines the impact of developments in journalism that have resulted in it becoming an international phenomenon operating in global networks as opposed to within national or cultural borders. It looks at journalism in crisis (as a practice) and journalism as it responds to and communicates crises in the world. It explores the blurring between entertainment and news, as well as the formerly clear division between journalism, public relations and business communication. The module draws on specific examples of global media events to examine these issues and enables students to creatively and critically explore the challenges of consuming and producing globalised stories.

Locating Cinema: British Cinema B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Media, Memory, History

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module examines the relationship between history, memory and media. Its starting points are; (i) The media are historical artifacts, forged and developed in historical contexts that they also influence. (ii) Access to history is mediated through various technical and cultural systems e.g. television, print, and networked and mobile media. Media systems capture, store, and re-disseminate material that may be returned to us as collective or individual memories for instance through family photographs, or through the annual collective commemoration of official memorial days. The relationship between history and memory is thus bound up with how media systems become embedded cultures. (iii) New media in particular, produce new kinds of artificial memory and thus may intervene in new ways in the making of history.

The module will address some of the questions arising around media, history and memory through sessions including explorations of prosthetic memory, war memories and memorials, the history of the invention of the media, memory damage and the politics of omission, family histories and migration patterns as photographic record, race and mediated memory, and questions of the convergence of the archive and the network which mean media records of events are simultaneously stored and represented.

Music, Stage and Screen 1: from opera to film

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module is split into two five-week units and will examine the history of musical narrative from classical opera to film music. Its focus will be the audio-visual study of musical 'texts', uncovering the technical means by which music creates metaphors of linear plot and development. The module concentrates on opera and film, although it also considers some more abstract instrumental music, such as the symphonic poem.

The work of Richard Strauss, for example, occupies a space between the language of late romantic opera and 20th century film music, made more explicit in the work of Eric Korngold, whose operas lead directly into his film scores of the 1930s and 1940s.

You will also consider post-war scores in which the role of music is more complex than the mere ghosting of visual action. The 'psychological' music motifs in Hermann's scores for Hitchcock's Psycho and Vertigo are cases in point; these works have operatic links, with the 'irrational' music of Schoenberg's Erwartung and Berg's Lulu. Essays are balanced with regular aural analysis training in opera and film music. No prior technical knowledge of music is needed to study this module, nor an ability to read music; the objects of study are audio-visual, not written scores.

Music, Stage and Screen 2: Film, Musical and Music Theatre

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module examines issues relating to how music is used on stage and screen. The module complements the material studied in the autumn term 'Music, Stage and Screen 1: from opera to film' such that the module is entirely free-standing and MSS1 is not a pre-requisite for MSS2.

The module is divided into two parts exploring European, 'world' and contemporary film music and musicals.

Whereas MSS1 explored how early Hollywood film music (from the silent era through to the Hitchcock films of the 1960s) evolved predominantly from 'narrative' musical models of 19th-and 20th-century opera and symphonic poem, this first part explores alternative and non-narrative solutions developed in examples taken from European, 'world' and contemporary cinema. It examines how the music relates to the visual action and what this conveys about the works' cultural, gender and socio-historical identities.

The second part bridges the gap between stage and screen, exploring the popular musical theatre genre of the musical and film musical. One of the most distinctively American of art forms, developed during the module of the twentieth century from its origins in European operetta, this popular genre brings into sharp focus issues of American national and cultural identity.

Professional Media Practice

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module is organised around a work placement in the creative sector. The placement will normally be arranged by yourself and will usually be approximately 20 hours in duration. The aim is to use the experience as an opportunity to develop and reflect upon your personal and social skills in the work place; the demands of time management; technical, organisational and/or creative achievement as appropriate.

The module will enable you to compile necessary documentation in relation to work, such as a portfolio containing CVs and development plans, as well as help you to assess your skills and perform SWOT analyses and a Key Skills Audit.

On this module you will also be encouraged to reflect upon your work experience through an online journal and a synthesis paper which will draw both on the 'hands on' knowledge gained during the placement and, where appropriate, your academic study.

Sound, Culture & Society

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

Sound, Culture & Society

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

The Allure of Things

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module explores the circulation of significant objects (material or otherwise) within specific cultural and historical contexts. It analyses the social/cultural/economic relationships which shape and are shaped by the movement of 'things'.  You will gain an understanding of theories of exchange, commoditisation and consumption. These will be set against wider cultural and economic transformations as the result of colonialism, capitalist penetration and globalisation.

Theory Taste and Trash B

15 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 2

This module aims to introduce students to two related issues, namely:
a) a historically-rooted account of how the study of popular culture came to be established in British higher education and of some of the key theoretical approaches that helped to shape those studies
b) an exploration of how the bringing together of popular culture and ‘the academy’ has and continues to pose intriguing problems around hierarchies of taste, questions of value, and definitions of educational worth.

A series of lectures will offer students both a historical overview of those issues and an introduction to the influence of key writers, theorists and approaches, while the module seminars would help students to engage with particularly significant and talismanic texts (from writers such as Hall, Bourdieu and Bakhtin) in the field and also to test out the interpretive frameworks they offer by undertaking some case study analyses of contemporary popular cultural texts and practices (in fields such as television, popular music, the leisure industries and youth culture).

TV: Fictions and Entertainments A

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module focuses on the textual and contextual study of television's key fiction and entertainment genres – soap operas, sitcoms and other styles of comedy, game shows, lifestyle television, daytime television, and music television, among others. You will explore the defining generic characteristics of those televisual categories, their representational strategies, their ideological implications, their particular pleasures and their relationship with audiences. The primary focus will be on British television, although comparative material from other broadcasting contexts will be used where appropriate for comparative purposes. Most of the primary material will be drawn from current or recent television, but you will also investigate the history of popular television genres in order to understand their evolution.

TV: Fictions and Entertainments B

15 credits
Spring teaching, Year 2

This module focuses on the textual and contextual study of television's key fiction and entertainment genres - soap operas, sitcoms and other styles of comedy, game shows, lifestyle television, daytime television, and music television among others. You will be encouraged to explore the defining generic characteristics of these televisual categories, their representational strategies, their ideological implications, their particular pleasures and their relationship with audiences. The primary focus will be on British television, although material from other broadcasting contexts will be used where appropriate for comparative purposes. Most of the primary material will be drawn from current or recent TV, but students will also be required to investigate the history of popular TV genres to understand their evolution over time.

Adaptation: Filming Fiction

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module examines film adaptations of fiction from the silent period to the present day. A diverse range of film texts will be considered, along with critical and theoretical perspectives on adaptation, authorship and intertextuality. The module focuses on film adaptations of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century novels, short stories and picture books, including works by Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allen Poe, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas Mann, Raymond Carver and Maurice Sendak. We will consider the significance of the idea of fidelity for the reception and theorisation of film adaptation. The module will approach adaptation as both an industrial mode of commercial production and a creative mode of critical interpretation. Cinematic strategies deployed to reproduce literary devices will be analysed in order to think about adaptation's value for theories of medium specificity. The module will also examine the politics of cross-cultural adaptation by looking at Indian and African films based on European source texts. Directors studied during the course include: Roger Corman, David Lean, Max Ophuls, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Claire Denis and Spike Jonze.

Alternative Cinemas

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Class and Popular Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

While constructions of gender, sexuality, 'race' and ethnicity in popular media and culture have been subjected to increasing academic scrutiny in the last decade or so, class has been largely left off the agenda. This module attempts to redress this neglect. It centres on theorisations of class in the cultural sphere, and on a series of debates over the representation of class in a range of examples from popular culture.

You will consider both strategies of 'othering' groups such as the working class and underclass, and also representations of the 'invisible', taken for granted norm of middle-class identity. Topics covered may include: emotions and class - shame, hate, and envy; news, television reality shows and television drama; and embodiment, education, aspiration and respectability.

Comedy and Cultural Belonging

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Comedy is, above all, a cultural form that invites its audiences to feel that they belong – to a social community, a class, a locality, a nation, a subculture, a gender, a sexual identity, an ethnic group, a community of interest, or a complex intersection of several of these. This module explores the relationship between comedy and belonging by considering a number of conceptual fields, such as: theories of the comedic; questions of identity formation; notions of representation and stereotyping; structures of power and resistance; the sexual politics of jokes; concepts of carnival and excess; the idea of a 'national sense of humour'; the use of comic strategies by 'minority' groups; the complexities of camp; and the role of class in cultural consumption. The initial focus would be on 20th-century British popular comedy, and the comic texts and practitioners studied might include Alan Bennett, Mike Leigh, Victoria Wood, the music hall tradition, the Ealing comedies, the Carry On films, Morecambe and Wise, The League of Gentlemen and The Royle Family.

Consuming Passions

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module explores consumption practices within specific cultural and historical contexts. It introduces you to processes through which objects are made sense of and appropriated by people in their everyday life. At the same time, the module explores consumption as a basic human activity through which people engage and understand their position in the world. It will locate historical and culture-specific consumption practices within wider processes of identity creation and social differentiation. Finally, consumption will be discussed in the context of the development of consumer cultures and globalisation.

Creative Project

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module extends the ideas explored during earlier practice courses. Having chosen a practice medium on which to focus in the second year, you will engage in the design, research and production of a practice project in that same medium. The module provides you with master classes from professionals and faculty in the practice field, offers supervision in designing and researching a project, as well as production tutor support in tackling technical and production issues associated with producing a project to the set brief. This practice work will be supported by relevant readings in media theory, aesthetics and production techniques which will be discussed in workshops.

Documentary, Reality TV and 'Real Lives'

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

During this documentary module you'll analyse documentary production in its historical and cultural context and focuses on new developments in documentary production, reality TV formats, feature documentary and alternative documentary production. In addition we'll address emerging documentary production in the developing world.

The module covers foundational thinking in documentary; theorisations of different modes of documentary; reality TV; debates over documentary's truth claims; the boundary between documentary and fiction; dramatisation and reconstructions; and international independent documentary production.

Globalisation and Communication

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module studies the role of the media (broadly understood to include all forms of telecommunications, the internet and computers, print and televisual journalism, and all forms of visual media) in the era of globalisation. You will investigate what the notion of globalisation actually refers to in various registers of discourse and theory, focusing on the relation between globalisation in the political-economic sense and globalisation in the cultural sense. The module then addresses the specific role of the various media in initiating, consolidating and sustaining both the idea and the practice of globalisation. It concludes by considering the merits and demerits of the process of globalisation in the arena of culture.

Hollywood Comedian Comedy

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Comedian-comedy has been one of the most persistent genres of popular Hollywood cinema since the silent era, but until recently it has received little serious critical attention. This module will consider a range of individual performers and the diverse historical, cinematic and extra-cinematic contexts in which they worked. Drawing upon a range of critical and theoretical paradigms, the module will examine the key fictional and extra-fictional features of the genre; the relations between performance, gags and narrative; the shifting relationships between comedy in film and other media (such as vaudeville and television); and the representation of class, gender, ethnicity and race. Films studied may include comedies featuring such performers as Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Jerry Lewis, Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy.

Hollywood Industry and Imaginary

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Media, Publics and Protest

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Social media have been at the heart of recent forms of protest both at home and abroad. This module aims to enable you to develop a critical understanding of the relationship between media, publics and protest. It will provide you with a conceptual framework and historical contextualisation with which to approach a key question in media studies - the construction of publics and counterpublics, and the relationship of media to democracy and democratic practice. The module begins by introducing a set of theoretical approaches to thinking about the public sphere; in the latter part of the course, you will be enabled collectively and independently to identify and research particular case studies, whether that be the role media play in revolution or political transition, in protests, demonstrations, petitions or riots, in hacktivism or culture jamming, or in cultural forms like satire and alternative media.

Music, Media and Culture

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module explores the relationship between music and media of all kinds, and questions the ideological structures underpinning the consumption of music in western society. The module focuses on the relationship between musical production and media technologies (the microphone, phonograph, radio and film), the changing role and place of music in society - understood through an analysis of media technologies, the meaning and nature of music and media reception in society, and the political economy of the music industry.

Race and Ethnicity in Popular Cinema 1

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Sexualities and the Cinema

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

This module centres on the critical study of sexualities and how they are represented in a range of film texts. Through screenings, seminars and self directed study, you will consider in detail and depth, the ways in which sexualities have been both theorised and represented in film. Debates considered in the module may include: the politics of sexual identification; the idea of sexual 'perversity'; sexual stereotyping (especially of lesbians and gays); and the critical concept of 'queer' in theory, identity politics and cinematic genre (queer cinema).

Social Media and Critical Practice

30 credits
Spring teaching, Year 3

Social media has become the way of framing much internet and mobile media and the implications of this turn are important. We use social media platforms in our everyday life and they have become influential in journalism, promotional culture, education and across the media industries. However, their pervasiveness and significance goes unchallenged and largely celebrated through the language of participation, communication and freedom. This module aims to stand back from the everyday ubiquity of these forms to question and analyse them by using them critically and creatively.

The module examines a range of social media platforms by engaging and using them and by equipping students to critically analyse this. We look at the promise and perils of these new forms, the histories of their emergence, their institutional and structural shape and power, and the politics, economics, aesthetics and pleasures attached to them.

Students will engage social media platforms to create a small practical project and interrogate this engagement through an extended critique of use and practice.

The Musical

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

This module will examine the musical, tracing the hegemonic Hollywood genre to its roots in European vaudeville, cabaret culture, stage musicals and operas. It will also explore musicals that may seek to defy or respond to Hollywoodcentric, Eurocentric and heterosexist conceptions of genre. The module is divided into two sections. The first section will analyse the Hollywood musical of the studio era, by examining both the stylistic features and historical context of some of its different sub-genres; the show/backstage musical, the fairy tale musical and the folk musical. It may also explore the diverse ways in which the studio era musical as entertainment may work ideologically in relation to issues of race, ethnicity and sexuality.

The second section of the module will focus on the musical as it has developed beyond Hollywood (and beyond the conceptual framework of Hollywood). Topics may include; the subcultural musical, the animated musical (arguably, the most common form of the contemporary musical in both its mainstream (Disney) and counter mainstream forms (South Park)) and may conclude with a consideration of the future of the musical in terms of gender, age and physicality.

Viewing Women

30 credits
Autumn teaching, Year 3

Early work on the relation of women to film considered woman's 'to-be-looked-at-ness', examining representations of women as objects of the male gaze, constructions 'cut to the measure of [male] desire' (Laura Mulvey). You will consider the female spectator, positioned by particular film and television genres (melodrama, the 'woman's film', and soap opera). More recently, attention has shifted to women as social audiences and producers of meanings, differing from one another and constructing from texts their own meanings and pleasures. This module traces these developing and interacting strands of research, considering questions around the location of meaning, the relationship between text and context, and the usefulness of different strands of feminist research in enabling us to understand film texts and their representations and positioning of women. It considers a range of popular and feminist film texts and their viewers.