Media and film studies

Theorising Media Practice

Module code: P4091
Level 6
30 credits in autumn semester
Teaching method: Lecture, Seminar
Assessment modes: Coursework

With a view to helping you refine your skills in presenting your own creative media projects to galleries, festivals, competitions and in shows, interviews and graduate applications, we will engage with three substantial critical discourses in the context of creative media practice: representation and identity, narrative and interactivity, and materiality and politics. This study will also provide you with an advanced set of critical tools that should enhance the production of your current and future creative media projects.

As there is overlap between these broad discourses, media artists seldom limit themselves to just one debate. We will study individual critically savvy artists working across the media strands taught in our department: photography, audio, screen drama/animation, documentary and interactive digital media. We will analyse how they present themselves in relationship to histories of media, art and critical thinking, and how they enter relationships with their audiences.

Module learning outcomes

• Write fluently on the interdependence of critical theory and creative media practice, in both historical and contemporary contexts
• Understand and contribute to debates about the role of cultural/critical theory in media practice across fields
• Research and present on how specific contemporary creative media practitioners use critical and social theory to present their own work
• Contextualise students' own creative media project in terms of its relationship to aesthetic/semenatic/social theory
• Generate and refine an advanced, long-form piece of critical research