SYLLABUS
Year 1
Modules equip you with the essential critical toolkit for understanding and analysing the contemporary media and conducting media research. You'll examine media technologies, popular cultures, media ownership, media representations and media branding, alongside gaining some practical media-making work involving social networking tools. You'll be introduced to some of the key methods in media research through a series of case studies including gender in the media, television audiences, journalism, media preservation and music cultures.
Year 2
You'll explore questions of global media cultures, examining – for example – how the media transcends the borders of platforms, audiences, cultures, industries and countries. Alongside this, you'll study the impacts of a global media culture on everything from production to consumption. You'll have the opportunity to develop your skills in media-making, while further examining these themes in relation to more specific areas, such as stardom and celebrity, journalism and citizenship, music and digital cultures.
Year 3
We encourage you to specialise in an area that interests you, and to develop independent research and/or practice. This manifests in the form of a dissertation, with specialist modules available in gender and film, media technology, fandom, music journalism, computer and video games and the central role that they play in our leisure time, community media, and the reporting of panics, disasters and terrorism.
Course assessment
Media Communications is a theoretical course with a practical component. Assessments therefore range from essays, professional writing, presentations, reviews and feature writing to cross-media presentations, object history work and industry reports and investigations. You'll also learn through the creation of journals, research logs and portfolios, blogs and collaborative projects.