MA Media and Cultural Studies

Semester A
Core Unit : Critical Approaches to Media and Cultural Studies
2 Option Units (see below)

Semester B
Core Unit : Research Practice for Media and Cultural Studies
2 Option Units (see below)
Dissertation : 15/20,000 word dissertation.

Core Units

Critical Approaches to Media and Cultural Studies

This unit will offer an overview of key theories and debates which characterise the development of the field of media and cultural studies in order to encourage a critical understanding of the perspectives brought to the media from different intellectual positions. The unit is organised around key concepts which have shaped the fields of media and cultural studies. Through close reading of groundbreaking texts, historical and contemporary, it will identify key issues and debates which characterise the different approaches to media forms, institutions, technologies and users.

Research Practice for Media and Cultural Studies

This unit will aim to provide students with an understanding of the skills required to conduct research projects across a variety of topics. Students will be exposed to the range of methods used in key studies in the fields of media and cultural studies, with access to support in quantitative methods as required. They will critically assess the strengths and weaknesses of particular methods and their relationship to research questions and theoretical frameworks. Questions of reflexivity and the ethical and political context of research will be raised and explored.

Option Units *

Consumer Cultures

The course considers social, cultural and political dimensions of consumption. It traces the rise of consumption and its ever-increasing prominence as a site of social and economic organisation. We examine how models construct it as a controversial activity that, beyond its financial implications, can never simply be value-neutral in the sense supposed by economic theory. The focus then shifts to an examination of the role of consumption in symbolic practices and everyday life and the construction of identity. The course then considers the current vanguard of consumption, in particular, ethical consumerism.

Cultural Politics

Cultural Politics brings together the interdisciplinary critical spirit of contemporary social, cultural and media studies, with analyses of political power, to explore the contested boundaries of contemporary citizenship. Increasingly, citizenship is studied not merely as a status held under the authority of the state but as including a variety of political, social and cultural struggles for recognition and redistribution. The course therefore acknowledges that ‘citizenship’ is by no means secure for all. Those who wish to maintain the grounds for social exclusion constantly police demands and claims for social inclusion. Cultural Politics will therefore focus on fluid and contested claims to citizenship. In doing so, it will prioritise case studies showing how struggles for social inclusion in an information age inevitably buffer up against real and symbolic boundaries of citizenship.

De-Westernising Media and Cultural Studies

This unit aims to be an advanced introduction to recent debates on media, culture, and society. While following these debates we will ask whether the “universalistic observations about the media to be advanced in English-language books on the basis of evidence derived from a tiny handful of countries” (J. Curran) can really help us to explain the dramatic changes in the globalised and internationalised contemporary cultural scene.

Digital Cultures

This unit will provide an opportunity for students to critically engage with a wide range of recent theoretical work on digital and online cultures. The major emphasis of the unit is the exploration of various aspects of the tension between user ‘freedom’ and media ‘control’ in digital and online cultures, in accord with this emphasis, we will be investigating what P.D. Marshall has described as the ‘dialectical interplay between the construction of the cultural commodity form and its reconstruction and appropriation by the user’. In what ways does this interplay manifest? What, furthermore, are the implications of this dialectic for shifts in production and consumption, and for changing formations of subject, identity and community?
 

National Cultures in Film and Broadcasting

This unit explores some of the complex and problematic links between ‘nation’ and ‘culture’ in the light of the increasing globalisation and commoditisation of cultural production. The three parts of the unit are linked by a common interest in examining and challenging some of the dominant conceptions of nation, culture and state with reference to selected examples from film and broadcasting. This unit considers the social and political movements and analyses that have contested the dominant construction of the audio-visual sphere in the United Kingdom and in post-colonial Africa and contrasts these with interventions designed to support international corporate interests. Case studies are drawn from Wales, from selected examples of African cinema and from moments of contestation and conflict in British broadcasting of the 1920s and the 1980s.
 

Television Studies : Institution; Text; Audience

The aim of the course is to provide an introduction to the study of television and to Television Studies. It will offer a survey of the key approaches and debates which have informed the field in relation to television which has been understood as industry, technology and cultural form. The course is organised around the theme of ‘history’ which has three distinct strands: histories of television and broadcasting, histories of programming and genre, histories of the intellectual approaches to television. Television is both global and local and whilst the majority of examples will be drawn from British television, differences in national backgrounds and experiences of television will be acknowledged and explored. The course will invite a critical approach to the application of modes of analysis and theoretical approaches to television, to histories of television and to history on television.

Visual Cultures

This unit will critically engage with a range of issues in the study of visual culture. There has been a veritable explosion recently in the publication of introductory texts and readers in this area. Why are visual media currently attracting so much attention across a wide range of disciplines? This unit will encourage students to explore a number of possible ways of answering this question and of framing the importance of this burgeoning field of study. It will ask what is encompassed by the broad term, visual culture, and what is at stake in its study. What perspectives are available to help us begin to understand the complexities of visual culture through its different media and cultural forms/practices?

*Some Options may not run every year.

Dissertation

Students will produce a scholarly dissertation on some aspect of media and cultural studies.

The course will be delivered through lectures, seminars and workshops and assessed through essays, presentations, group work and a dissertation.

The University Library provides study and IT facilities, extensive opening hours, access to a growing collection of books and journals relating to Media & Cultural Studies and to a range of online journal indexes and full text journals available on and off campus. The Faculty houses MA programmes in Media Production, Journalism and Historical Studies and seeks to build a strong postgraduate community.

Professor Ann Gray
Telephone: +44 (0)1522 886913
agray@lincoln.ac.uk  

For further information about fees, scholarships and bursaries please see our Fees & Funding pages.

Fees and Funding