Apply the knowledge you’ve gained throughout the year to a topic that interests you most in this module. You will be guided by an expert supervisor who will support your progress and offer support and advice as you develop your project.As part of your dissertation, you will take part in MA study skills sessions that cover topics such as:

• Useful tips to manage your research
• Guidance on writing and planning
• Ongoing support throughout your project
• Structuring your dissertation effectively

In this module, you will develop your own feminist practice with a creative project that could take many shapes, from an activist campaign to artwork. You will reflect on the ethical underpinnings of this work, and on its contribution to wider communities.You will engage in your own practices of feminist world-building, informed by intersectional feminist ideas of reflexivity, responsibility and situated knowledge.You will explore a variety of themes, such as:

• Power – Who makes knowledge and for whom?
• Political – How can we serve different communities through our work?
• Knowledge – How is knowledge always shaped by history and social context?

This module engages with history and contemporary developments in intersectional feminist thought. It focuses on feminist research and knowledge, highlighting the importance of cross-cultural work in Women’s and Gender Studies and the sensitivity to questions of difference and diversity.You will explore different approaches, including:

• Intersectional
• Transnational
• Interdisciplinary

You will engage with a diverse range of case studies and material to explore ways in which Women’s and Gender Studies has critically engaged with issues of equality and justice globally. You will participate in lively, critical debates about important contemporary issues, considering how theoretical perspectives can help to shed light on the world around us.

While histories of war have long focused on the causes, course, outcome, and legacies of conflict, ‘new’ military histories also now seek to understand how ordinary people have experienced war ‘from below’.

Structured around four broad themes—medicine, the body, sexuality, and the mind—this module considers the bodily legacies of warfare in a variety of times and places.

Topics typically include:

• The role of the military in the emergence of clinical medicine in the 18th century
• The impact of war disability on society following the American Civil War
• The long history of rape as a ‘weapon of war’
• The use of methamphetamines by the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War

Drawing on a large range of sources, including diaries, memoirs, medical texts, engravings, photographs, and wartime propaganda, you will develop a detailed understanding of how people throughout history have experienced conflict and its aftermaths through their bodies.

On this module, you will encounter a series of intriguing texts that in one way or another explore the body. You will examine many models of the body, some old and some new, as well as such adjacent concepts as anatomy or flesh, and we will also be exploring the ways in which the texts we study work with, against and around those models.

You will be taught by several tutors who will present many very different and often competing models, including visions of the body as, variously, living, dying, political, prosthetic, gothic, suffering, fashioned, conscious, familiar, unfamiliar, fixed, unfixed.

This module provides an overview of the key theoretical debates and empirical issues that have developed with respect to the topic of violence within criminology. It facilitates research-led debate and discussion on prevention and response to violence in national and international realms and thinks critically about policy and practice in this area.

What is violence? How is it defined, and by whom? Should there be a hierarchy of what we consider violence, or is violence enacted as part of a continuum? You will engage with these complex questions in relation to the macro and meso, from state and corporate violence to the infliction and survival of interpersonal abuses.

Subjects covered may include:

• State violence
• Structural violence
• War crimes and crimes against humanity
• Torture
• Border related violence
• Gendered violence
• Interpersonal violence
• Zemiology (the study of social harm)

Gain a strong understanding of contemporary methodological issues by examining various critical methods through practical techniques and case studies related to media analysis.

You will explore different research practices, including:

• Textual and discourse analysis
• Visual analysis
• Ethnography
• Participatory approaches

You will focus on how who we are, how we differ and the power we hold shape our experiences in today’s hyper-complex media and cultural environment. You will draw on recent examples of media and cultural research at Lancaster University and examine their theoretical and practical implications.

By the end of this module, you will have a good understanding of the key elements in planning and carrying out independent research projects.

In this module, you’ll gain an accessible and critical introduction to using numeric evidence in social research.

You will study the basics of quantitative research design, including:

• How to work with large-scale datasets
• Design surveys
• Understanding population level assumptions
• Interpret statistical outputs

In this module, you will understand key statistical techniques and ask thoughtful questions about the power and politics of data. The module emphasises a critical, reflexive approach that recognises that data is never neutral and that all research involves choices. You’ll also learn to check if data is fair, by looking at how it was collected and whether it is truly represents people.

You don’t need a strong background in maths to take this module. We’ll help you understand key statistical techniques and ask thoughtful questions about the power and politics of data. You’ll gain practical and critical skills essential for any well-rounded researcher.

What ethical and political questions can we ask about ‘smart’ digital infrastructures that are typically overlooked by engineers and tech corporations? How can we approach the social connections forged by ‘smart’ digital infrastructures?

In this module, you will consider the forms of power and control underpinning algorithmic cultures and data. You will explore the progression of technology and how it has made the relationship between the digital and non-digital more complex.

You will consider how technology doesn’t always work as planned, whether it affects people differently or leads to unexpected consequences, such as:

• The messiness of datafication
• Algorithmic culture tied up with affective contagion
• Unpredictable ecosystems
• Electronic waste straddling the planet

The study of audience has a long history in media and cultural studies. However, in the digital age, how do we approach and understand audiences? From watching television to writing fanfiction, digital media has transformed our relationship with media texts.In this module, you will explore timely topical issues related to contemporary media culture, delving into the concept of fandoms. You will examine how fan communities and media industries engage in a dynamic interplay that shapes the evolving meanings and experiences of being a fan today.This module explores media participation in the globalised and digital era. You will develop a comprehensive understanding of media engagement by examining theoretical frameworks and contemporary issues that shape how communities interact with media. The module explores major theoretical trajectories that have shaped scholarly understandings of audience communities and participatory cultures.

In this module, you will focus on crucial feminist interventions in cultural production and cultural studies. You will explore the intersections of feminism media and culture while critically examining how gender identities and inequalities are constructed through various forms of media.

You will think about media as a global practice and address issues such as:

• Class
• Race
• Sexuality
• Disability

This module explores how feminist cultural theory connects with everyday culture by studying sources from popular media such as art, public culture and policy.

This module introduces you to key themes of innovation and production in global media. You will focus on the analysis of power in relation to media, while exploring new and emerging forms of social and technological innovation.

You will examine the interplay between power structures, such as global and local inequalities and modes of (dis)engagement in global media. You will ask critical questions about what is at stake in media innovation, from ecological damage to global inequalities in media use.

In this module, you will read and discuss recent and formative writings in global media studies and develop an understanding of key concepts, such as:

• Media cultures
• Industries
• Practices

This module helps to support students to become future media leaders by honing your critical thinking skills.

This module examines Muslim women’s engagement with key texts in the Islamic tradition through the conceptual frameworks of gender and hermeneutics.

Focusing on women’s experiences from the formative period (7th CE) to the present, you will explore how gendered power relations have shaped the interpretation and transmission of religious knowledge and how interpretive traditions have informed constructions of femininity, piety, and legal status.

You will investigate the reception of texts revealed in response to women’s questions or concerns and analyse how classical exegetes and jurists negotiated questions of gender after the death of the Prophet. The module will also introduce you to a range of interpretive voices—classical, modern and contemporary—with particular attention to Muslim women scholars and activists who have critiqued or reimagined inherited frameworks.

Crucially, you will use materials from the Islamic tradition not only to explore gendered dynamics within Muslim contexts, but also to critically interrogate the category of gender itself—its assumptions, constructions, and applicability across time and place. In doing so, the module offers theoretical and historical tools for understanding the interplay between gender, authority and interpretation in Muslim societies.

Study a language formally in a way that will support your learning. You can enrol either as a beginner or as a more advanced student where you will build on existing knowledge.

In the seminars and workshops, as well as through a series of optional drop-ins offered later in the module, you’ll get the tools you need to approach materials which are relevant to your own academic and work interests.

You will be given opportunities to practise in your chosen target language, building on materials posted on the learning space (flipped classroom videos, self-study links) as well as other events organised for the community of linguists and language learners in the University, such as our weekly lunch clubs.

On this module you will develop transferable communicative skills and reflect on cultural and linguistic challenges which are relevant to your postgraduate studies and beyond.

You may use these skills to research matters relating to intercultural and/or interlinguistic issues, work with archives, develop an international research network, or simply add them to your CV.

The media industries employ millions of people around the globe. This module examines key historical and theoretical foundations that shape a critical understanding of the media and cultural industries.You will analyse major advancements in media production and how they have been influenced by regulation and cultural policy.The module explores inequalities within the cultural industries, including:

• Issues of diversity
• The realities of creative work
• The cultural and economic dimensions of the industries

By examining these aspects, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the media and cultural sectors. The module encourages critical thinking and engagement with contemporary issues, helping you develop a deeper understanding of how media, culture and society interact.

This practical module gives you the tools to design and carry out qualitative research.You will investigate complex social questions by applying a range of research methods, such as:

• Interviews
• Ethnography
• Focus groups
• Visual research

Alongside practical skills, you’ll explore how different methods relate to theoretical and ethical considerations. The module encourages critical thinking about what counts as data, how to build rapport with participants and how to navigate issues like positionality and representation.You’ll also gain strategies for analysing qualitative data, including coding and thematic analysis.By the end of the module, you’ll be able to confidently plan a qualitative research project and reflect critically on the strengths and limitations of different approaches.

This module challenges you to understand the transnational forces shaping the emergence of racial thinking and racist practices. You’ll learn how these developed around, and resulted from, justifications for the enslavement of millions of women, men, and children of various cultures across the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

You will acquire a global perspective on the history of race and slavery – historical phenomena that have profoundly shaped the modern world from across the Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and beyond. You will develop experience of critical engagement with primary sources (including those left by enslavers and the enslaved) and achieve command of a series of longstanding historiographical challenges, including debates around the complex dynamics concerning causative connections between race and slavery.

On this module you will focus on a number of texts, some famous, some not, that question the idea of spirit. You will be taught by several tutors who consider both modern and pre-modern models of spirit as well as neighbouring concepts such as soul or ghost or the divine and you’ll examine how our texts might both reflect and refract those models.

You will explore a host of models, including visions of spirit as, say, sacred, ancestral, communal, global, animal, spatial, national, revolutionary, or indeed as something to live for or even to die for.

This module thinks about the nature of goddesses in ancient South and Southeastern Asian religious traditions in relation to issues that lie at the heart of feminism, women going against the norm, women’s autonomy and choice.

You will explore questions such as:

• What makes a goddess ‘wild’?
• What makes her ‘mild’?
• Can tales of goddesses be read as tales of womanhood?
• Can the ideas of selfhood we find in these early non-Western traditions enlarge and alter modern feminist theories?

The module may explore what constitutes transgression for women and attitudes towards transgressive women in a variety of South Asian and Southeast Asian literature: from Hindu legal literature on women’s autonomy, to narratives from Indonesia, to verses on warrior goddesses, to early Sanskrit love poetry on women seeking love and married women enticing travelling men.