This module helps you explore critical, ethical, and interdisciplinary approaches to the challenges AI poses for society. It covers AI's origins, the main theoretical frameworks, and current debates, and gives you the tools to examine how AI works and what roles it plays across different contexts.
You will develop a clear understanding of AI's place in society today and learn to assess, engage with, and respond to the issues it raises, from individual to global scales. The module also encourages creative, forward-looking thinking, drawing on a range of disciplines and methods.
Screen media shapes our understandings of identity, selfhood, and social life. In this module, you’ll study key debates, theories, and concepts in global media studies thinking critically about the ways media reflect, challenge, and produce social norms, inequalities, and cultural values.
Through seminar discussion, close analysis, and independent research, you will examine screen media such as film, television, streaming platforms, and online content as sites of cultural production, activism, and resistance. Drawing on feminist, queer, postcolonial, and critical media studies, you’ll explore how representations of gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, and other identities intersect and influence one another.
You will take an intersectional, transnational, and interdisciplinary approach to examine the production, circulation, and reception of media across diverse cultures. You’ll come to understand how individuals and communities negotiate belonging, visibility, and power in mediated environments. You will complete the module with an advanced understanding of how film, television, and digital media shape bodies, relationships, and subjectivities in a global media landscape.
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.
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.
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
