Visual Culture (Taught)

The MA in Visual Culture offers an exciting opportunity to engage with current debates in media and communication studies about the impact of contemporary media on everyday life. The programme addresses the changes, challenges and unprecedented possibilities that digital media bring to everyday life in the twenty-first century, while emphasizing the importance of studying media in a wider historical context.

By exploring the ways in which media and everyday life are intertwined, the programme addresses broader questions of modernity and social change, ranging from experiences of everyday space, time and mobility, to the impacts of media on self and identity, how we access, ‘store’ or remember the past, and the broader environmental, infrastructural and social impacts of digital technologies.

Informed by cutting-edge research in the field of cultural, media and communication studies, the programme is widely interdisciplinary in scope, drawing on perspectives from disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, cultural geography, visual culture, urban studies, games and memory studies.

The programme is built around three core modules which focus on:

• The study of contemporary media together with past forms of media, in order to a) understand the historical origins or predecessors of today’s media, and b) to understand how media change is produced, experienced and negotiated

• Reflection on the role of contemporary media technologies in social and cultural life, drawn from students’ own everyday experience of media.

• Research methods and approaches used in the study of visual culture.

You will develop skills that directly enhance employability, including applying critical thinking skills, giving presentations, plus data management, problem-solving, team-working and research design and implementation.

You'll be able to pursue your own specific research/study interest in media, culture and everyday life via a 12,000-15,000 word dissertation and by choosing from a range of masters-level module options offered by the Department and wider School.

You will develop skills that directly enhance employability, including applying critical reviewing skills, giving presentations, plus data management, problem-solving, team-working and research design and implementation.

You'll able to pursue your own specific research/study interest in political communication via a 12,000-15,000 word dissertation and by choosing two further modules from a range of other M-level modules provided by the department or wider school.