Year four will allow you to consolidate the competence in the Portuguese language obtained during your year abroad, as well as deepening your understanding of Lusophone culture and history.
Modules in international media and communications studies will allow you to gain vocational skills relevant to journalism and other creative industries as well as exploring the political issues arising from, among other things, cultural policy and media coverage of conflict. You will also undertake a dissertation project under the close supervision of a member of staff with knowledge of your chosen area.
Brazilian Slave Society
An understanding of Brazilian slavery is key to understanding not only the history of the country but also appreciating their culture today. Within this module, we'll explore the significance of Brazilian slavery in both, the transatlantic slave systems and slave societies across the Americas.
In addition to gaining historical understanding, you'll also learn how to use different historical approaches, tools and skills.
Literature and Films, Conflict and Post-Conflicts
Explore how literature and film can give us a deeper insight into the experiences of conflict in 20th and 21st-century Latin American and Iberian societies.
Together we’ll investigate the way in which film and literature have reflected, resisted, interrogated and remembered the socio-political violence and conflicts that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries so far in Europe (with a particular emphasis on the Iberian Peninsula) and Latin America (including Brazil).
Your Spanish and Portuguese language skills (along with translations or subtitles where needed) will help you adopt a comparative approach focussing on the formal experiments and common preoccupations of filmmakers and writers across different national cultures and historical contexts.
You will discuss questions around a range of themes which may include; authoritarianism, confronting colonial and neo-colonial practices, racial and class inequality, social injustice, gender and sexuality, and living on with the legacies of past traumas.
You can expect to discuss works by writers such as Roberto Bolaño, Ruben Fonseca, Alejandro Zambra, Mariana Enríquez, Clarice Lispector and Liliana Heker. Feature films and documentaries by Alfonso Cuarón, Pedro Almodóvar, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Claudia Llosa, Patricio Guzmán and Susana de Sousa Dias will also be discussed.
Culture and Society across the Portuguese-speaking World
This module uses a focus on identities and identity formation, as represented or articulated in literary, cinematic and visual texts, as the basis of a chronological survey of the development of lusophone societies and cultures in the long 20th century (roughly, from 1880 to the present). Approaches to these set texts will introduce, and equip you to evaluate, a history of changing conceptions both of racial, ethnic, sexual, and class identity.
The module will explore how shifts in social taxonomies and conceptions of community and difference relate both to scientific and philosophical discoveries and innovations and to the changing political and socio-economic structures of Portugal and the African territories formerly subject to Portuguese colonial rule. It will also provide an introduction to the study of the concept of identity itself, and of the interrogation, by psychoanalysis and post-structuralist thinking, of preconceptions of either individual or collective identities as stable and unitary.
Self, Sign and Society
This module equips students you with the theoretical tools needed to explore how social identity is both asserted and challenged through the deployment of signs broadly conceived. 'Sign' is understood here primarily with reference to Saussurean linguistics, and the impact of the structuralist and then poststructuralist movements on disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, postcolonial theory, cultural studies and visual culture.
- How does our accent function as a sign of our class origins or cultural sympathies?
- Does skin colour always function as a social sign?
- How do the clothes we wear align us with particular lifestyles and ideological positions and how is this transgressed?
- How has the phenomenon of self-branding colonised our everyday lives?
- What does our Facebook profile say about how we would like to be read by the wider world? Does the logic of the sign itself exceed what we intend to do with it?
- How do the signs that construct a social 'self' circulate in the context of new media?
- Are there psychological costs associated with living in this society of the sign?
This module will address these and other related questions by introducing students to the approaches of thinkers such as Freud and Lacan, Saussure and Greimas, Barthes and Baudrillard, Levi-Strauss and Geertz, Derrida and Bhabha, and Mirzoeff and Mitchell among others.
Mediating Disaster
This module critically evaluates the roles that media play in scenarios of disaster. From war and famine to train crashes and natural disasters, the media play a central role in our understanding of, and imaginative engagement with, disaster. From the disaster movie to documentary photography and news coverage, a variety of media forms regularly link us to the real and imaginary landscapes of disaster, war, conflict and emergency, particularly with the technological expansion of the means of image-making in the 21st century. The module investigates the aesthetics and ethics of representation where disaster is concerned, introducing students to research in fields concerned with the mediatisation of disaster, conflict and emergency.
Global Cinema
Almost every country has a cinema industry. Yet what’s shown, and why, varies wildly.
We’ll look at how films outside Hollywood are made, distributed and received globally, and how these reflect local, regional and international trends.
We’ll ask how these cinemas:
- reflect past and current international film industries setups and audiences’ tastes
- are driven by local cultural specifics and global changes
- might benefit different institutions and structures in society
We will also try to untangle categories such as national cinema, transnational cinema and world cinema, as well as to make sense of different filmic traditions, genres and modes around the world. Who creates these categories and who do they serve?
With an entire global cinema to draw from, the focus will narrow in any year to particular regions, filmic genres or movements.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Working in the Cultural Industries
The cultural and creative industries are at the forefront of government strategies across the world for developing post-industrial economies, are seen as exciting places to work, and regularly feature at the top of graduate employment destinations.
- But what are these industries, and what is it like to work in them?
- How do you gain entry to these competitive, highly skilled jobs?
- What is ‘creativity’ and why is it so important to modern economies?
- And what does the future hold for cultural and creative sectors?
We’ll examine the structure, organisation and working patterns in the creative and media industries alongside more practical exercises designed to help you to identify and evaluate your own skills and interests. This combination of industry knowledge and personal reflection is aimed to help you to find a rewarding and exciting career when you leave university.
You’ll also examine key aspects of contemporary work including:
- the concept of creativity, the knowledge economy and precarious labour
- important issues such as internship culture, exploitation and inequality
There will be plenty of opportunity to discuss and build upon your own experiences and aspirations, and to conduct independent research on areas of creative and media work that interest you.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Photographing America
This module examines the development of photography in America from roughly 1945 onwards. The module breaks the period down into themes and considers:
1. the transformation of ‘documentary’ photograph;
2. the emergence and importance of colour photography;
3. experimental, conceptual and post-conceptual photography;
4. issues of serialism and seriality;
5. landscape photography;
6. the photobook
7. analogue/digital
The module will draw on the work of a diverse range of photographers, including Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Ed Ruscha, Lewis Baltz, Robert Adams, Robert Heinecken, Stephen Shore, Todd Hido, William Eggleston and Doug Rickard.
Teaching Film and Media Studies for Undergraduate Ambassadors
This module is part of the nationwide Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme, which works with universities to provide academic modules that enable students to go into local schools to act as inspiring role models. You will split your time between the university-based seminar and your allocated school, where you will be placed in an appropriate department as a teaching assistant. You will design and deliver a teaching project aimed at improving pupil understanding of selected aspects of media studies. You will be supported by the module convenor, the education specialist on campus, and the school's contact teacher. The module typically includes fortnightly seminars and seven half-days spent in school. Placements are in secondary schools and Sixth Form or FE colleges.
Film and Television Genres
Many films share common traits. Together they might be classed as “action”, “made for television” or “low budget”. But how does as film get assigned a genre? Who does the assigning? And what impact does this assigning have?
During the module we’ll delve deep into a particular genre. We’ll examine it’s:
- key concepts and texts
- development
- influence and influences
Building on what you’ve learnt in years one and two you’ll also look at the genre in the context of production and consumption.
As well as knowledge of a specific genre you’ll also develop the skills to apply your learning to other genres.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Screen Encounters: Audiences and Engagement
Develop and expand your understanding of the relationship between screen media and their most important component – the audience.
We’ll explore widely across history including:
- pre-cinema moving images
- the changing nature of cinema space
- the impact of domestic television and VCRs
- the playing of games and use of smartphone apps
- experimental forms of screen media
You’ll also consider the impact social and political factors, and changes in daily living, have on screen media’s relationship with its audience.
Alongside the theory you’ll also get practical experience by using questionnaires and focus groups to conduct your own audience research.
This module is worth 20 credits.
Auditory Cultures: Sound, Listening and Everyday Life in the Modern World
This module introduces students to the cultural and social role of sound and listening in everyday life. Scholars have argued that, since the Enlightenment, modern societies have privileged sight over the other senses in their desire to know and control the world. But what of hearing? Until recently, the role of sound in everyday life was a neglected field of study. Yet Jonathan Sterne argues that the emergence of new sound media technologies in the nineteenth century - from the stethoscope to the phonograph - amounted to an 'ensoniment' in modern culture in which listening took centre stage.
Beginning with an examination of the relationship between visual and auditory culture in everyday life, this module introduces a variety of cultural contexts in which sound played an important role, including:
- how people interact with the sounds of their cities
- how new sound technologies allowed people to intervene in everyday experience
- why some sounds (such as music) have been valued over others (such as noise)
- the role of sound in making and breaking communities
- the role of sounds in conflict and warfare
- the importance of sound in film and television from the silent era onwards.
We use a variety of sound sources, such as music and archival sound recordings, in order to understand the significance of sound in everyday life from the late eighteenth century to the present.
Gender, Sexuality and Media
Examine how issues of gender and sexuality relate to media and popular culture.
Using the intersectional fields of feminism, queer theory, and media and cultural studies we'll ask some crucial questions such as:
- How are gender and sexuality represented in media and popular culture?
- How do media and cultural industries structure gender and sexual inequalities?
- How are identities and practices of media audiences and users gendered and sexualised?
- How can gender and sexual norms be challenged in creative and radical ways?
This module is worth 20 credits.
Public Cultures: Protest, Participation and Power
Explore the relationship between public space, politics and technology using overlapping and interdisciplinary fields, including:
- cultural studies
- cultural geography
- digital studies
- urban sociology
- cultural politics
You will engage in debates about the changing nature and uses of public space, with an emphasis on urban environments and digital space.
A range of protest movements will also provide case-study material and offer a central focus for your theoretical and practical explorations of the role of new technologies in:
- controlling space
- resisting control
- enabling new forms of civic participation.
This module is worth 20 credits.