Module: MCO4108-20 - Rethinking Media

Level: 4

Credit Value: 20

Module Tutor: Rebecca Feasey

Module Tutor Contact Details: R.Feasey@bathspa.ac.uk

1. Brief description and aims of module:

The key outcome of this module is to equip students with the research, technical and analytical skills to communicate complex messages via still images. Students will first be familiarised with a broad range of conceptual and analytical tools that enable them to critique and deconstruct issues and practices across the media landscape, specifically in terms of the relationship between still images seen across media platforms and complex social, political, cultural and environmental phenomena. Students will develop skills in media literacy, acquiring an understanding of how global and local media platforms are constructed to communicate meanings. The module is designed to enable students to both make sense of and critique contemporary media messages, developing key skills in research and media production alike. Learning graphic design and visual communication skills, students will produce a portfolio of original poster designs.

2.Outline syllabus

● Module Introduction: Why Rethink Media?

● Understanding Media Literacy

● (In)Equality and the Media I: Gender Representation

● (In)Equality and the Media II: Ownership and Power in the Media

● (In)Equality and the Media III: Media Ethics

● (In)Equality and the Media IV:Participatory Cultures

● (In)equality and the Media V: Exploring Advertising

● (In)equality and the Media VI: Exploring YouTube

● (In)equality and the Media VII: Climate Justice and COP

● Producing Podcasts

3.Teaching and learning activities

Students will be introduced to media literacy, developing conceptual and analytical skills to enable reading, analysing, critiquing and deconstructing contemporary media. This includes both textual aspects such as editing, image formation, assemblage and social media construction, as well as more pervasive industrial, cultural and technological aspects such as online algorithms, representation and participatory cultures.

Lectures will be used to introduce a whole host of problematic relationships between contemporary media workings on issues of social inequality, as well as more specific case studies focused around the programme’s core employability sectors: advertising, social media, and news journalism. Workshops will be used as spaces for hands-on analysis and deconstruction of media, including interrogations of the images selected for news stories, the role of collage on social media, and debate around media and search engines.

Workshops will also be used to introduce students to core Library and Writing & Learning Centre support, and students will be able to use such research-skills development exercises as further opportunities to consider questions of online media, skills literacy and issues of hierarchy. Technical skills training will centre on (i) podcast production, including questions of argumentation, and (ii) visual communication design for posters and social media images, learning to experiment with communicating a research-led argument about the role of today’s media through audio-visual techniques (Research Portfolio 100%).

Assessment Item 1:

• Assessment Type: CW

• Description: Research Portfolio (including Podcast and Visual Communication Materials)

• % Weighting: 100%