MA in Brands, Communication & Culture

The programme is made up of two core modules (60 credits in total), between two and four options modules (60 credits in total), and a dissertation (60 credits).

The first core module, Branding I, introduces you to contemporary definitions and theories of branding, its history and development, changes in the role of marketing, promotion and design, and their place in the global economy.

The second core module, Branding II, puts greater emphasis on contemporary themes and issues in branding, and their relationship to wider debates in society, economy and culture.

Throughout the core components of the degree, you will examine the wide range of ways in which branding is currently used, in organisations ranging from large corporations to public sector bodies, charities and other third sector organisations.

For the optional modules, you'll have an opportunity to explore some of the wider contexts for brands and branding by taking up to 60 credits of modules provided elsewhere in Media and Communications or neighbouring departments such as Sociology , Cultural Studies and Anthropology.

Part-time students typically take the two core modules in their first year, and the options modules plus the dissertation in their second year.

Vocational elements

The department offers some practice-based options in areas such as:

• Media Futures
• Online Journalism
• Campaign Skills
• Media Law and Ethics
• Design Methods
• Processes for Innovation
Core modules Module title Credits. Branding I: History, Contexts and Practice Branding I: History, Contexts and Practice 30 credits

Liz Moor

This module is a core part of the MA Brands, Communication and Culture programme, but is available to a limited number of students from other MA programmes in the Media and Communications department as an option module.

It provides a critical exploration of the history and practice of branding, from developments in markets, consumer culture and intellectual property law to current uses of brands and branding in commercial organisations, charities and the public sector. Students are assessed via an essay of 5000-6000 words.

Reading:

• Lury, C. (2004) Brands: the Logos of the Global Economy, London: Routledge
• Moor, L. (2007) The Rise of Brands, Oxford: Berg
• Arvidsson, A. (2006) Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture, London: Routledge
• Julier, G. (2000) The Culture of Design, Oxford: Berg
• Aronczyk, M. and Powers, D., eds. (2011) Blowing Up the Brand, New York: Peter Lang
• Kornberger, M. (2010) Brand Society: How Brands Transform Management, Cambridge: CUP
• Bently, L,. et al., eds (2011) Trade Marks and Brands: An Interdisciplinary Critique, Cambridge University Press
• Woodham, J. (1997) Twentieth Century Design, Oxford: OUP
• King, S. (2008) Pink Ribbons Inc., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
30 credits. Branding II: Key themes and debates Branding II: Key themes and debates 30 credits

The second core module focuses in more depth on key themes in contemporary branding, such as intellectual property rights, globalisation, place branding, the concept of brand ‘value’ and the impact of digital communications and marketing technologies. Throughout this core component of the degree, you will examine the very wide range of ways in which branding is used, from large media organisations and corporations to public sector bodies, charities, sports organisations and educational establishments. You will be encouraged to develop your critical and analytical skills, and to think creatively about how brands relate to their social and political contexts.

30 credits. Option modules Media options

In addition to the core module, you can take up to 60 credits chosen from the list of Media modules or the list of Sociology modules below.

Sociology options Module title Credits. What is Culture? What is Culture? 30 credits

This course is the core course for the MA Critical & Creative Analysis programme. It aims to provide a detailed, intensive introduction to some of the key thinkers who have been influential on the development of cultural theory and analysis. It is necessarily selective, with an emphasis on 20th century European thought, but has its focus on the different cultural critiques and critical cultures that have emerged through different perspectives. Through lectures and group discussions, we will explore the interventions of Simmel, Benjamin, Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Alexander, Stengers, Haraway and Serres, among others. The course will appeal to students who wish to spend time deepening their appreciation of theoretical interventions, and who enjoy discussing the implications of theoretical analysis for both sociological research and political critique.

Module convenor: Martin Savransky

30 credits. Introduction to Feminist and Cultural Theory Introduction to Feminist and Cultural Theory 30 credits

This module introduces key debates and developments in feminist theory, cultural theory and in particular feminist cultural theory. It introduces both early debates which defined these fields and contemporary developments and departures. This core module does not attempt to map the field of gender scholarship chronologically, nor can it be exhaustive, but instead extrapolates a number of themes around which some of the most influential and defining work has emerged.

You will be introduced to social constructivist and post-structuralist perspectives; debates on feminism, ethnicity and the critique of universalism; key questions in relation to feminism, biology and reproductive technology; debates on family, kinship, and psycho-analysis; the emergence of post-colonial feminism; debates on gender and promotional culture to debates on post-feminist popular culture. You'll also be introduced to the emergence of queer theory and debates regarding the relationship between queer theory and feminist theory.

30 credits. Navigating Urban Life Navigating Urban Life 30 credits

This module addresses significant issues in the contemporary organisation of urban landscapes, urban life and connections between cities as well as the interface between human and architectural fabric. Drawing on specific empirical examples in based in China, Hong Kong, the US, London and parts of mainland Europe this module examines key debates in urban sociology and research. There is a strong focus on visual apprehension of cities and ways of accessing and researching cities through photography. The following sessions have been offered in previous years:

• A tour of 'urban theory' from the Chicago School to the present day. This sets up the conceptual basis for the session following which, although empirically focused on specific cities, illuminate different conceptual frameworks for understanding urbanism.
• Whose City? This examines debates concerned with the social production of space and rights to the city. An examination of ghetto urbanism in the US through Wacquant, Bourdieu, Bourgeois and the research through which this kind of urban knowledge is generated.
• Pastness and Urban Landscape. This examines discrepant and linear notions of time/interpretations of pastness, collective memory, and how pasts are inscribed within urban landscapes. We will draw mainly on visually-led investigation of Hong Kong and London to explore these themes.
• Post-Colonial Cities. This session examines the intersections between globalisation and colonialism in Hong Kong and in the lives of ‘skilled’ migrants from the global North. It makes extensive use of photographic narratives of Hong Kong as an iconic city landscape and the use of environmental portraiture to capture migrants’ relationships to the city.
• Globalisation, Migration and Urban Life. Drawing on visual empirical research on mosques and African churches in London this session examines the impact of recent and current migration on commerce, religion and city landscape. It sets this in broader debates about globalisation and cities developed from the previous session.
• Material Cultures and Multiple Globalisations. This session draws on some of the more ordinary trajectories of commodities and collaborations composing the global world through small trade between China/Hong Kong and Africa, and Europe and Africa.
• Mega-Cities and Non-City Zones. This session is set in China. It examines architecture, the generic city, land speculation and the dynamics between mega-cities and economic and technical development zones through some of the lives that are lived in them.
• Urban Regeneration. This session examines the politics, debates, conceptualisation and social divisions generated and sustained in urban renewal projects. Who benefits from these projects? How do they reconstruct cities? We will draw specifically on Olympic-related redevelopments in Athens, London, and Beijing.
• Architectural and Planning Politics. This session examines ways in which political and military decisions are embedded in architecture and planning. It draws on Weizman’s Hollow Land and asks questions about whether this involves a radical re-conceptualisation of space.
• Mobilities. This session is concerned with movement and routes as well as the infrastructure and technologies of mobility such as bridges, roads, airports, stations, tunnels, trains, motor transport, and shipping. It asks critical questions about whether these approaches to space generate information about social morphology or social life more generally.

Convener: Dr Emma Jackson

30 credits. Through The Lens Part A: Imaging the City Through The Lens Part A: Imaging the City 15 credits

This module examines the theoretical and practical relationships between urban photography and urban ethnography focusing on city environments. Through a series of interconnected lectures and seminars, the module asks questions about the nature of ‘sociological seeing’, of the relationship between walking and urban detouring, on object-hood, ‘thing-ness’ and materiality, on how the city is both imagined and imaged, and on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Students will be expected to read widely on the subject both from sociological and visual textual sources, and to actively relate learning to image-making processes and outcomes.

15 credits. Empirical Visual Research Empirical Visual Research 15 credits

This 5-week MA module focuses on ‘sociology-in-the-making’, examining the processes of social research rather than its products. It follows the ‘empirical cycle’, providing an overview of key formative moments of sociological research, from formulating research questions, to producing and analysing data, to the public presentation of results.

It pays specific attention to how sociology may be transformed in the age of visual, digital and other empirical technologies, and examines the ‘doubling of social research’: partly as a consequence of the proliferation of social research tools and practices across social life, key empirical tasks of social research now refer both to social practices ‘out there’ as well as to our own work as social researchers.

The module also examines the the techniques, objects and settings in and with which social research is performed, both in and outside the academy.


Convener: Nina Wakeford

15 credits. Sensory Sociology: Imagining Digital Social Research Sensory Sociology: Imagining Digital Social Research 30 credits

Sensory Sociology: Imagining Digital Social Research takes an integrated approach to teaching digital sociology: it combines advanced training in sociological thinking with a practice based approach to methods teaching. Such an approach is challenging, as it requires you to think across the divide between social theory and social methods, and to adopt an active role in formulating social research approaches that are adequate to digital and contemporary contexts. In these contexts, the forms of social life as well as the methods of sociological research are undergoing constant change. This makes it necessary to adopt a creative approach to devising concepts, methods and techniques for the analysis of social life. Finally, it should be noted that this module is meant as an introduction to the Digital Sociology programme as a whole, and subsequent core and option modules in the Programme will enable you to explore in further detail several of the theories, methodologies and issues presented in this introductory module.

Convener: Evelyn Ruppert

30 credits. Theories and Debates in Visual Research Sociology Theories and Debates in Visual Research Sociology 15 credits

Visual sociology has taught sociology that text is not the only medium. This module introduces you to the problems of visuality and representation in sociology, beginning with classical debates in visual sociology, but including more recent debates surrounding the notions of media and methods to discuss how sociology can represent the social. The module will introduce you to the complexity of decisions to be taken in inventive sociology once the primacy of text is relinquished.

The module has two aims: first to introduce you to key fields of visual and inventive sociology, and second to key problems of doing inventive sociology. We discuss the cooperation of sociologists with other specialists, such as photographers or videographers, the relationship between self-representations of research subjects and those of the sociologist, the problem of representing objects which are not visual or textual in nature, combining different media, and how to address specific audiences.

Convener: Nina Wakeford

15 credits. Consumer Citizenship and Visual Media Consumer Citizenship and Visual Media 30 credits

This module examines visual advertising media and the proliferation of neo-liberal philosophies of consumer citizenship. In the milieu from which universal rights are disappearing, consumer citizenship imposes a moral obligation on subjects to make provision for themselves and their families well into the future. The logical implication here is that autonomous consumers come to adopt a certain entrepreneurial form of practical relationship to their selves. Enterprise is represented here as playing a vital translating role, promising to align general political-ethical principles, with the goals of industry and the self–regulating activities of individuals. Within this politico-ethical environment, consumers are constituted as both objects of enterprise and instruments of enterprise as they make 'entrepreneurs of themselves, seeking to maximize their ‘quality of life’ through the artful assembly of a ‘life-style’ put together through the world of goods’ (Miller and Rose 2008:49).

Divided into four main sections. Part One: examines reflexive modernity and the linking of postmodern visual culture with citizenship as part of the development of political consumerism. Part Two: is informed by Michel Foucault's 1978-1979 lectures at the College de France, in conjunction with Miller and Rose (2008), so as to provide an account of the entrepreneurial self. Central objective of Part Two is to examine the 'governing of humanity', in the context of Neoliberal governmental rationality and market reform of public sector services (with emphasis on recent healthcare market reform). Part Three raises pertinent issues about visual media: the embodiment of consumer citizenship; the body as a site of self-discipline; body praxis and life-politics; and cultural political resistance to the commodity-sign. Part Four: examines Fairtrade branding and the geopolitics of ethical consumerism in the context of global advertising media.

Module convenor: Pam Odih

Autumn Term

30 credits. Globalising Human Rights Globalising Human Rights 30 credits

This module explores the global politics of human rights in the present moment, paying particular attention to the way the power of “human rights” is mediated by institutional forms, discourses, and devices. Beginning with an intellectual and institutional history of the particular ways the concept of human rights is understood today, we will examine a number of sites that are central to the circulation of human rights today (local and international NGOs, courts, media organizations, states). We will also examine how a number of current political issues intersect with the language of human rights (undocumented migration, workers' rights, gendered forms of domination). Throughout we will pay attention to the intellectual and political benefits and costs of approaching political issues through the lens of human rights and consider what a politics of the forms of mediation of human rights might look like. Throughout, we will also imagine research questions and research strategies that would allow us to speak to the most pressing concerns in this area of investigation.

Convener: Monika Krause

30 credits. Gender Affect and the Body Gender Affect and the Body 30 credits

This module examines the place of affect and the body in feminist theory and feminist practice. It will first examine and engage the place of the body within the field of arts, culture and representation; feminist theatre practice; gender, passing and ethnicity, in feminist writing; and in feminist film theory.

Secondly it examines and critically engages the field of emotion, the politics of ‘happiness’, contemporary feminist scholarship on affect, and also the politics of science, technology and transformation in women’s/human bodies.

Third it will consider the issues which arise from old and new flows of migration and other kinds