MA in Race, Media & Social Justice

What you'll study Core modules You will study these core modules: Module title Credits. Race Critical Theory and Cultural Politics Race Critical Theory and Cultural Politics 30 credits The module offers a strong conceptual basis for understanding theories of race and racialisation historically and with regard to contemporary cultural contexts and political debates. Critical attention is focused on an examination of the theories and concepts that sociologists and cultural studies theorists have used to think about the formation of ethnic and racial identities in relation to social justice, specifically the social ideals of equality, valuing diversity, and the right to live in dignity. The module explores the challenges of reconciling the analytical rigour of race critical theories and practical aims of oppositional political agendas within the contemporary conjuncture of racism and multiculturalism. 30 credits. Race and the Cultural Industries Race and the Cultural Industries 30 credits While both academic and industry research has long established how racial and ethnic minorities are portrayed negatively in the media, in recent times there has been an increase in the level of campaigning around issues of representation – from the trending of #oscarssowhite, to the activism of the website Media Diversified, and recent parliamentary interventions made by actors Lenny Henry and Idris Elba demanding more diversity on and off screen. The aim of this module is to develop a rigorous, theoretically and empirically grounded approach to the topic of diversity in the media in order to help students develop an in-depth and nuanced understanding of how cultural industries work to produce discourses around race. The unique intervention of the Race and the Cultural Industries module is in drawing attention to the context of production. It explores the experience of people of colour working in the cultural industries to help explain why representations of race take the form that they do. In order to address the varied contextual factors that shape representations of race, there is a strong stress on interdisciplinarity, combining critical media studies (including political economy and cultural studies perspectives) with race critical scholarship (postcolonial theory, poststructuralist and post-Marxist approaches). By focusing on cultural production the overall aim of the module is to demonstrate how racialized minorities who work in the media are constrained (or enabled) by the conditions of the cultural industries. Moreover, the module is designed to help future practitioners conceptualise their own forms of antiracist media practice. 30 credits. Dissertation for MA Race, Media and Social Justice Dissertation for MA Race, Media and Social Justice 60 credits The dissertation requires you to demonstrate knowledge, understanding and critical reasoning but also to initiate a new project, to work independently and conduct new research, to apply knowledge acquired across the programme and to contribute to ongoing research in one of the main areas of the programme. 60 credits. Option modules You also take 60 credits of option modules from within the Departments of Media and Communications and Sociology, or relevant modules from other departments at Goldsmiths such as Theatre and Performance , Politics and International Relations , English and Comparative Literature , Centre for Cultural Studies and Anthropology. Examples of modules that may be of particular interest to students on this course include: Module title Credits. Historicising the Field Historicising the Field 30 credits This module examines the representational presence of black people in Britain (noting the aporia in such an undertaking), to trace the lines of descent and tradition that connect writers and performers across time and place. The module reviews the past via a problematised continuum to ascertain how mainstream or canonical culture is altered in centralising traditionally marginalised or neglected perspectives. It asks: What were the formative conditions of production and reception for early black writers and artists in Britain? What part do retrospective historical novels, poetry, visual arts, or drama play in retrieving and reviving past times, to re-circulate and celebrate marginalised voices? 30 credits. Genre and Aesthetics Genre and Aesthetics 30 credits This module evaluates the degree to which Western, Euro-centric theoretical frameworks (to name two), fit or contort reception of Black British writing and performance. Through a survey of sources of critical languages: reviews, theatre criticism, and academic scholarship, you participate in the task of evolving an inter-referential methodology that can meet the demands of writing that slips between, and re-works literary genres and performance traditions, considering texts as printed and performed embodiments of words. 30 credits. Race, Empire and Nation Race, Empire and Nation 30 credits or 15 credits This module will examine how histories of Western imperialism have shaped the landscapes of the present. Our task is to explore how contemporary racial and national formations (ideas about ‘Britishness’, ‘whiteness’, and so on) exist in a complex and intimate relationship to longer histories of empire. In addition to introducing key concepts from critical race and postcolonial studies, lectures will also draw on phenomenology to explore how race structures the present, often by receding into the background, as well as theories of affect and emotion to explore how security regimes become racial regimes. Our concern is with how histories of empire ‘get under the skin’, and set readings include works that reflect on the experience of being or becoming strangers, or ‘bodies out of place’. We also attend to the intersection between race, gender and sexuality throughout. 30 credits or 15 credits. Music as Communication and Creative Practice Music as Communication and Creative Practice 15 credits How can sound – as distinct from images, code and text - be used to understand society, culture and technology? What can music tell us about the non-representational qualities of the communication process? How can the auditory be used as a critique of the conventions of visual dominance and visual culture? What does music have to say about our experience of the world and our creativity? This module explores how musical meanings are conveyed and understood and how this is mediated through the cultures and technologies of production, recording and consumption. We will consider how music communicates mood and meaning, not only through associated imagery and the lyrical content of songs, but as sound itself. How for example do we recognise that music means love, anger, sadness, terror, or patriotism? We will also think about the processes that link production, circulation and consumption, as well as explore the ways that music connects with individual and collective identities. 15 credits. Politics of the Audiovisual Politics of the Audiovisual 15 credits Since the beginning of moving images, the world has moved from industrial and Politics of the Audiovisual Politics of the Audiovisual important in the period since the invention of the movies are (neo)liberalism, Marxism, fascism, nationalism, feminism and anti-colonial struggles. These trends are inescapably bound up in the technologies, techniques and forms of the moving image and the sound arts, from the early days of cinema to contemporary handheld and immersive media.. This module investigates the politics of these forms and technologies as attempts at controlling the dispositions of minds and bodies and as struggles for their emancipation. It will address a broad range of topics from the power of sounds, images and visual apparatuses in the 20th and 21st centuries to the relationship of politics and aesthetics, the problem of democracy, and ideology critique. 15 credits. Visualising Asia: Body, Gender, Politics Visualising Asia: Body, Gender, Politics 30 credits From western antiquity until modern times, the body in the west has been aestheticised, vilified, eroticised and pathologised. It is in and through the body that both self and society have been fashioned and disciplined. It is at the heart of the emergence of sexuality as a modern discourse, and a constituent feature of the politics of identity, formed around race, gender and sex. For all the different debates the body has generated, they have always been framed within the mind/body, and nature/culture distinctions, which have been at the core of western thinking since the eighteenth century. 30 credits. Race, Gender And Social Justice Race, Gender And Social Justice 30 credits This course aims to investigate discourses of equality and social justice in the context of the changing manifestations of race, religion, class, gender and sexuality in advanced capitalist and neoliberal times. Taking an interdisciplinary case study approach the course examines international research on pertinent issues such as educational inequalities, migration, religious difference and gendered violence. The course takes an intersectional approach drawing on feminist perspectives and critical race theory to understand the ‘border crossings’ of transnational peoples as they ‘live out’ new and affective religious, ethnic, class, sexual and gendered identities in rapidly changing global contexts. The course will focus on three broad areas of inquiry: First, discourses on multiculturalism and concern about ‘the migrant’ frames our focus on social justice. Here we look at race, gender, citizenship and belonging in the context of Islamophobia, securitization and the nation state. Second, mapping differences among raced, gendered, classed and faith based groups in education, health and employment enables a critical analysis of social justice discourses such as ‘diversity‘ in the context of the ubiquitous nature of whiteness, patriarchy and elitism in our institutions. Third, we contextualise the courses’ concern with social justice and inequality by looking at agency and ‘voice’ and the struggle for civil, political and social rights. In particular we examine transnational feminist, ethnic and indigenous social movements and the emergence of postcolonial pedagogies of difference and dissent. Course convenor: Nirmal Puwar 30 credits. Stories and the Social World: Identity, Politics, Ethics Stories and the Social World: Identity, Politics, Ethics 30 credits Interrogate the work that stories do in shaping social life. As such, its focus lies less on the literary or representational dimension of stories and more on the way that stories and 'storying' operate as one of a number of cultural processes through which the possibilities of and for social life and identity are shaped and delimited. It is for this reason that the concept of stories that will be explored in this course has significant social, cultural, political and ethical implications, and also raises provocative methodological questions in the context of social research. In this course students will come to understand the different ways that stories have been analysed in both classic and contemporary social theory and in research. Stories will be understood as descriptive (representational), constitutive (ontological) and relational (ethical). Although stories are strongly associated – for example in sociology, literature and history - with verbal narrative and narrative representation, this course will stimulate thinking and analysis of stories more broadly in terms of what Mary Louise Pratt has called a 'contact zone' (Pratt 1992) between historically and geographically separate subjects and between different levels, scales and kinds of experience. Course topics such as ‘Stories and the social’, ‘Fiction as method’ and ‘Case stories’ will demonstrate ideas and discussions about how stories move across, divide, puncture and assemble diverse perspectives, spaces and temporalities of experience. Students will be introduced not only to the cultural and discursive dimensions of stories, but also to stories and storying as social, political, affective, visual, and material. By discussing and investigating these different approaches to stories, students will be introduced to a range of theorists, debates and methods, inviting and supporting trans- and inter-disciplinary thinking. In this course, students will learn to identify and recognise the different implications of working with stories, and stories and doing an analysis of stories. Thus, as well as addressing issues of representation, ontology, epistemology and ethics, the course will consider some of the methodological issues that are raised, appeased or aggravated by the use of stories in social research. These issues may include the problems of interpretation, power, reflexivity, ‘truth’ and inter-subjectivity as they apply to textual data and to qualitative research. The course will provide opportunities for students to develop theoretical and methodological skills and knowledge that can be used to support their own research. 30 credits. Voice, Speech, Recording: Creating New Sociological Practices Voice, Speech, Recording: Creating New Sociological Practices 30 credits The content of this module will combine theoretical perspectives on the voice, drawn from contemporary sociological studies of speaking, listening and sound technologies, with an introduction to field sound recording. It gives the students the opportunity to do sociology in sound, in other words to address critical thinking about the voice through an experimental approach to generating and evaluating sounds and their mediations. Students will be expected to encounter and respond to a sociological ‘problem’ about the voice through a practice research approach. In order to do this, the module offers a set of theoretical and empirical starting points in relation to voice, speech and media which students are required to address through practice work. These include the history of speaking in public (including political speeches, protest chants, collective singing) as well as the sociology of listening (including urban soundscapes, sensory ethnographic approaches) and the contemporary issues of voice recognition and artificial intelligence in relation to speaking (Siri, agents, bots). In these examples the module will stress critical perspectives in relation to identity, power and diversity – for example, desires for or resistances to normative voices and the associated literature in feminist queer and critical race theories. 30 credits. Children’s Human Rights: A Sociological Perspective Children’s Human Rights: A Sociological Perspective 30 credits This module takes, as its starting point, a sociological perspective. It does not dismiss the idea that children’s rights are legal claims (argued, contested and upheld or not through forms of legal practice and institutionalisation), but it considers such claims to rights as social and cultural phenomenon worthy of sociological investigation and social theoretical analysis. As such, the module is informed by a growing body of research on the sociology of rights and human rights and work on the sociology and social analysis of children and childhood. The module considers key focal points of contestation about children’s rights as ways into the study of the sociology of children’s rights. It considers inter alia key problems regarding: religion, dress and schooling; gender, transgender and identity; sexuality and contraception; race and civil rights; undocumented children; nature, anthropocenic claims and futurity. 30 credits. Cultural Studies and Cultural Geography: Speed, Mobility and Territory Cultural Studies and Cultural Geography: Speed, Mobility and Territory 15 credits This module addresses the emergent relations of virtual and material geographies and focuses on questions of territory, communication and speed. It is concerned with the mobilities of information, people and objects and will address topics such as the dynamics of migrancy/nomadology and sedentarism; questions of globalisation, regionalisation and the reassertion of border controls; the role of tele-technologies in the transformation of temporal and spatial relations; processes of de/re-territorialisation and ‘new mobilities’; and differential demographies of technology use. These issues will be considered from an interdisciplinary perspective, and will draw on cultural studies, cultural geography, communication studies, anthropology and logistics. The module’s concerns will be exemplified through focussing on three of the iconic figures of the contemporary era of modernity - the migrant, the mobile phone and the container box. 15 credits. Assessment Assessment consists of coursework, extended essays, reports, presentations, practice based projects or essays/logs, group projects, reflective essays, and seen and unseen written examinations. Download the programme specification for the 2018-19 intake. If you would like an earlier version of the programme specification, please contact the Quality Office. Please note that due to staff research commitments not all of these modules may be available every year.