Media and Communications MSc

The MSc consists of both compulsory and optional modules, a typical selection can be found below. Modules can vary from year to year, but these offer a good idea of what we teach.

Compulsory modules

Dissertation in Media and Communications

You complete a dissertation of approximately 15,000 words over the summer period in consultation with a supervisor. You are encouraged to conduct primary research in an area relevant to the course in preparation for the dissertation.

Issues and Controversies in Media and Communications

Main topics of study: media ethics, media and moral panics, media power, media effects.

Qualitative Methods in Social and Cultural Research

Main topics of study: conceptual and practical issues in qualitative research design; interview research; research in and on the Internet; media analysis: research in practice; approaches to qualitative data analysis; planning and writing a dissertation.

Making Web Cultures

Making Web Cultures explores the development of internet communications, including social media and networks, the impact of online sharing and collaboration, and the challenges of surveillance and privacy.

The Creative Industries

This module explores the significance of creative industries and how they operate in various spheres of social life. The module focuses on how the notion of ‘creativity’ has emerged in the economy and society, its ideological significance, and the positive and negative consequences it has brought for society.

Particular topics addressed are the rise of the creative class, the symbolic economy, immaterial labour, gentrification of cities, and advertising and branding.

Media Audiences

Main topics of study: theoretical approaches to media audiences, gender and genre: cross-national and 'subversive' audiences; domestic technologies; media power and 'minority' readings; media production and audiences; television audiences and contemporary public issues (news and politics, health and illness, sexual violence); media effects/ influence debates; 'active' audience theory.

Principles of Media Research

Main topics include introducing and designing focus group studies; using critical discourse analysis; conducting research interviews; media content analysis and research ethics and safety.

Media, Body and Society

Main topics include early theories of the mediated body; modernity and the body: postmodernity, deconstruction and media bodies; superheroes, steroids and ‘masculine’ media; beauty, eating and ‘feminine’ media; laughter, ridicule and the body; ‘race’, ethnicity and sport; ‘deformity’, medicine and media; embodying mental illness; representing disability; zombies, consciousness and social death

Read more about the structure of postgraduate degrees at Brunel and what you will learn on the course.

Examples of recent student dissertations include:

• 'How is authority established in virtual communities?'
• 'TV Consumption, Identity and Lifestyle: A study of the Chinese Community in Los Angeles'
• 'The construction of femininity in Sex and the City'
• 'Media bias and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict'
• 'Constructing a female cyberspace? A case study of Chinese women and the web'
• 'Ethnography of a newsroom in Ghana'
• 'New media and news gathering'.