BA (Hons) Cultural and Media Studies Bachelor's degree at the University of Leeds

This module introduces ways of reading different aspects of culture. It should enable you to discuss the full range of cultural forms including film, television, popular literature and music as well as more canonical modes of culture such as opera, philosophy, art and architecture. This module will equip you with the skills to appreciate, criticise, and understand culture through intellectual approaches. This module covers questions of cultural studies, representation, authorship, meaning, close

This is a module that locates the interconnectedness of networks, its environments, and cultures as an analytic for understanding the contemporary world. You'll address questions around identity formation, knowledge production and cultural institutions in the networked age, by analysing the social, political and aesthetic implications of user-driven and algorithmically mediated networks. We'll provide emphasis to the historical trajectory that leads to the emergence of the world wide web, intern

This module introduces you to different methodological and critical approaches to the analysis and study of cultural production and consumption, in a range of different social, historical and political contexts. Week by week you are taken through a range of relevant questions, topics and themes relating to the critical and contextual analysis of culture and are shown the ways in which culture itself informs how it is theoretically interpreted.

This module maps social and cultural formations underscoring the history of 'the West' since the period known as the Enlightenment. We draw on events and developments to interrogate and challenge ideas and assumptions informing modernity and postmodernity. Texts you encounter range from academic writings to autobiography, fiction, cartography, paintings, memorials, photography and film. Contexts in which these are explored include rights, revolutions, enslavement, colonialism, the modern city, 2

You'll be introduced to a range of media and communication approaches, drawing on scholarship in media industries, texts, audience and histories. You'll also examine critical perspectives on and debates regarding the production, circulation, and reception of media. This module will also guide you in developing independent research skills and critical analysis.

Representation, Form, Context, Interpretation and Power are words you'll hear often while undertaking your course. They are heard frequently because they are concepts used by teachers and scholars in these fields to analyse works of art and cultural practices whether realised as paintings, texts, buildings, actions or otherwise. What do these concepts mean; how are they used; when and why were they produced; what debates have they stirred? These are the questions that you'll engage in this modul

This module prepares you for undertaking an independent dissertation within Cultural and Media Studies. Building on material introduced earlier in the course, it requires you to work at an advanced level with the range of critical theories and approaches from Cultural and Media Studies, including historical and cultural analysis, close reading, psychoanalytic and critical theory, feminist/queer and eco-critical methods, post/decolonial critique, or critical approaches to the digital humanities.

This module is designed to develop your visual literacy and enable you to read key visual texts, deploying a range of historical, critical and contextual approaches. You'll look at dominant visual cultural forms such as photography, cinema, television and websites, developing the ways in which you try to understand these key modes of communication.

You'll explore the interactive leisure forms and practices of digital technologies such as gaming, modding, play, hacktivism and social media. We ask how seriously we should take these new forms of interactions, and the extent to which they are changing our understanding of culture today. You'll explore a number of digital cultures and practices and consider a range of themes and issues that relate to them. We also address the contexts of these cultures, in order to develop your understanding of

This module introduces you to the historical, cultural and intellectual background of the culture wars. You will study relevant concepts (e.g. nostalgia) along with the post WWII milieu to understand how and why conflicts arose about key issues such as gender, race and education. Attention will be paid to comparing contemporary mass media with the importance of mass media from the 1960s to the 1990s to discover the origin of the term "culture wars" and how this notion came to shape the way we un

This module explores the significance of absences within cultural texts. By analysing how various scholars have explored the hauntings, opacities, and other absences in cultural texts, you will critically reflect on the links between representation and violence. The module will also encourage you to engage in a close reading of several cultural texts, including some of your own choosing, allowing you to generate surprising, imaginative insights into what absences can reveal.

This module explores the history of film as a global cultural form and mass medium and the evolving relationship between 'traditional' cinema and what has been termed 'post-cinema'. In the first part of the module, we examine how film was produced, disseminated and experienced from its beginnings in the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. In the second part, we look at how television and digital technologies as well as new media forms have reshaped cinematic experiences, especially in the

Although women have published literary essays for over 100 years and have produced audiovisual essays in increasing numbers since the late 1970s, their presence as essayists, public critics and intellectuals is still under-acknowledged. This module will make their enduring work more visible. You will be introduced to the essay as a malleable form of socio-political resistance and new knowledge production, aligning criticality and feeling, personal reflection and public performance. We will explo

This module offers you the opportunity to explore a multitude of different ideal cities and model communities from the sixteenth century to the present day. The tracing of the various forms utopianism has adopted since Thomas More will take us into the fields of architecture, art, literature, politics, philosophy, sociology, women's studies and religion. In parallel to this historical approach to utopian thinking, you will be encouraged to think critically and imaginatively about our contemporar