Studies in Global Media and Post-National Communication

Prerequisites

• This Module is capped at 25 places
• Students enrol via the online Module Sign-Up system. Students are advised of the timing of this process via email by the Faculty Office

Objectives and learning outcomes of the module

Aims and Objectives:

• To provide a detailed understanding and critical interrogation of the key theoretical issues around the communications and cultural dynamics of globalization in a period of media and communications convergence.
• To explore the particular significance of new communications technologies in time-space compression and the emergence of non-territorially bounded, post-national forms of communication.
• To familiarize students with the growing range and diversity of forms and practices of non-Western media production and distribution.
• To understand the political, economic and socio-cultural impacts of media and communications technologies within specific regions of the global South.

Outcomes:

• Students will understand the theoretical issues around contemporary processes of globalization and the political, economic and socio-cultural role of media and communications within these.
• Students will have had the opportunity to locate, research and analyze in some detail either a particular media/communications issue in a non-Western context or a particular transnational use of media/communications.
• Students will have learned to critically evaluate and present media and internet source materials.

Scope and syllabus

The course aims to provide students with a critical understanding of the role of media and communications technologies in the complex dynamics of globalization, that seem to both reinforce local and national identities and also open up new, virtual, post-national spaces of collective action. The course critically reviews the relevant literatures and establishes a critical vocabulary.
The course starts by examining the global expansion of capitalism, the shift from industrial to service and information economies and the significance of the ‘cultural’ as an expanding arena of production and consumption. It then examines the process of conglomeratization of media companies, the convergence of the broadcasting, telecommunications and internet sectors and the processes of diffusion of new information technologies for development in the South. It critically examines the rise of significant Southern media organizations and their forms of news representations and media genres, explores the possible impacts of a more global and diverse media and information environment for democratization as well as the policy and regulatory responses to cultural globalization in the South.
The course then analyses the manner in which old political, cultural and social boundaries, particularly those of the nation, are challenged by the new networks of an emerging global civil society and by transnational and diasporic communities. It explores new forms of affiliation and solidarity supported by information technologies and asks how post-national cosmopolitan identifications can co-exist local forms of belonging?

Method of assessment

Book review of 600-1,000 words worth 20% of the final mark, essay of 3,000 words worth 80% of the final mark

Disclaimer

Important notice regarding changes to programmes and modules