MA Media, Culture and Everyday Life

Overview

This programme was formerly known as MA Media and Communication: Digital Culture and Communication.

The MA in Media, Culture and Everyday Life offers an exciting opportunity to engage with current debates in media and communication studies about the impact of contemporary media on everyday life. The programme addresses the changes, challenges and unprecedented possibilities that digital media bring to everyday life in the twenty-first century, while emphasizing the importance of studying media in a wider historical context.

By exploring the ways in which media and everyday life are intertwined, the programme addresses broader questions of modernity and social change, ranging from experiences of everyday space, time and mobility, to the impacts of media on self and identity, how we access, ‘store’ or remember the past, and the broader environmental, infrastructural and social impacts of digital technologies.

Informed by cutting-edge research in the field of cultural, media and communication studies, the programme is widely interdisciplinary in scope, drawing on perspectives from disciplines such as cultural studies, anthropology, philosophy, cultural geography, visual culture, urban studies, games and memory studies.

The programme is built around three core modules which focus on:
• The study of contemporary media together with past forms of media, in order to a) understand the historical origins or predecessors of today’s media, and b) to understand how media change is produced, experienced and negotiated
• Reflection on the role of contemporary media technologies in social and cultural life, drawn from students’ own everyday experience of media.
• Research methods and approaches used in the study of media, culture and everyday life.

You will develop skills that directly enhance employability, including applying critical thinking skills, giving presentations, plus data management, problem-solving, team-working and research design and implementation.

Career prospects

Student career development is a major interest for the department and we actively encourage students to integrate career planning into their academic studies. This is promoted through individual modules which have strong policy and career relevant aspects, and a close relationship with the University’s excellent Careers Service who provide bespoke sessions for students.

Through this programme graduates will enhance their career prospects in professional areas like cultural and non-profit institutions, media, journalism and government. While some positions in these fields often require the ability to conduct research or project-work and to demonstrate sustained and complex organisational skills in ways encompassed by this MA, its emphasis on oral and written communication skills as well as on IT-based presentation skills and research will be useful for many types of employment. As a strongly academic degree, this MA offers a good preparation also for those graduates who wish to further their academic study through a PhD.