MA Media & Communication

Key Concepts & Methods: Users and Producers: This unit explores the key concepts and methods associated with analyzing and understanding audiences and producers following a project-based learning approach. It introduces the academic study of media and communication, focusing on ideas and techniques used to research users and producers. 

Key Concepts & Methods: Texts and Artefacts: This unit explores the key concepts and methods associated with analyzing and understanding texts/artifacts following a project-based learning approach. It introduces the academic study of media and communication, particularly emphasizing the role of media and communication research and its relationship with society and culture. 

Communicating Ideas in the Digital Age: This unit explores how research and ideas, more generally, can be expressed and transmitted via alternatives to the book, the article, and the lecture. It examines, for example, the communicative power of video, audio, performance, social media, and games to consider how knowledge is mediated in different forms. Students will develop skills as producers, curators, and experts as they devise methods and artifacts that translate complex research ideas into arrangements understandable by particular audiences. 

Media Diversity & Cross-cultural Communication: This unit aims to support students in developing the knowledge and skills to evaluate cross-cultural contexts critically and reflect on key themes in media and diversity. The team will analyze how social and cultural diversity is constructed, represented, and understood by the media. 

Major Project: The Major Project is the program’s capstone unit comprising a dissertation and exhibition. The dissertation aims to allow students to develop and demonstrate their critical, analytical, and research skills by undertaking a significant piece of academic work as the culmination of their program. The exhibition aims to provide students with the experience of translating their academic work into a media artifact and practice-based presentation, synthesizing and furthering their skills in communicating ideas, translating research into media artifacts, and targeting audiences.

Contemporary Perspectives in Media and Communication: This unit focuses on current perspectives in the field, exploring cutting-edge topics, new methods of research, and emergent areas of scholarship. To develop a critical understanding of how academic fields and the associated professional practice grows, the unit examines the role that perspective plays in debates around innovation, industry dynamics, media environments, policies, and procedures.   

Media & Global Challenges: This unit explores the function and role of the media in the context of shared global challenges, specifically those defined by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals 2030 Agenda. It will also examine media and journalism's role in empowering communities to respond to and reduce the risks posed by the challenges defined in the SDGs. 

New Media Innovation: In this unit, you'll engage with critical issues and debates facing a networked media landscape, where audiences as passive consumers make way for collaborative reporting and crowdsourcing. Ways new media can complement and improve existing journalistic processes, including data journalism, increased transparency and accountability, mobile news applications, and augmented reality, will be at the forefront. In addition, you'll find a branch; you'll gain an understanding of how to undertake developing online civic media projects for journalistic purposes. 

Brands & Branding: This unit aims to consolidate your understanding of why a brand is a strategic asset for an organization; how the support is realized, protected, and valued not as a cost but as a source of revenue/ value. You will also be encouraged to critically reflect upon the role and impact of brands and branding in today's contemporary society and appreciate how branding and brand communications need to evolve in the world of 24/7/always on connected audiences. You will also be exposed to new and emerging forms of brand communication, such as branded content, branded entertainment, and transmedia storytelling. 

Consumer Insights: Through applied work, you will gain a critical appreciation of the role of theory in generating commercially consumer-viable insights and in marketing communications practice. Understanding consumer culture and behavior for effective marketing communications development and implementation are explored and analyzed.