Culture, Media and Research

2024/2025

Academic Year

ENG

Instruction in English

9

ECTS credits

Delivered at:

Institute of Media

Course type:

Compulsory course

When:

1 year, 2-4 module

Instructor

Kompatsiaris, Panos

Course Syllabus

Abstract

The course Culture, Media, and Research trains students in working with cultural studies and ethnographic perspectives for studying and researching media and digital cultures. We discuss a broad spectrum of phenomena associated with contemporary media cultures, including transgression, celebrity activism, protest, social movements, selfies, attention, labour and curating economies as they relate to a wide range of contemporary media, from film and music clips to the internet and performance art. The course takes on the idea that practice occurs within social, economic and technological contexts and that practice and contexts should be understood dynamically and always in relation to each other. The course highlights issues surrounding power, class, gender, sexuality and ‘race’ with an emphasis on style, aesthetics and the visual. The students are expected to develop their own written or visual projects in reference to the themes of the course and actively participate in the seminars and discussions by bringing their own examples and case studies. In the first two classes of Module 2 Media Cultures we introduce the approaches and perspectives of the course. Following, each week focuses on one phenomenon or cluster of phenomena related to contemporary media cultures. The aim of this Module is to exercise our ways of seeing and writing about the mediascapes surrounding us. In the 3rd Module, Reception and Audience Studies, students will have the opportunity to engage with key theoretical approaches and debates around the broader study of reception and audiences. During the first weeks of this module, students will engage with key theoretical approaches and scholars, starting from Jauss to Stuart Hall and beyond. Then, students will concentrate on the conceptualization of audiences and publics, as seen through different theoretical lens. Next, the module focuses on contemporary debates regarding how audiences and reception are observed in the digital environment, concentrating on networked, imagined, and affective publics. During the last sessions of this module, students will concentrate on research methods and techniques for the study of reception and audiences, emphasizing on different examples and studies. In Module 4 Posthumanism and its Discontents we explore arguments and counterarguments, approaches and critiques, topics and currents that revolve around ‘posthumanism’, understood as a perspective that privileges the dissolution, deconstruction, amplification, enhancement and hybridization of the category of the ‘human’ as this is principally understood in Enlightenment thought. We will be doing that by focusing on the impacts and forms of an eclectic array of issues and concepts, including new materialism, biotechnologies, machine-seeing, data, AI, monsters and cyberculture. In addition to the readings, in each class, the students are invited to watch and think through a film based on the week’s lecture and/or reading material.