The School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London

Overview

Venue: Russell Square: College Buildings

Start of programme: September intake only

Mode of Attendance: Mixed Full Time and Part Time

The MA in Global Media and Postnational Communication starts from three premises. One is that globalization is a set of complex and dense processes with unequal effects in different parts of the world but sufficiently strong to invite analysis of a post-national spatiality of global social relations. The second is that central to these processes is the role of communications technologies as infrastructure and skeins of connectivity and the circulation of mediated products that structure competing social imaginaries. The third is the growing convergence between the previously separable areas of broadcasting, telecommunications and the Internet, so that study of the current moment needs to address not just conventional media (press, radio, television) but also the explosion in new communication technologies, including the Internet, satellite technologies and mobile telephony. Thus the remit of this degree is the study of the dynamics of globalization and its critiques, and the roles and nature of communications technologies and mediated content within these processes and the consequent changes in the nature of political, economic, financial, social and cultural activity.

The specific and unique focus of this degree will be its exploration of the responses to globalization in the South and the dynamic developments in media and communications within Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It examines the growing significance of Asia, Africa and the Middle East as the locations of new media players and new cultural genres, of complex audience involvements with mediated communication and as the sites of critical and creative responses to globalization processes.

It is not only media content that circulates but people themselves who move, and one aspect of this degree is to take seriously the development and use of mediated forms by minority ethnic, diasporic, exilic and refugee populations, be that in minority television channels, deterritorialized political action or other forms of cultural and political representation. Additionally, reactions to globalization and its more problematic outcomes increasingly take on postnational forms so the course will explore the dynamics of global civil society and the use of ICTs to build movements of solidarity.

Email: mediaandfilm@soas.ac.uk