Digital Culture and Media with Foundation Year BA (Hons)

Birkbeck, University of London

Culture today is increasingly digital. We can know our city’s iconic places through location-aware apps. We shape our identity alongside social media influencers. We are learning that biases around race, class, gender and sexuality are embedded into algorithms. The BA Digital Culture and Media with Foundation Year challenges you to immerse yourself in these kinds of issues while also engaging directly with digital technologies and practices.You will gain knowledge of the most recent advances and concerns relating to digital culture and media: from wearable technologies and artificial intelligence, to online misinformation and data-driven surveillance. We also put such topics under scrutiny in a wider historical context to enable you to better understand how the digital media we use and depend on today have been made possible.This course is your opportunity to learn about cutting-edge, academic perspectives, while also developing skills and knowledge in applied media practice. Through projects, practice-led activities and experimentation you will acquire professional knowledge and aptitudes in areas such as social media, digital design, video editing and entrepreneurship. This will help you develop a broad and highly transferable understanding of digital culture and media suited to our twenty-first-century context.Before proceeding to the main degree, you will spend your Foundation Year preparing yourself for a degree in the arts by improving your study and research skills and gaining arts-related knowledge and understanding. You will also have the opportunity to take a language module as part of the Foundation Year.Upon successful completion of the Foundation Year, you can automatically progress on to our three-year, full-time, evening study BA Digital Culture and Media.We also offer part-time Foundation Year degrees which allow you to spread out your Foundation Year studies over two years. This means that you can take six years to complete the part-time degree with Foundation Year.**Highlights**- Follow this course on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to discover more about closely related topics and events, and access free taster content.- Our Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies offers an extensive portfolio of internationally respected courses that engage with the latest ideas and techniques in media and cultural theory, arts policy and management, film and television studies, journalism, creative marketing and digital media.- Attend our dynamic programme of seminars, events and guest lectures organised by affiliated research centres and networks such as Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture, the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image and the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology. Make yourself at home in our Bloomsbury campus, which includes facilities such as the award-winning Birkbeck Cinema, the Peltz Gallery, and computer labs equipped with video editing, print layout and web design software packages.- Learn from leading academic researchers in the field such as Scott Rodgers, Joel McKim, Rebekah Cupitt, Silke Arnold-de Simine, Lina Džuverović, Robert Topinka, Sophie Hope and Professor Tim Markham. Acquire up-to-date skills and knowledge from experienced industry practitioners at the heart of London's global media industry.**Careers and employability**Graduates can pursue careers in the media and cultural industries, for example in:- film- television- newspapers- online publishing- digital media management- magazines- trade publications- public relations.