MA Film & Screen Studies

The Department’s research falls into four main strands which make up our research groupings:

• Gender, Feminism and Contemporary Culture: connecting the long tradition of work within the Department on culture and representation, embodiment and affect, to its specific strengths in gender, race, sexuality and cultures of work
• Media and Democracy: building on the work of the Centre for Global Media and Democracy and the Leverhulme programme on media’s contribution to democracy -- including the changing nature of journalism and political communication
• Media Futures: bringing together arts, humanities and social sciences approaches to understanding the changing role of media technologies in art, culture, economy and science, and the changing relation between the virtual and the material
• Screen Cultures and Media Arts: consolidating the long-standing focus on screen cultures within the Department, as concentrated within the Leverhulme programme, combined with an expanded exploration of media arts such as photography, video, digital imagining, sound and performance.

Pathways

The MA offers two pathways:

MA Film and Screen Studies: Moving Image Studies Pathway

The moving image media today are a concentrated form of culture, ideas, socialisation, wealth and power. 21st-century globalisation, ecology, migration and activism fight over and through them. How have the media built on, distorted and abandoned their past? How are they trying to destroy, deny or build the future? This pathway explores new critical approaches that address the currency of moving image media in today's global context – their aesthetics, technology and politics. It seeks to extend the boundaries for studying moving images by considering a wider range of media and introducing students to a wider range of approaches for investigating moving images' past and present.

MA Film and Screen Studies: Media Arts Pathway

The most intense and extreme forms of media, experimental media arts, test to breaking point our established ideas and practices. From wild abstraction and surrealist visions to activist and community arts, they ask the profoundest questions about high art and popular culture, the individual and the social, meaning and beauty. This pathway explores these emerging experimental practices of image making and criticism. Students on this pathway are encouraged not just to study but to curate and critique past, present and future media arts by building exhibitions and visual essays of their own. Short practical workshops will enable students to make the most of the skills you bring into the course.