Welcome new Level 1 students!

Posted on: 11 September 2018 in Posts

You will be meeting me very soon on your semester 1 core module COMM144 Introduction to Communication and Media Analysis. I’m the module leader for COMM144 and will be teaching you along with a team of 5 other members of staff from the Department of Communication and Media.

COMM144 Introduction to Communication and Media Analysis is about how media texts communicate meaning to us. It sets up foundational ideas about how mediated textual forms are constructed and explores the contexts around them, and how we interpret screen media, making meaningful readings of them to understand our own world. 

To explore this, the module is divided into three teaching blocks:

Block 1: Meaning, Images and Ideology (Weeks 1-4)
This introduces key concepts in visual communication, working through still photographic images and moving cinematic images to examine how images are tools of representation and power. It considers how composition, semiotics and ideology impact on the ways images are consumed and interpreted in everyday life and how this relates to ideas of ‘the real’.

Block 2: Analysis, Techniques and Methods (Weeks 5-8)
This explores dominant methods that we can analyse media texts through, concentrating on film and television to understand foundational analysis of all visual media communication. We will consider style and aesthetics, storytelling and structure, and categorisation and genre, looking at how and why media looks and feels the way it does, and for what purposes.

Block 3: Media in Context (Weeks 9-12)
Finally, we situate the study of communication and media in broader contexts to think about the effect of external factors on shaping media content. These range from the economic to the postmodern, from audiences and fans to bodies, space and place –looking at how texts and ideologies are commodified and/or challenged, how people negotiate an increasingly ‘mediated’ reality, and how non-media-centric media studies might open up new directions of study.

Textbook:
The main textbook for the module is Joanne Hollows (2016) Media Studies: A Complete Introduction, London: Hodder and Stoughton.
You can purchase this from online retailers such Amazon for £14.99 (with second hand copies available for around £9). This is affordable and is an excellent start to your preparation for the module and further reading around the topic of Media and Communication. Please note that textbook will not be used every week, but for about one third of all module. For the rest of the weeks we will be using a variety of books, articles and websites.

I look forward to seeing you all in the first week of teaching.

Sarah Thomas
Lecturer in Communication and Media, and Module Leader for Introduction to Communication and Media Analysis (COMM144)