This module is designed to provide you with skills and knowledge to design research projects.

By the end of the module, you'll know:

• what is expected from a Masters dissertation in communication
• how to design research questions, literature review, and methods
• how to choose the most suitable approaches for your research interests

The rapid changes in mass communication like the rise of artificial intelligence exert strong impact on politics in both democracies and non-democracies. This module is devoted to these new technologies and their challenges to contemporary politics. With that focus, it crucially provides the theoretical framework and empirical basis to understand emerging communication technologies and media practices from a political science perspective.

This is a supervised-reading module designed to allow students to delve more deeply into a core area of  Political Communication and Media that interests them – with expert guidance - in preparation for the dissertation.

This class trains participants in the design, application, presentation, and critical evaluation of quantitative political research using relevant software packages for statistical analysis.

The purpose of this class is to provide students with a comprehensive overview of the concepts and theoretical approaches central to understanding and analysing the role of international institutions and regimes in the contemporary world. This class will survey a variety of international institutions and regimes, exploring how they shape global interactions in a number of cross-cutting issue areas such as security, trade, human rights and the environment. The overall analysis will contribute to the understanding of the theories, practices and processes through which global politics are organised and to an assessment of the future of international institutions and regimes in global governance.

This class is an optional methods component that builds on the existing research methods taught by the department. It provides advanced training in quantitative text analysis and machine learning approaches that are not currently covered in the introductory classes.

This class will acquaint you with the field of strategic communication and the major theories of persuasion. It will explore the process of communicating purposefully from its different stages and thus help you form a well-rounded theoretical understanding of its many facets and complexities. The class will also combine theory and practice by asking you to apply the acquired theoretical perspectives onto professional scenarios.

This module is designed to give students an understanding of key ethical issues, practices and norms of the digital media environment.

Due to the rapid changes in the digital environment, journalism and wider information media systems have become key sites where normative questions arise about the ethics of these systems, processes and technologies. This includes the interrogation of the tensions between old and new values and traditions in a globally-networked system that has a bearing on individual and collective experience and identity.

This module is for students who wish to learn how to apply theoretical frameworks to complex topics in the digital media environment. 

The aim of this class is to provide fundamental data analytics skills to postgraduate students in the media and communication subject area. The class focuses on embracing new analytical capabilities provided by developments in the field of information communication and technology. The Media Analytics module will provide a much-needed set of analytical skills, enabling students to adapt to recent trends in the media and communication landscape.

You'll study the dominant media and communication theories, and their application across a number of international contexts and media platforms. You'll examine the trends and texts over a number of media contexts and genres, including popular cultural platforms and the coverage of politics, as well as dealing with the implications of international media on the mediation and public understanding of conflict and terrorism. 

Concerns about the impact of humankind on the environment and the threat to planetary health caused by unsustainable patterns of production, consumption and management mean that there is a pressing need for this module which explores media, science and the environmental crisis.

This class provides students with a critical overview of key debates regarding science and environmental communications and focuses on how messages are produced, packaged, and circulated for diverse audiences with examples drawn from legacy media and contemporary social media platforms.

Students will thus gain an understanding of overarching theoretical approaches to science and the environment from the cross-cutting fields of Sociology of media; cultural studies; feminist research; critical race research and science and technology studies.

We will examine reporting of the climate emergency; analyse framing of microplastics in the media, explore the role of celebrities in shaping environmental campaigns and deconstruct assumptions about what constitutes ‘pollution’.

The module is assessed by an academic essay and a short blog post.

This class is an optional methods component that builds on the existing research methods taught by the department. It provides advanced training in quantitative methods and the use of network-based models for understanding the social world beyond those currently covered in the introductory classes. This class will provide you with the substantive and practical knowledge to design and implement studies using a range of computer-assisted approaches to network analysis.