module specification

Urban Media promotes understanding urban spaces as media outlets in their own complexity while teaching the use of media devices and technology as a stepping stone for critical engagement with space, its histories and inequalities. This module provides students with critical knowledge to interpret and advance the use of media devices and infrastructure as tools to engage with urban environments. Lastly, Urban Media draws on methods to capture the city as the ultimate stage for cultural expression by taking on critical practice for creating new forms of conviviality.

The module aims to:

1. map and explore critical scholarship at the intersection between urban humanities, digital media, media and communications, and cultural studies.
2. problematise the notion of space and culture for the common good according to the latest technologies, its perceptions and purposes.
3. lead to an appreciation of the city in its sentient, digital, and post-digital environments.
4. investigate the media potential to inform citizens about the urban environment, its inequities, and intersections.
5. develop innovative approaches for a better rapport between populations and the urban equipment.

This module provides students with a foundation in urban media studies, its basic theories and the media examples. It explores the city as a battleground of change and struggles between communities and powerholders. This module ends by discussing the digital city and its contradictions. Lecture contents may include:

Definitions of space and urban media
Representation of the city in the arts and cinema
Methods to understand and represent the city
The media and the right to the city
The intersectional city
Images of the city as a stage for protest
Displacement, migration, and digital placemaking
Bodies, technology, and memory
Screens, sounds, and feelings
Convergence and divergence in the age of AI

Each week offers students a range of affordances and disconnections to the advent of digital and technological use in urban environments. Lectures draw on interdisciplinary practice-based knowledge applied to urban sites worldwide. This range of case studies should inform future student practice.

Teaching methods include formal lectures, seminar discussion, screenings, library sessions and tutorials.  Students are expected to attend lectures and seminars: in the seminars they will at times work in small groups and be given practice in listening to each other’s contributions and offering constructive criticism, and in chairing and reporting discussion to the plenary seminar group. The teaching and learning strategy aims at encouraging an inclusive and supportive learning environment that respects and values the contributions of individual students, and provides opportunities for individual intellectual development through a variety of learning opportunities.

The module booklet will be available online, as will lecture outlines and some readings. Weblearn or its equivalent will also be used for communication with students individually and as a cohort. In addition to guided reading, students are expected to read and to use variety of sources (primary and secondary) and use seminars and tutorials to raise issues, questions and seek feedback.

A blended learning strategy will be employed to enhance the learning experience, facilitate communication between students and tutors and develop collaboration among students. The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) will be used as a platform to support online activities including on-line discussions, evaluation of online resources, and access to electronic reading packs. The VLE will also be used to facilitate formative assessment and related feedback, as well as a tool to integrate useful online learning materials provided by research institutions, academic publications, professional organisations and other relevant sources.

After being introduced to narrative, ethnographic, and intersectional approaches to urban media, students are expected to pursue suggested approaches and methods to engage with an amalgam of urban issues and realities and develop their proposals. On successful completion of this module, students will be able to:

1. employ practice-based media and communications methods focused on capturing the modern city.
2. perceive the media as an agent for raising awareness of urban issues.
3. analyse and create multimedia interventions in public and private spaces.
4. understand contemporary activism based on their media use in the city. 
5. Identify opportunities for collaboration with communities on social issues while by engaging with critical media practice.

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