Media and Communications Honours subjects
Please note that not all subjects are offered every year.
Full subject descriptions are available on the University of Melbourne Handbook.
Core Subjects
100-415 Journalism: Conflict and Society
Journalism: Conflict and Society aims to engage students with a wide range of scholarly studies of different mediated conflicts and major informing theoretical frameworks and methodologies. Case studies of media reporting will include, for example, demonstrations, riots and civil unrest; war (from the Crimea to the Gulf and beyond); international terrorism and the events of September 11 2001; deviance, crime and criminal justice; 'race', racism and ethnicity; political scandals; the intifada; the environment and 'risk society'. Through this case study approach to mediated conflict the module opens up a sophisticated theoretical understanding of production processes, professional practices, political contingencies and media performance and how these impact on the representation of major public issues and concerns. Students will also be invited to engage in detailed analysis of current mediated conflicts as they arise throughout the duration of course and reflect on their own findings and research strategies.
100-416 Researching Audiences and Reception
Researching Audiences and Reception aims to provide students with a detailed understanding of the different ways in which questions of media effects and audience power have been conceptualised and investigated across the history of mass communication research. In this way, students will be equipped to understand and critically evaluate contemporary research approaches to audience studies - both industrial/administrative and academic/critical. Approaches examined will include: early media effects studies rooted in the behaviourist paradigm (but still influential in perennial concerns about media violence and the corrupting influence of new media technologies on the young), sociological studies of 'uses and gratifications' and 'cultivation analysis', and more recent approaches to public beliefs and opinion formation, as well as approaches inspired by cultural studies and varieties of feminism that explore audiences as culturally situated and as 'active sense makers'. Students will consider different audiences, mediums and genres across the course and engage in focused study of selected audiences and processes of reception.
100-417 Media and Everyday Life
Media and Everyday Life aims to engage students with a developing research tradition in the field of media and communications. In the past different approaches have tended to share a concern with media influence and impacts often conceived in terms of propaganda, ideology and/or the transmission of 'public knowledge'. Cultural studies helped to shift this concern to that of 'popular culture' - though still approached as an ideological battleground or site of hegemonic dominance. New research, however, often adopts a more 'anthropological' stance and tries to better understand how media are increasingly integral to our everyday lives at home, at work and in the interlocking spheres of political activity and nationalism, and within the temporal and spatial arrangements that characterise late-modern (mediated) societies. The domestic, ritualistic and everyday forms of media \involvement and experience are here opened up to critical inspection, as are, for example, studies of media and sport, tourism, childhood as an international media trope and children as key media consumers, the appropriation of new communication technologies by different creative constituencies (including visual artists, community action and NGO activist groupings, and e/m-commerce website designers), and the expansion of the televisual in public space. Students will be encouraged to evaluate internationally disseminated theories in a regional (Asia-Pacific) context.
100-418 Media Policy and Regulation
Media Policy and Regulation encourages students of media and communications to recognise the importance of investigating the changing regulatory regimes that structure media organisation and delivery and how these relate to surrounding interests and the play of power. Historical examples are introduced to demonstrate how media regulation has evolved across time and in response to different mediums, industries and markets. The normative dimension of media policy - the pursuit or safeguarding of 'public interests' - is also explored across different national domains and in respect of different cultures. Recent developments in digitalisation, telecommunications and satellite delivery systems render problematic a number of earlier assumptions concerning separate medium regulation and sovereignty of national regulation and these receive deliberate emphasis and discussion throughout the course and in respect of different national political contexts, cultures and moral concerns.
100-419 Public Relations and Corporate Power
Public Relations and Corporate Power aims to contextualise the rise of public relations in relation to the rise of large corporations and 'promotional society' and provide students with an understanding of the changing role of the public relations function within corporations, and its impact on creating and manipulating corporate reputation. Relationships between corporations and their publics will be examined through a variety of theoretical and critical prisms and with special emphasis upon the 'mediated' nature of such relationships. Case studies and recent contested issues such as 'the concept of 'corporate citizenry', will be discussed, as well as the role of the media in resisting, or assisting, corporations in promoting their goals and values.
100-420 Journalism: Practice and Theory
Journalism: Practice and Theory aims to provide students with an informed understanding of news organisation and professional practice, their informing determinants and impact on news representations. The course reviews and evaluates a wide range of theoretical frameworks and research studies and invites students to apply competing models to news materials and ethnographic and journalistic accounts of professional practice. This 'grounded' discussion of journalism as practice is then contrasted to normative liberal and professional views of journalism as 'fourth estate', 'independent watchdog' and provider of 'factual' information and neutral conduit of political opinion. Changing genres of journalism and news epistemologies ('ways of knowing') including tabloid TV news, current affairs programming as well as popular, serious, advertorial and online forms of newspapers are all consulted and related to wider debates about journalism in late-modern and so-called 'post-journalism' societies.
100-581 Media and Communications Thesis
Past Honours/MA Minor/PGD Theses abstracts [pdf]
The Media and Communications Thesis provides students with an opportunity to originate, under supervision, a study on a topic of their own choosing and to pursue this over a sustained period of time to successful completion. The thesis will be expected to demonstrate a relatively sophisticated and detailed understanding of its subject matter as well as competence in research design and execution, methodological and theoretical reflexivity, high standard of argument and conformity to academic standards of presentation. The thesis topic and proposal will have to be formally approved by the thesis coordinator. Students will receive support and guidance via seminars/workshops and consultation throughout the process of conceiving, designing, researching and writing up their thesis. Theses can be variously oriented toward empirical investigation and study or close theoretical engagement with and critique of the ideas of others, or situated somewhere between these two poles of the research continuum.
Optional subjects
| Subject title and code |
|---|
| 106-402 Cultural Policy and Power |
| 106-404 Memory and Contemporary Culture |
| 106-409 Stardom, Media, Culture |
| 106-428 Media, Politics and Cultural Diaspora |
| 106-444 Global Culture: History and Theory |
| 106-475 Business and Professional Communications |
| 106-474 The Contemporary Publishing Industry |
| 106-477 Editing and Publishing for the Internet |
| 107-421 Contemporary Film Theory |
| 107-429 Ethnographic and Documentary Cinema |
| 110-431 Literature and Film in Contemporary China |
| 131-452 Representations of Gender |
| 166-413 Globalisation and its Discontents |
| 166-444 The Emerging World of (Dis)order |
| 166-455 Management Communications and the Media |
| 166-485 Contemporary Sociological Theory |
| 121-545 Understanding Development |