Undergraduate - UnitATS4729 - Media, social relations and power

This unit entry is for students who completed this unit in 2015 only. For students planning to study the unit, please refer to the unit indexes in the the current edition of the Handbook. If you have any queries contact the managing faculty for your course or area of study.

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12 points, SCA Band 1, 0.250 EFTSL

Refer to the specific census and withdrawal dates for the semester(s) in which this unit is offered.

Level	Undergraduate
Faculty	Faculty of Arts
Offered	Not offered in 2015
Coordinator(s)	Fleur Gabriel

Synopsis

The unit focuses on the social relations, including power relations, entailed in and connected to various media. It reviews some key theoretical approaches to understanding discourse, power, social relations and their mediation via communication technologies. Topics include media and ideology; theories of practice; discourse, power and governmentality; deconstruction and democracy; the public sphere; media as communication technologies; the politics of media address; globalisation, informationalism and post-industrialism; intercultural relations; imagining the nation and gendering the media.

Outcomes

On successful completion of this unit, students will:

Be literate in (familiar with and able to apply) a range of theoretical approaches to the analysis of media, social relations and power;
Be able to formulate coherent and socially relevant investigations of media output and activity/audience usage, and undertake theoretically and methodologically sound description and analysis of empirical materials relating to these;
Be able to demonstrate a developed knowledge of the social conditions, material practices, products and outcomes of various media and their possible relations to specific audiences/populations;
Be able to demonstrate a capacity to draw on and adapt their unit-based knowledge to generate informed description and analysis of media instances, and to argue their own positions.

Assessment

Within semester assessment: 100%

Workload requirements

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 288 hours per semester typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. A unit requires on average three/four hours of scheduled activities per week. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.

Chief examiner(s)

Fleur Gabriel

This unit applies to the following area(s) of study

Communications

Prerequisites

First degree with a major in communications or a related discipline

Prohibitions

COM4421, GSC4421