Introductory description

How do your #s make the world you live in?

Consider how you use facebook, twitter, whatsapp, or instagram. How many times in a day do you use social media platforms? How are you digitally networked? How do certain issues trend (e.g. #metoo)? How do you participate in events, issues or trends on social media? Once events or issues trend on social media, they may find their way into print or television, which you access on your personal device. How are social media platforms used by activists to highlight injustice or give momentum to social and political movements? How is ‘user-generated’ content also used for both profit and surveillance?

Learn to examine how these networks made of emotions, communications, identity assertions, activisms, and data harvesting and surveillance techniques form a media ecology. Consider how these issues, events or trends criss-cross (trans) national borders. What factors complicate these transnational crossings? How do colonial and postcolonial contexts or gender or race or class or sexuality complicate these crossings? Learn to think through the ways in which human-technology relations are made and remade through ‘transnational media ecologies.’

Bring your digital smarts to this module, and we will work together to understand the world in sociological terms. We will look at ways in which governments, media, activists, corporations and people compete to influence the way you click, think, lol, love, hate, vote or want to change the world.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

This module will explore the ways in which our contemporary social, political and economic events and concerns are made visible through transnational networks and through their media ecologies. Through chosen case studies, the aim of the module will be to foster a historical awareness and a critical literacy regarding the ways in which these political, social and economic concerns are mediated. Emphasis will be placed on the intricate ways in which corporate and governmental technologies of profit and surveillance interact with user and activist considerations. These considerations include raced, gendered, classed, and queer politics alongside affective affiliations and transnational solidarities across geopolitical contexts. The module offers insights into ways of engaging with our digital environment, and the ways in which we may diagram and diagnose how we engage in ethical terms with political, social and economic concerns in the networked world in which we live.

Provisional Outline

1. Media Ecology and Transnational Networks
2. Mediality: Archive, Remediation & Hashtags
3. Mediality: Virality and Affect
4. Assemblages: Platforms & Surveillance
5. Assemblages: Race, Brutality & Resistance
6. Viral and Transnational (Palestine/Israel I)
7. Viral and Transnational (Palestine/Israel II)
8. Viral and Transnational (Kashmir/Palestine)
9. Viral and Transnational (Kashmir)
10. Mediality – Lessons & Futures (Wrap Up)

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• 1. to demonstrate a critical literacy regarding current political, social, and economic concerns as they emerge through transnational media ecologies through oral and written expression and argument.
• 2. to demonstrate an ability to communicate an understanding of theoretical concepts and analysis of case studies of transnational media ecologies through seminar discussion with peers and through oral, visual and written expression.
• 3. to demonstrate ability to engage creatively and ethically with module material by working on collaborative group projects with peers.
• 4. to demonstrate a capacity to be reflexive of one's location in relation to local and transnational perspectives.
• 5. to demonstrate an advanced ability to compare, evaluate, and analyse different perspectives and approaches to transnational media ecologies and locate and assess module material within the broader discipline of Sociology.

Indicative reading list

Aouragh, Miriyam 2011, ‘Confined Offline, Traversing Online: Palestinian Mobility
through the Prism of the Internet, Mobilities 6.3: 375-397.
Castells, M 2000, The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Clough, P 2008, ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, Bodies’, Theory, Culture, Society, 25 (1): 1-22.
Dasgupta, S 2007, Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique, Amsterdam, Rodopi.
Emejulu, A & McGregor, C 2016. ‘Towards a Radical Digital Citizenship in digital education’, Critical Studies in Education. DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2016.1234494
Gane, N, and Beer, D 2008, New Media: The Key Concepts, London, Bloomsbury
Publishing.
Grewal, I 2005, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, Durham,
NC, Duke University Press.
Grusin, Richard. 2010, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11. London: Palgrave Macmillan
1 – 61.
Haven, M 2013, Virality, Solidarity and Meme Warfare, Canadian Dimension, September/October.
Ince, Jelani, Rojas, Fabio & Clayton A. Davis. 2017. ‘The Social Media Response to Black Lives Mattter: how twitter users interact with Black Lives Matter through hashtag use’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 40 (11): 1814 – 1830.
Junaid, Mohamed 2013, ‘Death and Life Under Occupation: Space, Violence, and
Memory in Kashmir’ in K. Visweswaran (ed) Everyday Occupations: Experiencing
Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press. 158-190.
Marcus, GE and Saka, E 2006, ‘Assemblage’, Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2-3): 101-105.
Phillips, J 2006, ‘Agencement/Assemblage’, Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2-3): 108-109.
Sampson, TD 2012, Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks, Minneapolis, MN,University of Minnesota Press.
Scolari, Carlos. E. “Media Ecology: Expanding the Metaphor to Expand the Theory.”
Communication Theory 22 (2012): 204 – 225.
Sengupta, Shudhabrata 2013, ‘Facebook, Youtube, Kashmir’, in Sanjay Kak 2013
(ed) Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir, Chicago, IL:
Haymarket. 71-85.
Sharma, Sanjay. 2012. Black Twitter? Racial Hashtags, Networks and Contagion. New Formations 78. pp. 46 -64.
Tufecki, Zeynap. Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 2017. Print.
Venn, Couze 2006, ‘A Note on Assemblage’, Theory, Culture and Society 23 (2-3): 107-108.
Papacharissi, Zizi 2015, ‘Affective Publics and Structures of Storytelling: sentiment,
events and mediality’, Information, Communication and Society, 19.3: 307 – 324.

Research element

Research on theories and concepts taught in the module as well as research on case studies for assessments.

Interdisciplinary

The module brings together material from Sociology and Media Studies

International

The module addresses transnational circulations of events and phenomena through social media.

Subject specific skills

• a systematic understanding of knowledge, and a critical awareness of current problems and/or new insights, much of which is at, or informed by, the forefront of sociology and related fields of study including digital media studies

• a comprehensive understanding of techniques applicable to their own research or advanced scholarship

• originality in the application of knowledge, together with a practical understanding of how established techniques of research and enquiry are used to create and interpret knowledge in the discipline

• conceptual understanding that enables the student:

• • to evaluate critically current research and advanced scholarship in
    the discipline
• • to evaluate methodologies and develop critiques of them and, where appropriate, to propose new hypotheses.

Typically, holders of the qualification will be able to:

• deal with complex issues both systematically and creatively, make sound judgements in the absence of complete data, and communicate their conclusions clearly to specialist and non-specialist audiences

• demonstrate self-direction and originality in tackling and solving problems, and act autonomously in planning and implementing tasks at a professional or equivalent level

• continue to advance their knowledge and understanding, and to develop new skills to a high level.

Transferable skills

the qualities and transferable skills necessary for employment requiring:

• • the exercise of initiative and personal responsibility
• • decision-making in complex and unpredictable situations
• • the independent learning ability required for continuing professional development