Introductory description

This module introduces students to app studies as a critical, interdisciplinary and inventive approach to mobile applications as everyday software. The module brings together advanced theoretical and methodological frameworks to advance app analysis as a critical technical practice. Students engage with different analytical entry points, including app stores, app packages, data infrastructures and network flows, interface design and app historiography. They deploy and evaluate this range of approaches while developing independent research competencies and cultivating speculative imagination, equipping students to evaluate existing app ecosystems and envision socio-technical alternatives.

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.

Week One - Introduction
The introduction offers an overview of the module and app studies as a field. It outlines theoretical frameworks for understanding apps from cultural, economic and technological perspectives, setting up the conceptual basis for the module and its methodological pluralism.

Week Two - Platformisation, Conglomeration and Global App Economies
This session will cover super-appification, platform conglomeration, digital sovereignty and the geopolitics of platform capitalism; offering a review of app markets at different scales, offering comparative and transnational perspectives.

Week Three - Apps as Software: Permissions, Kits and Packages
A week covering software analysis, decompiling methods, privacy auditing and the socio-political implications of permissions, including auditing tools, frameworks and platforms.

Week Four - App Stores as Techno-Economic Systems
A week which will focus on the political economy and infrastructures of app distribution, including algorithmic curation, governance, moderation and review, and representational forms. Students will repurpose app store affordances to develop a range of studies from the analysis of media concentration to issue-based studies.

Week Five - Interface Cultures: Walkthroughs, UX and Personas
A week that considers interface analysis, persona design (including the development of research personas), UX methods, dark patterns and behavioural design critique. The walkthrough method is introduced as an approach to studying interfaces.

Week Six - Reading week

Week Seven - Apps as Data Infrastructure: Network Connections and Infrastructural Power
A week that turns to the mapping and analysis of network data flows, cloud computing systems and critical cartography of platform infrastructure. Workshop component will introduce network traffic analysis.

Week Eight - App Historiographies: Archives, Repositories and Platform Memory
This session will concentrate on web archival and software repositories, aiming to historicise apps and platforms, while covering key topics in digital archiving and preservation.

Week Nine - Group Presentations
Students will present and receive feedback on a group project developed throughout the term drawing on the methodologies and concepts they have been introduced to.

Week Ten - Decolonial Design, Ecological Critique and Speculative Futures
A final week considers the costs and harms of digital infrastructure, while introducing perspectives from decolonial design to speculative futures. Students will be invited to revisit their prior analyses from these perspectives.

Learning outcomes

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

• Critically evaluate and synthesize diverse theoretical frameworks, demonstrating command of current academic debates and their methodological implications.
• Design and operationalise an original, independently conceived research project that applies and reflects critically upon digital methods, including software audits, walkthrough analysis, data flow mapping and archival approaches, in relation to a specific app ecosystem or platform phenomenon.
• Demonstrate advanced methodological reflexivity, articulating the epistemological affordances and limitations of diverse analytical approaches and situating these within broader debates about knowledge production in digital media research.
• Produce academic work that communicates complex, evidence-based arguments, and demonstrate sustained critical engagement with primary and secondary materials.
• Engage constructively with speculative and alternative design thinking, producing original proposals that move beyond critique to envision feasible alternatives to current app economies

Indicative reading list

Reading lists can be found in Talis

Research element

Students undertake independent and collaborative research into apps as socio-technical artefacts. The module develops research skills through weekly engagement with app studies methods, including software analysis, walkthroughs, app store research, data flow mapping, archival research and speculative design. This involves the use of various software analysis tools, the repurposing of digital affordances, and forms of data collection and analysis, including visualisation. Such empirical work will be conducted alongside independent reading, theoretical reflections and conceptual development from relevant disciplinary fields.

Interdisciplinary

Students engage with debates on everyday software culture and app ecosystems from a range of disciplinary perspectives including media and cultural studies, platform and infrastructure studies, HCI, science and technology studies (STS), political economy and decolonial theory, among others. They are asked to evaluate and creatively deploy these frameworks using methods and concepts drawn from diverse disciplines.

International

The module provides students with the opportunity to examine apps across diverse national and cultural contexts beyond Western settings. They will acquire an appreciation of apps as multi-situated forms bound up with diverse regulatory regimes, cultural practices, political economies and infrastructural affordances. Students may select case studies from any national and platform context, and are encouraged to reflect on how app ecosystems mediate everyday life, governance, labour and everyday life across diverse geopolitical milieus.

Subject specific skills

• Design and deliver independent research that demonstrates a working knowledge of theoretical frameworks and methodological reflexivity, while being able to discuss and evaluate the work within its disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts to a specialist audience;
• Connect advanced theoretical knowledge with empirical practice, particularly in relation to the study of apps, platforms and data infrastructures;
• Draw from a range of perspectives platform and infrastructure studies to cultural and media theory in order to construct original analytical arguments and identify new directions for critical inquiry;
• Demonstrate ethical awareness in relation to methods of digital research, including reflection on privacy, consent, positionality and the social implications of the approaches deployed.

Transferable skills

• Think critically, creatively and independently in relation to a particular thematic area of the student’s choice;
• Meet regular deadlines;
• Demonstrate time-management skills;
• Demonstrate problem solving skills;
• Demonstrate independent learning skills;
• Participate in class discussions;
• Demonstrate and practice presentation skills;
• Present and report on group discussions;
• Experience and participate in both individual and team-based activities.