Seminar in Media and Communications

Seminar s področja medijev in komuniciranja

Course credits:

10.00 ECTS / 60 (0 hours of lectures, 0 hours of exercises, 60 hours of seminars, 0 hours other forms of work)

Course holder:

prof. dr. Breda Luthar

Type:

Required

Language:

Slovenian / english

Semester:

Full academic year

Study degree

3. level

Course execution:

• Interdisciplinary Doctoral Programme in the Humanities and Social Sciences

Short content

I. The historical tradition of academic research of mass communication, the intellectual roots and development of the sociology of mass communication and the role of European critical theory - Lazarsfeld, Cantril, Blumler, Herzog, Lowwenthal, Katz, Merton, Riesman, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin... . Here we examine the social and cultural contexts of the development of the sociology of the media, administrative and critical research, the decline of the critical sociology of the media and the positivism of the American tradition of mass communication studies and the tole with the European tradition of critical theory. II. Communication and technology: A move towards the study of the communication forms facilitated by the media, the material and practical turn in the study of media and technology. The relation of “the social” to “the mediated” as problem for media theory. (Innis, McLuhan, Kittler, Latour...) III. Media and cultural studies, media and popular culture: from culturalism to structuralism Culturalism of Leavis, Williams, Hoggart and Thompson and American cultural studies (Carey). The structuralist turn in the second stage of the cultural/media studies project (Hall) and the epistemological circumstances behind this turn (Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes). Feminist media studies. Everyday life and media. Social and cultural contexts of the "cultural turn," continuity and breaking away from the tradition of mass communication studies. IV. Communication as interaction, communication as ritual production of reality, theory of practice Goffman, Rothenbuhler, Schatzki, Reckwitz, Couldry ...) On this platform students prepare a project – an essay on historical and theoretical aspects or a research – in one of the following areas of media studies: • Examination of the production process and productive cultures, professional standards, ideologies and routine tasks in media/cultural production • Examination of audiences: the tradition of studying the effects and applications of mass communication studies; or ethnographic studies of reception, examination of media reception in the context of cultural consumption and class/gender/ethnic inequalities in society, pro-sumption and hypertextuality of new media. • Textual/communication aspect of the media – from books to new media. Applicability of the interaction analysis, or discourse analysis, ethno-methodology, conversation analysis and linguistic pragmatics in examining the communication aspect of media (Goffman, Garfinkel, Sacks, Austin).