Aims

Visual Culture is an innovative interdisciplinary module, which draws on theories and approaches from media and cultural Studies, fine art, film, memory studies and heritage. This module provides students with a grounding in the different disciplinary approaches to the visual and considers the way that our relationship to the visual has been shaped across time and space.

The emphasis on this module is on visual culture as a form of communication. To this end, students will be expected to develop appropriate analytical skills in decoding and assessing different types of visual communication, using a variety of different methodologies. This module aims:
• To explore the concept of the ‘visual’, both as a mode of communication and an interdisciplinary field of study.
• To provide students with a critical and comprehensive understanding of the role that visual communication plays in contemporary society, supported by an appreciation of the social and political histories of these acts of communication.
• To recognise the visual as political, social and cultural in nature and to understand how contemporary politics and culture shape acts of visual communication.
• To introduce a range of modalities of accessing, researching and comprehending visual acts of communication, including the ability to discriminate between types of visual communication.

Outline Of Syllabus

This module familiarizes students with the historical, political, social and economic contexts of visual communication and considers the visual in relation to a range of different topics. These may include:
• Perspective, and embodied approaches to visual culture
• Visual culture and the institution
• The photograph: histories, meanings, mobilities
• Exhibitionism, class and the visual
• Visual culture, commerce and consumption
• Visual culture, politics and the visuality of protest
• Digital visual cultures
• Visualizing time and place
• Cultural memory, trauma and the visual
• Visual culture and the body
• Offensiveness, taste and censorship

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

The lectures in the module will introduce students to various aspects of contemporary visual culture. The module will draw attention to the prevalence of visual acts of communication in everyday life and will offer strategies to enhance the understanding of such instances of communication. The examples of case studies will consolidate the appropriation of research methods that have applicability for an integrated approach to media studies, cultural studies and communication studies. Students will be constantly presented with the interdisciplinary implications of analysing visual culture and will be made aware of avenues for more in-depth study of the area. The module will review a wide range of aspects of visual instances (painting, photography, advertising, film, television, new media, design, architecture, urbanism), looking at the political, cultural and social contexts in which they are produced and interpreted.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

The assessment methods offer students the opportunity to explore themes from the module and apply them in a theoretical and practical way. Essay 1 allows students to apply a theory or theme from the module to a visual text of their choice and use one of the methodological approaches from the module to generate an in-depth analysis of that text. This assignment is complemented by continued student participation in the online blog or discussion thread; students will be required to contribute to this thread over the course of the module, writing a minimum of 3 discussion posts responding to a theme or idea raised during the lecture, responding to each other’s posts and sharing examples of visual texts that relate to the lecture topics.