Professor Sonia Livingstone, STC. S105

This course is available to students on MSc Media and Communications, MSc Media and Communications (Media and Communication Governance) and MSc Media and Communications (Research). It is an optional course for MSc Culture and Society, MSc Global Media and Communications (with Fudan or USC), MSc Media, Communication and Development, MSc Politics and Communication and MSc Social Research Methods. Students on degrees without a media and communications component may attend subject to numbers, their own degree regulations and with the permission of Professor Livingstone.

This course examines a variety of social, cultural and psychological issues as they relate to the audiences for television and new media. It analyses people's everyday engagement with media, beginning with the history of audiences and audience research, then examining audiences for a variety of genres (such as news, soaps, talk shows and reality television), before addressing transformations in audiences and audience research with the advent of new media (especially hybrid, globalised, cross-media genres and user-generated content). The course frames its critical investigation of empirical audience studies in relation to theories of active audiences, reader-response theory, interpretative communities, encoding-decoding and fandom, among others. Students will be encouraged to read widely, to forge links with other aspects of media, communications and cultural studies, and to debate the nature and future of audiences in a changing media landscape.

Lecture (two hours) x 1 MT, lecture (one hour) x 9 MT, seminar (one hour) x 9 MT.

All students are expected to complete advance reading, prepare seminar presentations, and submit one essay of 1,500 words.

Abercrombie, N.& B Longhurst, B. (1998) Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination, Sage; Brooker, W. & Jermyn, D. (2003) The Audience Studies Reader, Routledge; Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture, Routledge; Gillespie, M. (Ed) (2005) Media Audiences, Open University/McGraw Hill; Livingstone, S. (2005) Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters for the Public Sphere, Intellect; Morley, D. (1992) Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies, Routledge; Nightingale, V. (ed.) (2011) The Handbook of Media Audiences, Wiley-Blackwell. Nightingale, V., & Ross, K. (eds.). (2003). Critical Readings: Media and Audiences, Open University Press; Schroeder, K., Drotner, K., Kline, S., and Murray, C. (2003) Researching Audiences, Arnold.

A written assignment of not more than 3,000 words.