MC431      Half Unit
Critical Approaches to Strategic Communications

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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This course provides an advanced understanding of theoretical knowledge in the field of media and communication as it relates to strategic communications and the key promotional industries of advertising, branding and public relations. The focus is on the role, scope and activities of strategic communications in contemporary societies and in the context of globalisation and the digital age. Topics cover the context, practices and challenges of strategic communications, and are likely to include: the advance of promotional culture in and across public, political, non-profit and corporate institutions; professional structures and identities of the strategic communications industries; discourses of strategic communications, including reputation and relationship management; technologies of strategic communications; strategic communications and inequalities (gender, 'race', class); and the ethics of strategic communications.

30 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

• Aiello, G. & Parry, K. 2019. Visual Communication. London: SAGE.
• Aronczyk, M. and Powers, D. (eds) 2010. Blowing up the brand. New York: Peter Lang.
• Banet-Weiser, S. and Mukherjee, R. (eds) 2012. Commodity activism: Cultural resistance in neoliberal times. New York: NYU Press
• Cronin, A. 2018. Public relations capitalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
• Davis, A. 2013. Promotional cultures: the rise and spread of advertising, public relations, marketing and branding.  Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Edwards, L. 2018. Understanding public relations: Theory, culture and society. London: Sage.
• Ihlen, O and Fredriksson, M. (eds) 2018. Public relations and social theory: Key figures, concepts and developments (second edition). New York/London: Routledge.
• Macnamara, J. 2015. Organizational listening: the missing essential in public communication. New York: Peter Lang.
• Moloney, K. & McGrath, C. 2019. Rethinking public relations: Persuasion, democracy and society. London: Routledge.
• Turow, J. 2017. The aisles have eyes: How retailers track your shopping, strip your privacy and define your power. New Haven, CT., Yale University Press.
• Webster, JG. 2014. The marketplace of attention: how audiences take shape in a digital age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Oral examination (100%)