MC436      Half Unit
Mediating the Past

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

There are no formal pre-requisites, but students are required to prepare a statement of no more than 200 words in response to the following question, which must be submitted when selecting this course on LSE for You: Briefly explain what you hope to learn from the "Mediating the Past" course.

Please do not email the teacher with personal expressions of interest as these are not required and do not influence who is offered a place.

This course starts with the premise that understandings and imaginings of the past and the future are mediated and shaped by power relations within the present. It critically explores cultural, political and technological issues in relation to the passage of time. It addresses questions such as: How do we learn about history through media and why does that matter? How is nostalgia deployed in politics? How do different media technologies and conventions represent and structure collective notions about time? In addressing these questions, this course introduces students to the field of collective memory, differentiating it from history and historiography. It focuses on critical issues within the mediated politics of temporality, such as colonialism/postcolonialism, nationalism, authoritarianism, activism, and the witnessing of war. It explores how news media, popular culture, digital platforms and AI technologies mediate the past and structure time. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify key debates in the study of time and temporality, particularly as approached from the interdisciplinary perspective of communications and media studies.

10 hours of seminars and 10 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

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

Students will be expected to produce one research proposal.

• Anker, E. R. (2014). Orgies of feeling: Melodrama and the politics of freedom. Duke University Press.
• Badiou, A (2012). The rebirth of history: Times of riots and uprisings. Verso Books.
• Boym, S. (2008). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books.
• Chakrabarty, D. (2009). Privincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press
• Hage, G. (2009). Waiting. Melbourne Univ. Publishing.
• Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T (Eds.). (2012). The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press.
• Khayyat, M., Khayyat, Y., & Khayyat, R. (2018). Pieces of Us: The Intimate as Imperial Archive. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 14(3), 268-291.
• Martin-Barbero, J. (1993). Communication, culture and hegemony: from the media to mediations. Sage Pubns.
• Nelson, A. (2008). Bio science: Genetic genealogy testing and the pursuit of African ancestry. Social Studies of Science, 38(5), 759-783.
• Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations.
• Misztal, B. (2003). Theories of social remembering. McGraw-HIll Education (UK).
• Rao, R. (2020). Out of time: the queer politics of postcoloniality. Oxford University Press.
• Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke University Press.
• Strassler, K. (2006). Reformasi Through Our Eyes: Children as Witnesses of History in Post-Suharto Indonesia. Visual Anthropology Review, 22(2), 53-70.
• Trouillot, M. R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.
• Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
• Wang, Z. (2008). National humiliation, history education, and the politics of historical memory: Patriotic education campaign in China. International Studies Quarterly, 52(4), 783-806.
• Zelizer, B. (2010). About to die: How news images move the public. Oxford University Press.

Essay (100%, 3000 words)