SM5325 Introduction to Media and Cultural Studies

How SM5325 is assessed

The grading slide in the first two lecture handouts for this offering lists these three components, and they total 100%. The final essay is a Reflexive Book Review of a single core book connected to the course themes, written on the template posted on Canvas, and the book must be confirmed with the course leader by email or in person before you write. Presentations run in groups of two or three from Week 3 to Week 12, with three groups each week. Confirm on Canvas what counts towards participation. The Canvas submission page for the presentation slides shows a points value that does not match the published weight; treat the handout's 30% as the grading split and ask the course leader if in doubt. The handouts also set out the School's penalty for plagiarism, zero for the assignment and a drop of one whole letter grade in the course result, and limit generative AI tools to proofreading.

Current SM5325 dates

Dates are as published in the course syllabus page and the group presentation submission page for this offering. Confirm exact deadlines and submission settings in the live LMS.

What SM5325 covers

Twelve chapters follow the twelve reading weeks of the published outline, grouped into its four sections: basics of media and method, the classic schools of cultural studies, the move from analogue to postdigital media, and gender and posthumanism.

Its second aim is the one the grade rests on: learning to apply those theories and methods to your own research and to write extended critical analyses of media cultures across analogue, digital and postdigital forms. Nothing in the assessment rewards summarising a reading.

The reflexive book review asks you to start from your own experience and use one whole book as a mirror, and the group presentation asks you to explain why a text appeared when it did and what it names in your own life.

Section 1: Media theory and method

The first two reading weeks set out vocabulary and method.

Chapter 1 separates mediation, the uneven circulation of meaning through media, from mediatization, the structural adaptation of institutions to media logic, and introduces remediation, Bolter and Grusin's double logic of immediacy and hypermediacy.

Chapter 2 sets Richard Rogers's digital methods, which follow the medium and study natively digital objects, against Anand Pandian's method of experience, in which the researcher's own changing perception counts as evidence.

Section 2: The classic schools

Chapter 3 reads the Birmingham School's account of youth subcultures, in which style and ritual answer a class problem in symbolic form while the material problem remains.

Chapter 4 stages the argument between Adorno's culture industry, which standardises leisure from above, and de Certeau's attention to what people do with mass culture in particular circumstances. Chapter 5 moves from structures of feeling to affect, following Massumi's distinction between intensity and qualified emotion and Anderson's politics of boredom.

Chapter 6 pairs Debord's spectacle, in which the commodity has become image, with Fisher's capitalist realism, in which audit culture turns workers into their own inspectors.

Section 3: Analogue, digital and postdigital media

Chapter 7 follows Wendy Chun's argument that networks deliver freedom as and through control, and her critique of treating source code as the essence of software.

Chapter 8 sets Benjamin Bratton's six-layer Stack and its platform sovereignty beside Apperley and Parikka's warning that platform studies produces the uniform platform it claims to find.

Chapter 9 explains why postdigital, a word its own defender says sucks, is useful for a world in which the digital has become the default, and why the New Aesthetic marks machine vision entering everyday images.

Section 4: Gender and posthumanism

Chapter 10 reads Haraway's companion species, beings who make each other up through a shared history, alongside Fisch's reading of multispecies science fiction.

Chapter 11 compares Åsberg's feminist posthumanities, which asks who counts as human and natural, with Hester's xenofeminism, which treats technology as a site of struggle and argues for abolishing gender by proliferating it.

Chapter 12 turns to autotheory and intimate scholarship, the method the final essay names, and sets out a procedure for writing a reflexive paragraph that turns outward rather than inward.

How to use this guide

Read the front matter first, because it sets out the grading split and the published requirements of the two graded tasks.

Then read one chapter a week alongside the course readings, and do the practice items before reading their answers. Keep a notebook of your own examples from the first week, since both graded tasks depend on personal material you cannot invent at the last minute.

The practice chapter plans a reflexive review and a presentation on original cases, and the closing chapter is a last pass before submission.

Evidence and assessment control

The grading split, the task requirements and the essay template follow the opening lecture handouts and the course site for this offering.

Teaching explanations, worked examples and practice items are independently authored and are not University assessment material; any marks shown on them are an AskSia study allocation.

The course site lists the final essay and the presentation slides as due on 6 December 2026, but presentation slots are chosen on the sign-up page, so confirm your group's week, the submission settings and any change to the requirements on Canvas.

Worked example · free

Turn a presentation topic into a context slide that meets the requirement

Key terms

Remediation

The representation of one medium inside another, through which new media gain meaning by refashioning older ones and older media refashion the new.

Mediatization

A long-term structural process in which institutions come to depend on media and adapt their routines to a media logic.

Digital Methods

Research approaches that repurpose the techniques of online devices, such as search engines and archives, to study natively digital objects.

Subculture

A tightly bounded group within a wider class culture, organised around its own focal concerns, activities, style and territory.

Culture Industry

Adorno's term for culture produced for reproduction and mass consumption, organising leisure by the same principles that govern work.

Affect

In Massumi's usage, the intensity of an experience before it is captured and named as a personal emotion.

Spectacle

Debord's name for the stage at which the commodity has colonised social life so completely that what we see is the commodity world.

Capitalist Realism

Fisher's term for the widespread sense that there is no alternative to capitalism, sustained by audit culture and bureaucracy.

Platform Sovereignty

Bratton's term for the governing power that planetary computing platforms exercise across and beyond state borders.

Postdigital

A condition in which the digital is no longer new but the default, blurring the line between analogue and digital.

Companion Species

Haraway's figure for beings, such as dogs and people, who make each other up through a shared history of relating.

Autotheory

Writing that joins first-person life narration with critical theory, using each to test the other.

SM5325 FAQ

Questions students ask in each SM5325 chapter

What is the simplest way to tell mediation and mediatization apart?

Ask what is changing. If an institution such as a political party, a church or a sport is reorganising its own routines to suit media formats, the process is mediatization, a structural and directional change. If the question is how meaning moves between production, circulation and reception in everyday life, often unevenly and in loops, the process is mediation. Couldry keeps both terms but argues the second is better at handling heterogeneous change. Chapter 01 · Theories of Media: Mediation, Remediation, Mediatization

What is the difference between digital methods and virtual methods?

Virtual methods take established tools such as questionnaires and interviews and use them online, so they study users and their reports. Digital methods, in Rogers's sense, repurpose the techniques that online devices already use, such as ranking, linking and archiving, to study natively digital objects. The first tells you what people say about a platform; the second tells you what the medium itself records and orders. Chapter 02 · Methods of Cultural Studies in the Digital Age

What did the Birmingham School mean by subculture?

A tightly bounded subset of a wider class culture, organised around its own focal concerns, activities, style and territory. The Resistance through Rituals chapter insists that a subculture always relates to a working-class parent culture whose problems it shares and, through it, to the dominant culture whose codes it negotiates. It is therefore a class answer in a generational form, not a youth phenomenon floating free of class. Chapter 03 · Popular Culture and the Birmingham School

Did Adorno think audiences were simply fooled?

No, and this is the most common misreading. Bernstein stresses that consumers can see through the culture industry's products and still feel compelled to buy and use them. The claim is about compliance without illusion, not about stupidity. An essay that answers Adorno by pointing out that viewers are ironic and knowing has answered a weaker argument than the one the reading makes. Chapter 04 · Everyday Life from the Frankfurt School to Practice Theory

What is the difference between affect and emotion in this week's reading?

For Massumi, affect is intensity, the body's response to an event before it is fixed to meaning, while emotion is that intensity once it has been qualified, owned and recognised as a personal feeling. The snowman study, in which children's bodily responses and their ratings of pleasantness came apart, is his evidence that the two operate on different levels. Chapter 05 · From Structure of Feelings to Affect Studies

What does Debord mean by the spectacle?

The point at which the commodity has taken over social life so thoroughly that commodification is all we see. It is not simply lots of images or advertising. It is a social relation in which exchange has displaced use and appearance has displaced lived activity, so that the spectacle functions like money that can only be looked at. Chapter 06 · Spectacle, Consumer Society and Capitalist Realism

What does Chun mean by control-freedom?

A structure in which freedom is offered as and through control, so that users are free to the extent that they can manage their exposure. Because networks constantly transmit data beyond users' knowledge, this freedom is always partial, and it is sold through fear of an open public. Chun names it to show how promises of freedom and technologies of control arrive together rather than as opposites. Chapter 07 · From Freedom to Control: New Media and Networks

What are the six layers of Bratton's Stack?

Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface and User. Bratton treats them as interdependent layers of one planetary system of computation, each with its own logic and its own kinds of accident. Read from the top, a user meets an interface that shows an addressed world of cities, served from the cloud and powered by the earth's minerals and energy. Chapter 08 · Computational Culture and Platform Infrastructure

What does postdigital actually mean?

In Cramer's usage it names a condition in which the digital has stopped marking a difference and become the default, so that the line between digital and non-digital is less clear and less important than the new media view assumed. It does not mean a time after digital technology. Contreras-Koterbay and Mirocha agree, describing it as the messy condition of a world where computing is ubiquitous and in real time. Chapter 09 · The Postdigital and the New Aesthetic

What does Haraway mean by companion species?

A relation of at least two partners who make each other up in flesh and history, so that neither exists as it is before the relating. The category is broader than companion animals and includes rice, bees and gut flora. Haraway uses dogs because their long shared history with humans shows co-constitution clearly, and she treats the relation itself as the smallest unit worth analysing. Chapter 10 · Post-trans-humanisms and Companion Species

What is xenofeminism in simple terms?

A feminism that is technomaterialist, anti-naturalist and gender abolitionist. It treats technology as socially made and therefore open to struggle over design and access, refuses to treat nature or the given body as a limit to respect, and aims at a world where gender no longer structures power. Hester stresses that abolition means proliferating differences, not erasing them. Chapter 11 · Feminist Posthumanism and Xenofeminism

What does the term autotheory mean?

Writing that joins first-person life narration with critical theory so that each tests the other. Wiegman notes that the term became widely known through Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, but she warns against treating any one book as its definition and prefers to speak of an autotheoretical impulse shared by very different works. The course's final essay points to autotheory as the model for using theory as a mirror. Chapter 12 · Autotheory and Auto-ethnography as Method

How to prepare for the assessments

Keep a running notebook from the first week: one paragraph per reading that uses the week's key term to describe something from your own life. That notebook does three jobs at once. It prepares you to speak in class, it gives your presentation group personal material to draw on, and by the end of the semester it tells you which book to review, because the paragraph you most want to keep writing is your entry point.