Communicating Culture: Arts and Media Infrastructures COMMS5004

  • Academic Session: 2025-26
  • School: School of Critical Studies
  • Credits: 20
  • Level: Level 5 (SCQF level 11)
  • Typically Offered: Either Semester 1 or Semester 2
  • Available to Visiting Students: No
  • Collaborative Online International Learning: No
  • Curriculum For Life: No

Short Description

In this course, students will ask: how do we build more equitable and sustainable ways of producing the arts and culture? Students will assess, interrogate, and examine how the infrastructures that support the production, dissemination, and sustainability of arts and culture rely upon effective communication strategies. The course approaches communications through the field of infrastructure humanities. It understands "infrastructure" as both the technical systems of circulation that enable creativity (e.g., music venues, theatres, funding bodies) and as a political and aesthetic ideas about who and what gets to participate in the creative industries. This course emphasizes case studies to explore specific real-world problems within Glasgow that are widely applicable to the larger, international cultural sphere. Our course will work with community and/or industry partners from across the Glasgow arts landscape to introduce students to immediate issues facing their organizations and to assess the role that communication plays in enabling them to continue to function.

Timetable

10 x 2hr timetabled on-campus seminars

 

This is one of the MSc options in Global Communications and may not run every year. The options that are running this session are available on MyCampus.

Requirements of Entry

Standard entry to Masters at College level.

Excluded Courses

None

Co-requisites

None

Assessment

Type of Assessment

Brief Description

Weighting

Policy Critique

2x 500-word policy critiques

50%

Course Aims

This course aims to:

• Facilitate the examination of the arts ecosystem through interdisciplinary methodologies, emphasizing the political and cultural aspects of communication and media studies

• Assess critically the multiple ways that media infrastructure can be re-imagined in new, sustainable, and creative ways

• Equip students with contemporary methodologies for media and communication through disciplinary methodologies including literature, architecture, sociology, and human geography

• Encourage students in the exploration of the relationship between communication, art, and infrastructure

• Engage students with real-world experience translating theoretical knowledge into work experience through industry and third sector workshops

Intended Learning Outcomes of Course

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Communicate effective strategies for supporting arts and media organizations

• Distinguish different methodological approaches to infrastructure drawn from media studies and communication

• Construct an individual research exercise based on a need of a partner organization

• Evaluate critical accounts of arts communication with respect to wider socio-cultural and historical concerns

Minimum Requirement for Award of Credits

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including examinations) of the course's summative assessment.