Policy Communications COMMS5009

  • 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

This course asks: how can policy communication be made more effective? Students will take a practice-based approach to policy communication across different media. Students will examine a range of policy communications across key areas, such as energy, food, poverty, and wellbeing, to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and produce alternatives. The course encourages a concretely place-based approach. Sessions will include fieldwork, assessing community responses to policy communications, and archive research to consider policy communications in context past and present. The course aims to prepare students to be able to apply infrastructural humanities and critical media studies frameworks in order to understand problems and solutions around the material systems that shape people's lives and the social organisations that emerge in response to them, and communications that circulate from both community and policy-makers to frame and engage with these.

Timetable

10x 2 hour workshops

 

This is one of the MSc options in 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

Course Aims

This course aims to:

• explore the strengths and failings of contemporary policy-communication through place-based methodologies, fieldwork, and creative practice.

• build a systemic picture of the context in which policy communications operate, and their role in shaping that context.

• provide students with real world experience of engaging with communities and policy-makers, translating theoretical knowledge into work experience through policy, community, and third sector workshops and the creation of policy communication

Intended Learning Outcomes of Course

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

• analyse critically policy communications across a range of media with respect to wider socio-cultural and historical contexts.

• communicate effectively in real-world contexts with policy-makers, community and third-sector organisations.

• produce effective policy communications across a range of key policy areas.

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.