Intimate and Embodied Communications COMMS5012

  • 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, we explore the ways in which communications are increasingly being created, disseminated, and

received by and through the body, and often in intimate and relational ways, leading to a recognition of the body

as a communications platform. While theories of embodiment and communications will be used as a lens, the course will consider some very practical applications of embodied communications such as wearable fitness trackers, implantable delivery of medication, and communicating with A.I.

Timetable

9 x 2hr on-campus seminar

1 x workshop

 

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

Individual presentation (25%)

500 word reading response (25%)

2000 word essay (50%)

Course Aims

This course aims to:

- assess how platforms are no longer external to us but now embedded, both literally and figuratively in our lives and bodies;

- understand how bodies can be leveraged as social, cultural, and political forms of communication;

- examine how digital communications are developed and disseminated in ways that have very real and material effects, including effects on the body;

- work to balance both the affordances of such forms of communication, as well as the risks;

- provide practical understandings of intimate communications technologies that will be valuable in the fields of regulation, politics and governance, technology design, and law.

Intended Learning Outcomes of Course

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

- Question, challenge, and extend the notion of 'body as platform', and mapping it onto a diverse range of communications phenomena;

- Use course concepts in application to their own work and research and future career;

- Compare a range of languages and lenses for contributing to the growing body of scholarship at the intersection of intimacy, platform, and communications studies;

- Synthesise the both critical and practical perspectives on the future of communications technologies and their application to real world challenges.

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.