This module introduces you to the practicalities and philosophies of doing interdisciplinary research in gender and women’s studies. You will learn to interpret, understand and explore the consequences of particular research methods. You will also be encouraged to critically consider the relationship between theories and methods in research. The module also provides scope for reflecting on the politics of knowledge, the ethics of research, and the relationship between disciplines and interdisciplinary fields such as gender and women’s studies. You will learn how some key conceptual frameworks within feminism (for example, sex and gender, body politics, sexual difference, queer theory) have been constructed over time through both research practices and theoretical arguments. This module will be useful as preparation for your own research later in the programme and particularly for your Master's dissertation.

How are gender, sex and bodies understood in contemporary sociology and feminist theory? How do feminist theorists and social scientists address questions of difference, representation and performativity in their research?

In this module, we engage with the work of particular theorists (enabling you to acquire skills in close reading and critical discussion), critically evaluate relevant empirical findings, and explore current issues of importance to sociology and feminism. Topics include medicalization and health, race and racism, sex and sexuality, bodily autonomy, and reproductive choice. The essays you write then give you scope to follow your own interests in more depth by using the reading lists provided and undertaking independent research.

This module will explore Gothic representations of, for example: pain and illness experience, chronic illness, psychiatric confinement, eating disorders, organ harvest and transplantation, genetic testing, and epidemic or disease emergence. Traditional Gothic tropes find ready echoes in illness.

Subjects may experience their bodies as uncanny, once familiar but now strange; they may feel helpless and physically vulnerable; they strive to decipher the cryptic signs of the medical record and the body’s symptoms; they endure strange temporalities and carceral hospital sites; they are subjected to rituals of medical monitoring; and they become supplicants to powerful figures with mysterious knowledge.

The Gothic mode can be part of a critique of the complex biopolitics of medicine and illness. Yet at the same time, representing illness and pain through a Gothic mode can carry ideological risks, reinforcing problematic cultural assumptions about which human lives are of value. You will explore the promise and perils of the Gothic mode in the arena of health humanities and critical medical humanities.

In this module you consider the forms of power and control underpinning algorithmic cultures, and cultures of data and quantification.

What ethical and political questions can we ask about ‘smart’ digital infrastructures, that are typically overlooked by engineers and tech corporations? How can students in media, sociology, gender, or environment & culture intervene in technological developments and debates? How can we approach the social (including cultural, political and ecological) connections forged by ‘smart’ digital infrastructures?

Decades of technological progression have only made the relationship between the digital and non-digital more complex. You will consider difference, accidents, and unforeseen ramifications that challenge a simplistic, instrumentalist view of technology. Juggling these various lenses, you will study ‘smart’ infrastructures underpinning phenomena such as networked affect and smart cities. Rather than assuming we now live in a homogeneous global society of control, you will consider the unexpected: the messiness of datafication and algorithmic culture tied up with affective contagion, unpredictable ecosystems, and electronic waste straddling the planet in ways that remain unaccounted for.

This module engages with a socio-cultural analysis of what has been called a ‘consumer society’, a society with increasing emphasis on marketisation, commercialisation and commodification. The module approaches a variety of topics that consumer society has intensified - such as promotional culture, advertising and branding - and students will have the opportunity to work with a range of conceptual resources to produce understandings of these issues and their impact on society. This module, therefore, offers you key resources with which to understand contemporary society and social change in a way which complements their other core and optional modules.

This module is designed to introduce you to contemporary methodological issues, key approaches, practical techniques, and case examples relating to the study of media.

Many different methods are used in media, and that variety is reflected in this module. To explore research practice in this discipline, we look at textual and discourse analysis, visual analysis, ethnography and participatory approaches, but place a strong emphasis on engaging with issues of identity, differences, power and experience in the hyper-complex media and cultural environments that we live in.

To give you a taste of particular research methods and approaches, we draw on recent examples of media and cultural research done here at Lancaster, and encourage you to explore their theoretical and practical implications.

We aim to have a number of invited guest speakers on this module, and you will have the opportunity to discuss and critically evaluate different methodological approaches and learn how to draw on these approaches as a starting point for your own research. It is our aim that you acquire a good understanding of the key elements in planning and carrying out independent research projects.

Current debates over issues such as plastic and food waste, fracking, loss of biodiversity or climate justice – and the protest movements and campaigns that have arisen in response – provide tangible evidence that the relationship between society and the environment is a difficult and often controversial one. This module examines the role that sociology and social theory can play in helping us to understand that relationship better and explores the range of approaches that have been developed in environmental sociology. Studying the environment sociologically opens up a host of interconnected social, cultural and political issues. Whose knowledge counts? How can we handle unquantifiable risk? What role should technology play? And what about democracy, freedom, diversity and justice? Using lectures and seminar discussion, the module will lead you through the resources of sociology and social theory to enable you to think through these questions in relation to some of the most urgent environmental issues facing societies today.

The emergence of cultural studies in the 1970s opened-up new areas of scholarly enquiry and raised new issues about the politics of class, gender, ethnicity and race, youth, subcultures and sexuality. Although there have been many changes since the original formation of cultural studies, feminist cultural studies today remains concerned with the effects of discursive and institutional practices of domination, subordination, and hegemony both in everyday life and within academic enquiry.

This course will focus on crucial feminist interventions in cultural production and cultural studies. It will examine contemporary debates in feminist theory and specific forms of activism, engagement and resistance that have identified and targeted hierarchical mechanisms that produce gendered, sexual, ethnic and racial identities and oppression.

The course will be taught through the examination of a range of sources drawn from popular culture, media, art, public culture and policy, enabling us to bring feminist cultural theory into dialogue with a range of media and other cultural productions and practices.

This module is concerned with a range of wonderful texts from c.1919 to c.1980 that together suggest a line of broadly modernistic writing that has a fascination both with the city (primarily Paris, but also Berlin, Oxford, London, Zurich, and even that city of death which is the death camp) and with the mixing of genres - in particular, such genres as critical essay, philosophical treatise, poetry, comic dialogue, fragment, novel, anecdote, manifesto, autobiography, history, textual commentary, and travelogue. Featured authors currently include Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees, Mina Loy, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, and Jacques Derrida. Special attention will be paid to texts that blur the genre-boundary that, traditionally, separates critical writing from creative writing, and students will be invited, if they wish, to submit such texts themselves.

This module aims to develop students’ understanding of the ways in which social phenomena are conceptualised, defined and measured. The module will be a mix of lectures, seminars, and computer-based labs where students will get to play with real data. You will access data, explore data sets, generate and modify variables, frequency counts, cross tabulation, produce tables, bar charts and scattergrams, and test relationships between variables.

This module examines manhunt narratives -- stories about the systematic pursuit of people who don't want to be found - in British and American writing from the early nineteenth century to the present day. It will address questions of space, power, violence, mobility and surveillance as they are raised by a range of set reading that covers classic thrillers (Buchan, Orczy), proto-feminist stories of female runaways (Gaskell, Wollstonecraft), narratives of escape from slavery (the Crafts, Whitehead), SF stories of hi-tech pursuit and evasion (Dick, Wells), and uncanny experiences of self-hunting (Conrad, Stevenson). The module asks how manhunt narratives work, what fears, desires and fantasies they cater for, and why they are such a prevalent feature of both highbrow and popular literature.

Primary Texts:

• John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps
• Joseph Conrad, 'The Secret Sharer'
• Ellen Craft and William Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
• Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
• Elizabeth Gaskell, 'The Grey Woman'
• Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man
• Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
• Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria; Or, the Wrongs of Woman

This module examines the central historical and theoretical legacies which inform a critical approach to the media and cultural industries, as well as providing insights into comparative analyses of their development. It develops students’ understanding of key developments in media production, regulation and cultural policy as well as important analyses of persistent inequalities in the cultural industries, questions of diversity and the realities of creative work. It is intended that the module will also draw on external speakers from industry where possible.

This module explores media participation in the globalised and digital era. It helps you develop a comprehensive understanding of media participation, exploring theoretical frameworks and contemporary issues that shape audience communities and their engagement with media.

The module begins with an overview of major theoretical trajectories that have shaped scholarly understanding of audience communities and participatory cultures. Some of these include the mainstreaming of fan culture in the age of transmediality and media convergence, the various forms of fan labour, narratives of fan management, and the multi-directional media flows and implications on transnational fandom. The module will then explore timely topical issues related to contemporary media culture, delving into the concept of fans and examining how fan communities and the industry engage in a dynamic interplay to shape the evolving meanings and experiences of being a fan in contemporary times.

This module provides first-hand experience of organising and undertaking a group research project on a subject of your own choosing. You will work through processes of research design and strategy, developing research questions, planning and carrying out fieldwork and analysis, and presenting and evaluating research. Working together in small groups, you will produce a research proposal, a journal article based on your project, and an oral presentation of your work. You are also encouraged to keep a research diary of the process. This will provide the basis for an individual reflective essay to be submitted after the module has finished. Although the module is essentially practical, it also provides an opportunity to learn about generic issues involved in doing social research and about the contemporary context of research policy and funding.

This module explores key theoretical, methodological, and ethical issues in researching migration, migrants’ experience, and the effect of migration on origin and receiving societies. Through the use of case studies, you will have the opportunity to examine, in-depth, several topics in contemporary migration research, and related methodological and ethical considerations. Topics covered may include: are we living in an 'age of migration'?; how do we define 'migrant' and why does it matter?; borders; citizenship; migration as a reproductive justice issue; ethical considerations when researching migration; the use of qualitative and quantitative methods in researching migration; and more.

This module explores some of the ways in which literature has explored and expressed the complexity of belief and doubt, redemption and apocalypse, damnation and revelation, in the modern world.

We will consider the ways in which moments, motifs and ideas indebted to the sacred can be found within the traces, margins, narratives and echoes found in the literature of the modern world.

Although welcoming consideration of all three Abrahamic faiths, we will focus primarily on Christian traditions and their life, afterlives and influences in literature.

Authors studied vary from year to year and may include such as Toni Morrison, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Douglas Coupland, Kamilla Shamsie, James Baldwin, Marilynne Robinson, Christina Rossetti, Samuel Beckett, Flannery O'Connor, Charles Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, G. K. Chesterton and the Brontës.

The exploration of literature will be complemented by philosophical writings on religion and may include writers such as J. Kameron Carter, Zhange Ni, Walter Benjamin, Ziad Elmsafy, Sarah Coakley, Michael D. Hurley and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Taking our cue from Haruko Maeda’s remarkable twenty-first century painting Heartbeat of the Death, Queen Elizabeth I (2013), Tudor Gothic critically considers the relationships between traces of Tudor history and culture in four gothic novels (Deborah Harkness’s Shadow of Night (2012), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (c.1803), Sophia Lee’s The Recess, or a Tale of Other Times (1784) and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764)) and proto-gothic tropes (such as wonder, terror, strange places, clashing time frames) in select poetry, prose and drama produced in the Tudor period (1485-1603) itself. Rather than viewing the Tudor Gothic as an anachronistic term, the module suggests that Tudor Gothic informs and shapes literary gothic’s social, political and imaginary landscapes.

This module?investigates the various bodies at work in Victorian literary texts. You will explore not only?human?bodies, and how they relate to discourses of race, sex, class, and industrialization, but also such?nonhuman?bodies as animals, water or weather. You will also examine conceptual?bodies such as the body politic and the body of Christ.

Attention to the material dimensions of human existence – including affect, the senses, objects and things – has been the focus of much recent critical discussion. Drawing on this discussion, this module will enable you to explore both the operations of the nonhuman and the preconscious.

You will also examine how the Victorian literary text is a privileged site through which interhuman, intra-human and human-world relations can be considered.

?The texts we study vary from year to year, but previously examples include work by authors such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Ruskin, Mary Seacole, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Henry Mayhew, and M P Shield, and theoretical ideas from such as Friedrich Schiller. Gaston Bachelard, Jane Bennett, and Robert Esposito.