Postgraduate Course: Researching Cultures (ARCH11088)
Course Outline
| School | Edinburgh College of Art |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course will introduce students to the materials and expertise required to conduct postgraduate research in Cultural Studies. It will consider the changing cultures of research practice in the humanities, explore a range of approaches to transdisciplinary research and examine different ways of researching contemporary cultural corpora.
It will introduce Edinburgh's extensive range of research resources (print and electronic) as well as archives, special collections and the academic context of the institution (such seminar series, public lectures, postgraduate conferences and journals). It will familiarise the students with skills necessary to embark on their postgraduate research, recognize the research methodologies and conventions of discourse that these resources serve so they can lead to productive research strategies. |
| Course description |
The course offers a series of workshops and seminars some focused on specific research skills, others broad in scope to encourage explorations across disciplines in the humanities and examining methodologies, modes of enquiry, and critical modalities in the practice of Cultural Studies.
The course will provide students with a general introduction to postgraduate research and will give them the scope and opportunity to produce solid preliminary research on topics that they choose.
This advanced research skills course in Cultural Studies relies on the students' academic background in the humanities (for example cultural studies, anthropology, art history, architectural history and theory, philosophy, comparative literature, film studies). Good writing and critical reading skills, and familiarity with key texts and concepts in cultural studies and critical theory, will provide an excellent platform for obtaining the most from this course. The course will require all students to fully participate and critically engage with the course material through close reading, writing, in-class discussion and presentation at an advanced level required of the postgraduate students in the research programme in Cultural Studies.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2022/23, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 20 |
| Course Start |
Semester 1 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 22,
Feedback/Feedforward Hours 15,
Formative Assessment Hours 8,
Summative Assessment Hours 25,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
126 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Final assignment will comprise a critically-annotated bibliography that surveys material (including visual material and media sources) pertinent to each student's specific research interest, anticipating the MScRes dissertation proposal that will be revised and refined in Semester 2. |
| Feedback |
Students will receive formative feedback on research reading and scholarly writing based on selected submissions of reading notes and weekly writing assignments from their Research Reading Journal. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Apply research skills and methodologies of interdisciplinary research to developing their specific topic of interest.
- Make use of and evaluate a variety of research tools.
- Address issues of copyright, confidentiality, data protection and other ethical issues.
- Communicate with colleagues about their research.
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Reading List
Katherine N. Hayles, "Deciphering the rules of unruly disciplines" in Bruce and Purdy (eds) Literature and Science. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994): 25-48.
Ben Highmore, A Passion for Cultural Studies (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Ben Highmore, Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Ben Highmore, The Art of Brutalism. Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017).
Mark Dorrian, Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2015).
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
W. J. T. Mitchell, Image Science: Iconology, Visual Culture, and Media Aesthetics (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009).
Johanna Drucker, Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Georges Didi-Huberman, When Images Take Positions, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press and Toronto: RIC Books, 2018).
Daniel H. Magilow, The Photography of Crisis: The Photo Essays of Weimar Germany (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania Press University Press, 2012).
Ulrich Bauer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 2002).
Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth Century Germany (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 2005).
Karen Beckman et al (eds) On Writing with Photography (Minneapolis, Minnesota and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Ofra Amihay and Lauren Walsh (eds) The Future of Text and Image: Collected Essays on Literary and Visual Conjunctures (Newcastle upon Thyme: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).
Ana Dahlgren et al (eds) Representational Machines: Photography and the Production of Space. (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013).
Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb (eds) Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Theodor W. Adorno, ¿The Essay as Form¿ trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will New German Critique, No. 32 (Summer, 1984): 151- 171.
Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. trans. Jan E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Richard Johnson et al, The Practice of Cultural Studies. (London: SAGE, 2004).
Umberto Eco, How to Write a Thesis, trans. Caterina Mongiat Farina and Geoff Farina (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 2015).
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Ella Chmielewska
Tel: (0131 6)51 3736
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Emma Binks
Tel: (0131 6)51 5735
Email: |
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