Dr Lee Edwards, PEL.7.01.B

This course is available on the MSc in Media and Communications, MSc in Media and Communications (Research), MSc in Politics and Communication and MSc in Strategic Communications. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

In order to accommodate academic staff research leave and sabbaticals, and in order to maintain smaller seminar group sizes, this course is capped, meaning that there is a limit to the number of students who can be accepted. Whist we do our best to accommodate all requests, we cannot guarantee you a place on this course.

This course will be delivered as a combination of academic lectures and presentations from leading industry practitioners, in order to facilitate a cross-fertilisation between professional experience, academic perspectives, public debates and research. Students will be expected to critically engage with ideas from practice in the seminars, developing reflexivity and analytical skills through the course.

The professional lecturers will be experts working on various forms of strategic communication in a wide range of sectors, including the corporate sector; the not-for-profit sector such as global NGOs and activist organisations; the voluntary sector; government and public sector organisations; and journalists. The course will culminate in a group-based practical presentation from students of their own campaigns, which will form part of the course assessment. The topics covered will change each year depending on speaker availability, but as an illustration, the range of topics could include: connecting with elusive audiences; social marketing/nudge marketing; global media industries: global NGOs; fundraising and strategic communications; communicating in complex contexts; communicating change; communicating government policy; crisis communication; communication, consultation and citizenship.

10 hours of lectures and 10 hours of seminars in the LT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 x 1,500 word essay in the LT.

Amiso, G. and Kwansah-Aidoo, K. 2017. Culture and crisis communication: Transboundary cases fron non-western perspectives. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE Press.

Christensen, L., Morsing, M. and Cheney, G. 2008. Corporate communications: Convention, complexity, critique. London: Sage.

Coombs, W.T. and Holladay, S. 2014. Ongoing crisis communication. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Cornelissen, J. 2014. Corporate communication: A guide to theory and practice. London: Sage.

Demetrious, K. 2013. Public relations, activism and social change: Speaking up. London: Routledge.

Dimitrov, R. 2017. Strategic silence: Public relations and indirect communication. London: Routledge.

Macnamara, J. 2014. Journalism and PR: Unpacking 'spin', stereotypes and media myths. New York: Peter Lang.

Powell, H. 2013. Promotional culture and convergence: Markets, methods, media. London: Routledge.

Seu, I.B. and Orgad, S. 2017. Caring in crisis? Humanitarianism, the public and NGOs. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sussman, G. 2011. The propaganda society: Promotional culture and politics in global context. New York: Peter Lang. 

Tench, R. and Yeomans, E. 2017. Exploring public relations (4th edition). Harlow, Essex: Pearson.

Presentation (20%) and project (30%, 2500 words) in the LT.
Essay (50%, 2000 words) in the ST.

The presentation and project are linked, group-based assessments: the project is the written campaign proposal for the campaign described in the group presentation.

This course explores the practice of straetgic communications, drawing on functional and critical theories and using them to analyse current cases. The course includes regular contact with practitioners, including a number of practitioner lectures, a student-led practitioner debate and presentation of student proposals to a panel of practitioners. Students will not learn how to do straetgic communications work in a formal sense, but they will learn about the tools and techniques that practitioners use and will need to apply them to real-life case studies in both seminars and assessments. Students are put into study groups, which meet throughout the semester and are also their groups for the assessment.

Following feedback from students after the first year of delivery, the beginning of the course has been adapted to contain more theory about how strategic campaigns are developed, so that students have a good grasp of the ideas behind the practitioners' presentations and are fully prepared for their assessments. There has also been some adjustment to the assessment format.

Some student comments from the first year of delivery (2017-18) are:

'I like having the seminar questions in advance to help guide the reading. Knowing what Lee sees as crucial/critical to identify within the texts helps me drill down on concepts. While the study groups were a slow start, I did find it useful.'

'Lecturer integrated course material with the guest lectures in a very effective way. Seminars were great and very engaging.'

'Group presentations were a really engaging (and different) form of assessment. Professional lecturers were interesting.'