Dr Myria Georgiou STC. S119a

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture, MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and Fudan), MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and USC), MSc in Media and Communications, MSc in Media and Communications (Research) and MSc in Media, Communication and Development. 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 examines the relation between identity and the media in the context of diaspora and transnationalism. The course explores meanings of identity at present times, especially as these are formed through experiences of mediated and physical transnational mobility. As migration and symbolic mobility, especially through the media, inform each other it becomes almost impossible to understand identity outside the context of mediation. The course is organised in three main thematic units. The first unit provides the conceptual entry point to the course. The second unit focuses on the modes of transnational communication: television, cinema and the internet. The third unit focuses on the spaces of transnational communication: the city, the nation and the transnational space. Each unit and lecture contributes to the understanding of identity in a world that is increasingly interconnected and networked.

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

All students are expected to complete advance reading, prepare seminar presentations, and submit one essay of 1,500 words.

Appadurai, A. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers, Duke University Press;

Bailey, Guedes O., M. Georgiou and R.Harindranath (eds.) (2007) Transnational Lives and the Media: Reimagining Diasporas, Palgrave;

Beck, U. (2006) Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity;

Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, Routledge;

Du Gay, P. et al. (eds.) (2000) Identity: A Reader, Sage;

Hall, S. and P. du Gay (eds.) (1996) Questions of Cultural Identity, Sage;

Georgiou, M. (2006). Diaspora, Identity and the Media: Diasporic Transnationalism and Mediated Spatialities, Hampton Press;

Gilroy, P. (2004) After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia, Routledge;

Harvey, D. (2006) 'Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils' in The British Journal of Sociology 2006 (57) 1;

Naficy, H. (ed.) (1998) Home, Exile, Homeland, Routledge;

Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Duke University Press;

Werbner, P. (2008) Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, Berg;

Vertovec, S (2009) Transnationalism, Routledge.

Essay (100%, 3000 words) in the ST.

The course examines individual and collective identities at times of growing interconnections across boundaries.

Students' comment

"I would recommend it to people interested in questions of globalisation and identity."