Professor Myria Georgiou

This course is available on the MSc in Culture and Society, MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and Fudan), MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and UCT), MSc in Global Media and Communications (LSE and USC), MSc in Media and Communications 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 migration and transnationalism. As the world becomes increasingly interconnected – not least as a consequence of technological advances that enable information, people and things to move between places and across distances – questions are raised about the consequences of those changes for identity. More particularly, the course examines (i.) how those who move, but also those who don’t, develop a sense of self in an interconnected, mediated world; (ii.) how digital communication connects or disconnects people within and across space and what those connections mean for collective identities, communities and nations; and (iii.) how mediated communication raises or erases boundaries between people – locally, nationally and transnationally. Engaging with a range of theories, case studies and creative activities, the course invites students to develop a globally oriented and critical understanding of identity, media and transnationalism. 

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars totalling a minimum of 20 hours across Michaelmas Term. This year, some or all of this teaching will be delivered through a combination of virtual classes and flipped-lectures delivered as online videos. This course includes a reading week in Week 6 of term.

All students are expected to complete advance reading, prepare seminar presentations, and submit a 1,500 words case study.

• Amin, A. (2012) Land of Strangers. Cambridge: Polity.
• Appadurai, A. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers, Duke University Press.
• Coates, T-N. (2015) Between the world and me. Melbourne: TPC.
• Du Gay, P. et al. (eds.) (2000) Identity: A Reader, London: Sage.
• Hall, S. and P. du Gay (eds.) (1996) Questions of Cultural Identity, Sage.
• Georgiou, M. (2006) Diaspora, identity and the media, Hampton Press.
• Gilroy, P. (2004) After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia, Routledge.
• Smets, K., K.Leurs, M.Georgiou, S.Witteborn and R. Gajjala (2020) The Sage Handbook of Media and Migraiton, Sage.
• Yuval-Davis, N., G. Wemyss and C. Cassidy (2019) Bordering, Polity.
• Werbner, P. (2008) Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, Berg.
• Vertovec, S (2009) Transnationalism, Routledge.

Essay (80%, 3000 words) in the LT.
Project (20%, 500 words) in the MT.

A 3000-word essay on a case study of students' choice and a 500-word blog on one of the identities taught in the course. 

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."