Dr Claire Forbes

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 controlled access, meaning that there is a limit to the number of students who can be accepted.

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; voluntary sector; government and public sector organisations. The course assessment is the development of a strategic communications camapign, based on a real-life brief provided by the course leader.

The academic lectures will focus on campaign theory and development. The topics covered in the practitioner lectures will change each year depending on speaker availability, but as an illustration, they  could include: connecting with elusive audiences; global media industries; global NGOs; communications in the retail industry; communicating in complex contexts; communicating change; communicating government policy; crisis communication.

This course is delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars totalling a minimum of 20 hours across Lent Term. This course includes a reading week in Week 6 of term.

All students are expected to complete advance reading, participate actively in seminar discussions and submit one essay of 1500 words.

• Amiso, G. and Kwansah-Aidoo, K. 2017. Culture and crisis communication: Transboundary cases from 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. 2015. Organizational listening: the missing essential in public communication. New York: Peter Lang.
• Motion, J. Heath, R. and Leitch, S. (2016) Social media and public relations: Fake friends and powerful publics. London: Routledge.
• Powell, H. 2013. Promotional culture and convergence: Markets, methods, media. London: Routledge.
• Scammell, M. 2014. Consumer democracy: the marketing of politics: Cambridge University Press
• Seu, I.B. and Orgad, S. 2017. Caring in crisis? Humanitarianism, the public and NGOs. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Tench, R. and Yeomans, E. 2018. Exploring public relations (4th edition). Harlow, Essex: Pearson.

Project (100%, 5000 words) in the ST.

The summative assessment is a group campaign plan and critical essay, delivered by students working in pairs. 

This course explores the practice of strategic 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. 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.

Some student comments 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.'