Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi

This course is available on the MA in Modern History, 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, MSc in Media and Communications (Data and Society), MSc in Media and Communications (Media and Communications Governance), MSc in Media and Communications (Research), MSc in Media, Communication and Development, 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.

This course starts with the premise that the understanding of the past and the future is socially-constructed, mediated, and shaped by power relations within the present. It critically explores cultural, political and technological issues in relation to the passing of time. It addresses questions such as: How do different kinds of media represent and structure collective notions about time whether in relation to the present, the past or the future? How do power relations shape understandings and experiences of time? How do we learn about history through media and why does that matter? How do memories and experiences of colonialism impact collective understandings of history and national futures? In addressing these questions, this course centres temporality in the study of media and communication studies. It introduces students to the field of collective memory, differentiating it from history and historiography. It then considers critical issues within the relation between history, memory and politics, such as colonialism/postcolonialism, nationalism, collective action, trauma, witnessing and war. The second part of the class focuses on the analysis of technology and media in the ways they contribute to the social construction of time. It addresses how privilege and access to technology regulate the speed and slowness of people’s lives. It moves on to exploring how particular media conventions represent temporality, with a focus on news media, digital technologies and popular culture. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify key debates in the study of time and temporality, particularly as approached from the disciplinary perspective of communications and media studies.

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

Students will be expected to produce one 1500 word essay.

• Badiou, A (2012). The rebirth of history: Times of riots and uprisings. Verso Books. 
• Boym, S. (2008). The future of nostalgia. Basic Books.
• Chakrabarty, D. (2009). Privincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press
• Diouf. M. (2003). Historians and Histories: What For? African Historiography: Between the State and the Communities. International Institute of Social History, South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the Histoy of Development.
• Hage, G. (2009). Waiting out the crisis: On stuckedness and governmentality. Waiting, 97.
• Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T (Eds.). (2012). The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press. 
• Keighley, E., & Pickering, M. (2012). The Mnemonic Imagination. Palgrave Macmilan, London.
• Khayyat, M., Khayyat, Y., & Khayyat, R. (2018). Pieces of Us: The Intimate as Imperial Archive. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 14(3), 268-291.
• Mark, J. (2010). The unfinished revolution: Making sense of the communist past in Central-Eastern Europe (p.8). New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Martin-Barbero, J. (1993). Communication, culture and hegemony: from the media to mediations. Sage Pubns. 
• Nelson, A. (2008). Bio science: Genetic genealogy testing and the pursuit of African ancestry. Social Studies of Science, 38(5), 759-783. 
• Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations.
• Olick, J. K., Vinitzky-Seroussi, V., & Levy, D. (Eds.). (2011). The collective memory reader. Oxford University.
• Özyürek, E. (2006). Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey. Duke University Press Books.
• McClintock, A., & Robertson, G. (1994). Soft-soaping empire: Commodity racism and imperial advertising (pp. pp-131). London: Routledge.
• Misztal, B. (2003). Theories of social remembering. McGraw-HIll Education (UK). 
• Rao, R. (2020). Out of time: the queer politics of postcoloniality. Oxford University Press.
• Sharma, S. (2014). In the meantime: Temporality and cultural politics. Duke University Press.
• Smith, R. M. (2003). Stories of peoplehood: The politics and morals of political membership. Cambridge University Press.
• Strassler, K. (2006). Reformasi Through Our Eyes: Children as Witnesses of History in Post Suharto Indonesia. Visual Anthropology Review, 22(2), 53-70.
• Trouillot, M. R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.
• Zelizer, B. (1998). Remembering to forget: Holocaust memory through the camera's eye. University of Chicago Press.

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