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.

This course is 'controlled access', meaning that there is a limit to the number of students who can be accepted. If the course is oversubscribed, priority will be given to students who have the course listed on their Programme Regulations.

There are no formal pre-requisites, but students are required to prepare a statement of no more than 100 words in response to the following question, which must be submitted when selecting this course on LSE for You: Why would you like to take this course?

Please do not email the teacher with personal expressions of interest as these are not required and do not influence who is offered a place.

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

1. How those who move, but also those who don’t, develop a sense of self in an interconnected, mediated world;
2. How digital communication connects or disconnects people within and across space and what those connections mean for collective identities, communities and nations; and
3. 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. 

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

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 1500 word case study.

• Amin, A. (2012) Land of Strangers. Cambridge: Polity.
• Appadurai, A. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers, Duke University Press.
• Benjamin, R. (2019) Race after Technology. Cambridge: Polity 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 du Gay, P. (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 (100%, 3000 words) in the ST.

The essay will be based on a case study of students' choice.