As I'm a lecturer at Bournemouth University, I do lots of lectures. This page will link to many of them as I put them online... It turns out converting these materials into online resources is perhaps even more time-consuming than is preparing them to start with. Here are links to some of them - more will become available over time.
Critical Media Concepts and Contexts
CMCC is a media theory lecture series for first years on media production courses. I usually do 3 or 4 lectures for this unit:
- The use of theory (March 2011)
A lecture exploring the relationship between theory and practice from a personal perspective; featuring Ruskin, Sennett, Heidegger and Pickering. - Play (March 2010/11)
A lecture exploring the idea of play in stories, culture, life. Draws on Huizinga, Caillois, Aarseth and Derrida. - Production (November 2009/10)
One of five sessions examining the so-called 'cultural circuit', this lecture leaps off from 'Production' and lands in Serres, Benjamin, Heidegger, Marx and Baudrillard.
Narratives
In 2008 - 09 I did a series of six lectures for first year media production students on narrative theory. Here are some of them:
- Narratives: Openings and Introductions (November 2008)
Introductory lecture which starts to lay out some themes in narrative theory: structure and texture, metonymy and metaphor, syntagms and paradigms, synchrony and diachrony, diegesis and framing, story and plot. - Narratives: Stories and Structures (December 2008)
Structuralism and rational approaches to narrative, featuring Claude Levi-Strauss. - Narratives: Familiarity and Strangeness (January 2009)
Aristotelian narratives, mimesis and diegesis, formalism and alienation, plus a glance at the avant-garde; featuring Bertolt Brecht. - Narratives: Performers and Players (January 2009)
Interactive narratives: puzzlement, play and participation, featuring Caillois, Costikyan, Eskelinen and Aarseth. - Narratives: Endings, Meaning and Morals (January 2009)
Stories with purpose - therapeutic, identity-forming, civilisation defining, species-haunting; featuring John McLeod and Nietzsche. - Narratives: Endlessnesses and Existence (February 2009)
Beyond endings: adaptation, appropriation and other post-structuralist approaches to narrative, featuring Sanders, Todorov, Sartre and Bakhtin. It is ironically unfinished.
Media & Participation
From 2006 to 2010 I taught a second-year media theory option called 'Media & Participation'. In later years, to reflect the participatory theme, the students became repsonsible for producing lecture notes, with variable success, but in 2007-08 I wrote up these lecture notes, which drew increasingly on the contributions of students who took the course.
- Media & Participation: Culture (December 2007)
Some foundational questions and debates about participation. Matthew Arnold fears the anarchy of the common man hooting as he likes, while Henry Jenkins defends 'crud'. - Media & Participation: Citizenship (January 2008)
Participation, citizenship and democracy: Hobbes, Rousseau, Habermas, Bakhtin, Chomsky, Foucault. - Media & Participation: Truth (January 2008)
Facts and social constructions. - Media & Participation: Identity (January 2008)
The construction of the self; Goffman, Giddens, Foucault.