School of Arts, Media, and Communication

Research clusters

Our six vibrant research clusters foster interdisciplinary conversations and collaboration.

Contemporary Literature, Writing, and Culture

The Contemporary Literature, Writing and Culture research cluster works to develop collaborations among colleagues in different areas of AMC and at different levels: from developing new modules, to organising research events, to working on joint research projects and/or grant applications.

At the moment, the cluster is scoping different areas of shared interest, which include, but are not limited to:

• Place, identity and belonging in contemporary literature, writing and culture: how do contemporary texts contribute to place-making? How might contemporary works mediate (or impede) affective interactions with space and place?
• Continuities and discontinuities: how do contemporary texts update, adapt, recycle, refashion or challenge well-established literary tropes and traditions? And what might such breaks or continuities with the past tell us about the present?
• Comparative modalities and temporalities: how are global literary and cultural trends modulated differently according to geo-political context?
• Academic and creative writing: to what extent is hybridisation of these two forms of writing a new phenomenon? What characterises contemporary examples of such a crossover?

The cluster is first and foremost an open forum for the exchange of ideas. It is also a vehicle for collaboration, not only among its members within AMC, but also with other areas of the University, such as its Research Institutes.

HESTIA (Health, Environment, Science, and Technology in the Arts and media)

Long considered one another’s opposites, scientific disciplines and the arts and humanities are in fact deeply intertwined. From medieval animals to the rhetoric of twenty-first-century Big Tech firms, from the cultural history of evolution to the exploration of how the arts can centre patient voices, the HESTIA research cluster's mission is to bring the humanities into the sciences, and the sciences into the humanities, in order to answer the pressing questions facing our world.

Members of the cluster carry out research, research-led teaching, and creative activities related to health, the environment, science, and technology. Areas include, but are not limited to, the following:

• History of medicine
• Medical humanities
• Health communication
• Ecocriticism
• Environmental journalism
• Sustainability and its politics
• Science fiction
• History and philosophy of science
• Philosophy and ethics of technology
• Digital studies and new media

Literary and Cultural Histories

Cluster members variously research aspects of literary and cultural histories stretching from the medieval and early modern periods, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to the present day. Colleagues' interests include material texts and media from manuscript to film, editing and translation, and the cultural histories of ideas, languages and literatures. Transnational, transcultural and translinguistic exchanges are among colleagues' specialisms, as are interdisciplinary approaches to the exploration of literary and cultural texts, artefacts and archives across the world.

Colleagues consider these texts within their cultural and historical contexts to examine and interpret their meanings and significance. Research within the cluster spans a wide range of geographies and cultural settings, including Britain, Continental Europe, North America, South America, the Caribbean, South and East Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Media Practice

The Media Practice Research Cluster brings together researchers, makers, educators, and theorists to explore how media is produced, experienced, and transformed through creative practice, cultural labour, and technological mediation. In an age of rapid technological and social change, this cluster aims to foreground media practice as both an epistemological and political intervention. We seek to understand how media practices, enacted across a wide variety of communities and contexts, can shape and are shaped by wider questions of power, participation, pedagogy, and publicity.

The cluster supports interdisciplinary and practice-based research, connecting scholars from media studies, digital humanities, cultural studies, film studies, journalism, and more. We are committed to knowledge-making that is inclusive, experimental, and socially engaged.

Members carry out research, teaching, and creative practice across a variety of areas and approaches. But some questions that our members’ are currently exploring in their work include:

• Audiences, fandoms, and online communities: How can we understand the viewing pleasures, decision-making processes, and participatory practices of digitally mediated publics?
• Media technology, knowledge production, and epistemology: What types of epistemologies are at work in the knowledges produced by generative AI and Large Language Models?
• Participant-led media research and social justice: How can methods like video empower farmers to challenge existing power dynamics?
• Creative/Practice-based research, environment, & sustainability: How can communicative media be used to build a picture of the lived experience of the environment and turn an anthropocentric viewpoint into an ecocentric one?
• Digital media and sensorial methods: What does it mean to study culture when the object of study resists discursive capture? How can we engage the sensorial as a method of inquiry to study and understand digital culture?

Public Communications

The Public Communications Cluster works collaboratively to develop critical, impactful studies of the ways that media and mediated communication serve civil society. Since its inception, cluster members have presented and reviewed works in progress. Presently, the cluster is scoping new directions for research, with core cluster themes and research questions including, but not limited to:

• Audiences and publics: How do organisations and institutions use mediated communication to facilitate civic and political engagement for diverse publics in a populist era?
• Race, ethnicity, and immigration: How do communication flows impact and represent ethnic minorities and immigrants?
• Media and policymaking: How do institutional discourses and regulatory structures shape public engagement with media?
• Environment and crisis communication: How do media actors and organisations portray environmental issues and empower communities to act?

The cluster prioritises open and inclusive dialogues about research and invites researchers within and beyond the School to share their perspectives and works in progress.

Visual Cultures

The Visual Cultures Cluster provides a supportive arena in which researchers working on any area of visual cultures are able to discuss research plans, ideas and outputs. We place a strong focus on giving space to talk about our research and this is a central part of our meetings. The group defines visual cultures in the broadest sense possible encompassing, but not limited to, film, television and visual media texts and performances as well as the visual arts including painting, drawing and photography. We advocate for the role and importance of the text in cultural studies, although our research extends beyond this to also explore the production and reception contexts that visual texts exist within.

We welcome all researchers whose work fits under the umbrella of visual cultures.

The research current research undertaken within the cluster focuses on a range of themes, many interrelated, including:

• Diasporas, migration and translation
• Undervalued/de-valued areas of research including texts with lower cultural capital, visual cultures of the everyday, popular cultures and texts
• Ideology, power and different visual cultures
• Heritage and legacy
• Gender, identities and visual cultures
• Stardom, fandom and paratexts