Overall you must take 120 credits of compulsory modules and 60 credits of optional modules
CDFM001: Dissertation - Written
The dissertation project is the culmination of your postgraduate course and represents an opportunity to explore a research question in detail over an extended period of time. Across the module you will conceive, plan, research and write a study of 15,000 words. Initially you will be supported by a supervisor, but during the writing period you will be expected to work independently.
The dissertation will enable you to consolidate and develop your subject knowledge and methodological skills in your discipline by exploring in detail a topic of your own devising.
You will be supported through the early stages of planning your dissertation in the second term of your studies through a series of workshops. This will enable you to develop and submit a dissertation proposal by the end of term 2 (for part time students the proposal will be submitted by the second term of the second year of study).
You will then be assigned a supervisor who will support you during term 3 as you conduct initial research, prepare draft work and establish your project sufficiently to enable you to work independently after the end of term 3. Your supervisor will support you as your research, planning and writing progress through one-to-one supervision sessions. These combined activities will offer you the necessary guidance and support to refine your initial plans and bring your research project to completion.
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CMMM001: Media and Communications: Advanced Theory and Concepts
This module explores current theoretical and conceptual frameworks that are shaping the field of media and communication studies. We will explore a range of theories that can be used to analyse the role that media texts and technologies play in our lives. The module will combine new ways of understanding media, whilst providing you with analytical skills and knowledge that will help you to conduct your dissertation research.
This module aims to:
- Explore the historical development of a range of communication theories.
- Encourage you to consider the potentials, limitations, and critiques of different forms of communications theory and situate these debates in their socio-historical contexts.
- Motivate you to critically analyse media genres, styles, and forms and understand them in relation to their production, consumption, dissemination, and engagement practices.
- Provide you with an advanced understanding of communications as a discipline and the various research-based approaches the discipline can offer.
- Help you begin the process of identifying a suitable idea that can be developed into a research topic for the final dissertation.
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CMMM015: Digital Media Cultures
This module on digital media culture examines a wide variety of perspectives and discourses on digital media from dimensions like (but not limited to) access, capabilities, economy, gender, power, class, and social hierarchies. This module will weave in a range of global trends and perspectives of digital media allowing you as a student of media studies to think of digital media services, software, and platforms as both individually designed experiences and also globally navigated systems. The module will offer you new ways to think about the cultural significance of digital media and the online lives we lead.
This module aims to:
1. Explore the cultural value and significance of digital media and online services and to think of online lives as sites of cultural production.
2. Encourage you to consider the potentials and limitations of different digital media theories and forms in their socio-historical contexts.
3. Motivate you to critically analyse digital media technologies, services, and processes and understand them in relation to production, consumption, dissemination, and engagement practices.
4. Provide you with an expert understanding of communications as a discipline and the various research-based approaches the discipline can offer.
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CMMM002: Social Media: Management and Strategy
This module explores topics of social media management and social media strategy from a critical and practical perspective. Topics covered may include issues of marketing foundations and strategies on social media, brand management and reputation management on social media, and disinformation, propaganda and persuasion in the age of social media. It may also consider practices in different socio-cultural contexts and a range of social media.
The module aims to:
- Provide you with core knowledge and key skills to critically assess developments in the field of social media management and strategy.
- Offer key industry insights and empirical evidence and studies to help you build these skills.
- Provide you with advanced knowledge of management, as well as strategic communication.
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CMMM014: Industry Insights
This module provides you with an opportunity to develop your employability skills and potential so that you may more effectively prepare for entering the job market. Through a series of industry-facing guest lectures from practicing media and communications sector professionals, you will be guided through possible career paths and learn to identify employers' needs in a changing job market. You will also have the opportunity to network with the guest speakers, further developing your interpersonal communication and networking skills, maximising your employability potential. There are no pre-requisites or co-requisites for this module, and no specialist knowledge, skills, or experience are necessary to take it. This module is recommended for interdisciplinary pathways.
This module aims to:
- Prepare you to join the workforce by developing your employability and career prospects.
- Provide you with the opportunity to reflect on your career goals and plan for your future career.
- Offer you a range of industry perspectives from guest speakers from the media and communications sector.
- Equip you with a working understanding of the day-to-day realities of different media and communications jobs via industry speakers.
- Provide you with opportunities to engage with the University's Career Zone and familiarise yourself with the services and support they can offer.
- Enable you to deepen your understanding of the media and communications sector and organisations relevant to your own potential career trajectory.
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CMMM016: Strategic Communications
This module explores how communication is designed, coordinated, and deployed to influence attitudes, behaviours, and decision-making across political, corporate, military, and civil society contexts. The module critically examines the theories, practices, and ethical challenges underpinning contemporary strategic communication in a global, digitally mediated environment. You will engage with concepts such as narrative power, audience analysis, messaging coherence, reputation and legitimacy, information operations, and the relationship between communication, strategy, and policy. Drawing on international case studies, the module analyses how organisations align communication objectives with broader strategic goals while navigating misinformation, persuasion, and public trust. Emphasis is placed on critical evaluation, strategic planning, and ethical judgement. You will develop the analytical and practical skills required to design, assess, and critique strategic communication campaigns in complex and contested communication environments.
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CMMM018: Public Relations and Promotional Media
This module critically examines the strategic role of public relations and promotional media within contemporary organisations and cultural industries, across international contexts, including the UK, US, Europe, and China. The module considers key histories and theories of PR, providing you with a grounding in critical PR studies. Drawing upon a range of advertising, branding, PR, and marketing strategies you will examine numerous campaign case studies to understand how organisations use media relations, social media, and influencer partnerships to shape public perception and achieve strategic objectives. Attention is given to ethical, legal, and cultural issues including misinformation, diversity, sustainability, and responsible communication practice. By the end of the module, you will have an advanced understanding of major debates in the study of public relations, promotional media, and consumer activism across sectors and international contexts.
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DRAM141: Ideas Generation and the Creative Process
Working at the intersection of theory and practice, you will explore creativity not as a neat sequence of steps, but as a dynamic, non-linear process shaped by intuition, constraint, environment, and collaboration. Drawing on theories of creativity, innovation, and design-led thinking, you will test how ideas are generated, stretched, disrupted, and transformed through doing.
The module places particular emphasis on embodied and performative approaches to thinking. Through improvisation, play, and structured experimentation, you will work with creativity as something that is enacted - something that happens in space, in interaction, and often under pressure. Performativity here is both a lens and a method: a way of understanding how ideas take form, and how they are communicated, negotiated, and brought to life across different cultural contexts.
At the same time, you will situate creative practice within the realities of the creative industries. Ideas do not exist in isolation: they move through systems of production, distribution, and value. You will critically examine how imaginative, non-linear processes can be translated into viable, impactful, and responsible outcomes, and what is gained, and sometimes lost, in that translation.
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DRAM142: Creative Management
This module explores the management of creativity and the application of creative approaches to project, team, and creative project development. You will investigate the challenges of working with creative individuals and teams: What motivates and drives creative talent? How can leaders inspire, support, and enable innovation? Conversely, how do organisational practices or managerial behaviours stifle creativity? You will examine the roles of individuals and teams in promoting ideas, developing projects, and generating value.
Through case study analysis, research, and reflective discussion, you will engage with live challenges and debates from the creative industries. You will be encouraged to consider how organisational culture, sectoral differences, digital storytelling, placemaking, and Theory of Change frameworks may influence creative decision-making, processes, collaboration, and outcomes. Examples may draw on creative management case studies, including projects, events, or exhibitions, offering insight into both successes and lessons from failure.Assessment is portfolio-based, allowing you to demonstrate practical and strategic skills. Portfolios may include elements such as creative projects, business strategies, business model canvases (BMCs), or project plans, providing opportunities to apply your understanding in realistic professional contexts.
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DRAM169: Creative Industries
This module explores concepts, structures and issues that draw from creative industries narratives and challenges. By looking at the past, present and future of the creative industries, you will form an understanding of how cultural value is created, consumed and evaluated. This module provides you with an overview of the creative industries in a global context and equips you with a rich, critically informed understanding of the sector. Through engaging with organisational challenges, disruptive innovation and strategic change, you will learn how the business of creativity and value capture has resulted in a growing creative economy, and will analyse, reflect and creatively respond to a range of professional, sustainable contemporary contexts.
This module aims:
- To develop critical skills through the analysis of contemporary case studies from a range of creative organisations.
- To interrogate the notion of value as applied to creativity and to creative industries.
- To develop a balanced understanding of generic business content, such as business structures, business models and funding streams.
- To equip you with an understanding of how the creative sector is adapting to digital technology, social media and changing audience behaviour
- To introduce and study the role and impact of social entrepreneurship.
- To equip you with skills to develop and communicate key business concepts and ideas.
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EAFM009: Transmedia Adaptations
Adapting stories across media is one of the most established practices across creative industries. This module will introduce you to advanced study of these practices across several disciplines. You will consider the creative, cultural, and commercial decisions of media creators, considering how stories move across forms such as stage, screen, games, print, comics and webtoons as well as franchises incorporating these. It will also develop case studies derived from different disciplines, aiming to foster interdisciplinary expertise in areas that may include, but are not limited to: media and communications, film studies, games studies, comic studies, TV studies, English, and drama. The module will draw on interdisciplinary expertise from tutors and is suitable for individuals wishing to gain interdisciplinary understanding of the ways that transmedia adaption operates as a creative, commercial, or political practice. There are no pre-requisite modules; however, it will be useful if you have relevant educational experience in any part of the humanities, social sciences or creative industries.
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EAFM089: Archival Encounters: Material Film Histories
This module explores the relationship between film and the archive. It will guide you through a range of case studies exploring the international histories and contemporary practices of film archiving from the perspective of the researcher, the donor, the archivist and the public user. We consider how and why film and film culture has been preserved through diverse archival practices. The focus will be upon hidden histories and the uncollected/undercollected in film history. The module will enable you to gain a deep understanding of key currents in archival film theory and to apply these to the use of physical and digital archive collections from across the country.
Your study will be grounded in Exeter's own internationally significant film archive the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum. Here you will work hands-on with a range of archival ephemera, interact with film archive curators and develop your skills in archival cataloguing and research. Module assessment will enable you to undertake detailed critical analysis of archival practice and artefacts and build your skills in working with public-facing archival cataloguing and digital curation.
The module aims to do the following:
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