BA Media Studies | Media Studies | University of Basel

Introductory module

The introductory module provides a historical and systematic overview of the basics of media studies. The obligatory introductory lecture in the fall semester conveys central concepts, figures of thought and theories of reflection on media. It deals with fundamental questions, such as what media are and how they determine our present, as well as with the history of the subject and its traditions of thought. The lecture is accompanied by a tutorial, which is also obligatory, in which the most important texts are discussed.

Digital media

This module deals with the history and present of digital media. It places dispositives of the digital at the center of the investigation and deals with both current practices in digitally coded, medial and technical arrangements as well as the historical genesis of digital media. In doing so, media procedures such as share and like, microblogging and networking are reflected in their arrangements and handling. In addition, the historical and media-technical conditions, power constellations as well as economic and political forces that decisively determine these fundamental processes of digital transformation will be analyzed. Social media, navigation systems, search engines and machine learning increasingly operate on the basis of images, which is why one of the focal points of this module is the study of image practices.

Media infrastructures

This module draws attention to the constitutive relationship between media practices and local and global infrastructures. In this module, the medial is traced back to the material basis of communication, actions and forms of control. Media infrastructures are often invisible, but at the same time omnipresent. This applies, for example, to visual forms of organization such as grids, lists and diagrams, to interfaces, data networks and server farms, virtual infrastructures of social media platforms or the games industry; to arrangements of paths, tracks, routes and maps in transport media as well as to haptic objects such as plugs, switches or keyboards. To the extent that media infrastructures implicitly generate what is institutionally codified as standardizations and normations or socially codified as appropriate behavior, studies of media infrastructures point to political and economic distributions of power. Infrastructures make things flow and function, they condition and shape our scope of action, but they usually only become visible when there are disturbances.

Scientific work

This module teaches basic as well as advanced techniques of scholarly work, with a particular focus on dealing with media artifacts, such as texts, images, films, and sound materials, as well as historical documents and codes. Specifically, the course teaches: How does one classify a source knowledgeably? What is a thesis and how can it be developed argumentatively? How do you write a scientific paper? What is an essay? Media studies offers numerous analog and digital techniques for conducting archival research, creating and organizing collections of material, and systematizing bodies of knowledge in order to develop questions and problems for scientific work.

Aesthetics and critique

This module examines aspects of perception in the context of their media-technical conditions. Artistic procedures as well as everyday practices and historical ways of seeing, hearing or touching are equally the subject and are confronted with their media conditions. The aim is to direct attention above all to processes and procedures that prove to be constitutive of historical and cultural forms of experiencing the world, but which are themselves imperceptible. The aim is to explore the blind spots of our everyday perception in media arrangements and to critically reflect on their effects. To this end, concrete arrangements of perceptual dispositifs are placed in relation to corresponding aesthetic theories. The critical study of media aesthetics is particularly interested in the conditions of technical media, for example when they constitutively undermine the audience's conscious threshold of perception. In this context, historical and current theories of perception are not only used for explanatory purposes, but are also critically evaluated from the perspective of the media-theoretical approach.

Cultural Techniques

This module deals with the basic and more advanced processes from which cultural achievements and accomplishments emerge. The focus is on the interplay of practices, materialities, and media involved in the emergence of culture, as well as the actions and processes by which the constitutive knowledge of a culture is transmitted. Students develop systematic and historical perspectives on eminent activities such as reading, writing, arithmetic, measuring, programming, etc. and learn to discuss cultural techniques as drivers of medial and cultural processes in selected scenarios.

Theoretical perspectives

This module deals systematically and historically with media theories as well as with media-theoretical perspectives of other disciplinary approaches. In this context, media theory formation is understood as an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary enterprise of insight and knowledge that cannot be separated from the knowledge of visual science (Bildwissenschaft), computer science, linguistics, philology, philosophy, sociology or the history of science. The concept-bound knowledge of theory therefore also does not first serve the classification of media and their performances, but rather conveys the ability to formulate, process and further develop problems in media studies.

Media Ecologies

This module examines the history, genesis, and theories of media environments. What media ecologies are will be examined from a variety of perspectives: first, in the exploration of historical and contemporary interconnections of media and medial arrangements to medial and cultural environments in which data circulate as images, texts, sounds, or even as commodities; second, as a question of how media are involved in constructing concepts such as the distinction between nature and culture, and also in calling such differences into question again; third, media ecology examines the relations of technical-media practices to the resources they need and consume to produce medial environments. Accordingly, it is not only necessary to analyze the respective milieus and ecologies from the perspective of media studies, but also, complementarily, to understand the participation of concrete media such as diagrams, photographs, or acoustic recordings in the respective historical construction of the relationship between system and environment.