The MA in Anthropology of Media is one of the first degrees of its kind in the world. It deals with the growth of mass media, their relationship to traditional forms and the increasingly post-national nature of contemporary media, with particular reference to Asia and Africa.
Most media studies remain centred on the English-speaking world.
The result is to universalize and textualize historically and culturally specific activities in an ethnocentric manner. The programme, by contrast, sets out to develop a distinctively anthropological approach to media, one which considers media as social and cultural practices. The programme aims to study media in Asia and Africa both ethnographically and theoretically. Inother words, it is concerned with inquiring not only into differences between various media in different parts of the regions, but with considering the kinds of theories used to imagine other media as against the understandings Asians and Africans have of their own media. Students are offered an intensive introduction to current theoretical approaches in anthropology and media studies, including an examination of the pervasive eurocentrism of much existing cultural and media studies.