Postgraduate
The Chair in Media and Information Society teaches a Masters Level course on media policy and institutions.
This course assumes some awareness of the key theoretical perspectives on the relationship between the media and society. It also assumes awareness of the key debates about the ideological functioning of the media as a social institution.
The course thus preoccupies itself with the media as a social institution answering to specific internal and external media policies. To this end, the concepts of media institution and media policy are defined within particular theoretical traditions. Picking up the discussion about media institutions, the course undertakes an institutional analysis of journalism in order to disentangle the institutional underpinnings of news production.
The course intends to introduce students to the dynamics of policy making, to encourage postgraduate research in this area, and to assist in building capacity on policy related work in the region.
The course extends the definition of media policy to encapsulate the domain, scope, goal, context, and process of policy formulation, implementation and evaluation. It compares and contrasts internal media policy and external media policy. It analyses the economic and other factors, usually associated with globalization, that impinge upon policy formulation and application.
Furthermore, the course discusses the theoretical underpinnings of media regulation in order to understand the rationale for regulating media institutions. In particular, it analyses the various regulatory models of broadcasting, focusing on public service broadcasting (PSB). African country-specific examples of media regulation are given in order to assist students to understand the historical and cultural context of media policy and regulation. The course also analyses the concepts of media freedom and accountability, and policy measures used to promote media plurality and diversity.
Finally, the course analyses the relationships between technology and media policy formulation, with special focus on the concepts of the knowledge economy and information society, usually associated with the discourse spawned by the two phases of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), and articulated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). As such, the course analyses the problems and prospects associated with the concept of the knowledge society as an analytical tool for discussing issues of media policy and regulation in Africa and in the developed world.
The Chair also supervises Masters and PhD theses on aspects of African media policy, with a specific focus on the following areas:
• Media pluralism and diversity in the digital environment;
• Digital broadcasting policy;
• Media accountability systems;
• Public service broadcasting in the digital environment;
• Media transformation;
• Media, political action and social movements.
