Art History and Visual Culture - U6UAHAVC

In this module, you'll dive into the history, context, and importance of sustainability. We'll help you understand how the arts and humanities uniquely contribute to the global conversation about sustainability and our response to the climate crisis. Together, we'll study how communities from different times and places have managed to live in harmony with nature. You'll also learn about their challenges and how human activities have shaped the world and brought us to the Anthropocene era.

This module provides a broad perspective on sustainability and offers insight into how people around the world adapt to their environments. Get ready to explore the complex world of sustainability and what it means for our future and the planet.

See article: Shaping a sustainable future in the screen industries.

In this module, you'll discover how the Faculty of Arts conducts research to tackle the climate crisis and promote sustainable living. We'll approach sustainability from a unique angle, considering both human and non-human perspectives and experiences. Through literature, art, music, history, philosophy, and languages, we'll tackle fundamental questions; how can we protect and preserve our world? We'll explore diverse approaches and sources to uncover how the arts and humanities provide answers to the sustainability challenge.

This module covers different perspectives on living sustainably in a time of environmental crisis. It's your opportunity to understand and make a difference in our world.

See article: Shaping a sustainable future in the screen industries.

How can the arts help us think about health and cope with illness?  What can the arts contribute to healthcare practice and policy?

You will explore big questions like these, looking at how the arts can engage with the crucial issues in health today and build a better vision of health for the future.

We will cover major themes including:

• Representing health - look critically at representations of good and poor health, found in politics, religion, art, film, literature, and philosophy.
• Mental health - explore what mental health is, and how it differs from physical health. You’ll look critically at themes such as the marketisation of mental health, the history of mental health institutions, and the ethics of psychiatry.
• Communicating health - how health is communicated in personal, public, and professional settings. We’ll explore questions such as why it is so important that patient voices are heard in communicating about health.
• Health inequalities - look critically at striking inequalities in health, including patterns of gender, race, class, sexuality and economic differences in health and access to healthcare.

From treatment, information, care, and outreach, understanding the health humanities provides career opportunities for the next century.

This module is worth 10 credits.

We live in a data-driven society. Information is used for everything from predicting our shopping habits, to understanding global weather patterns, and has radically changed our world.

From the development of Artificial Intelligence to robotics and the use of ‘big data’, the capture and use of information is essential in modern society. To make sure these developments help solve problems, and are not used for harm, we need the arts and humanities to set boundaries and ask questions.

You will:

• Explore topics such as privacy, surveillance, power and representation
• Learn how modern technology can replicate historical biases and ignore contemporary struggles
• Gain the background and context to contemporary issues on data and society
• Question the limits we place on technology in our world
• Explore how the arts and humanities shape, direct and protect against the way data is used

This module is worth 10 credits.

The digitisation of records and texts has revolutionised academic study. The ability to efficiently and confidently use data is a valuable skill for both your course and future career.

On this module, you will:

• Learn the basics of data and ‘text mining’ (using search terms to explore large amounts of information)
• Develop your skills and apply them to case studies
• See how your work can highlight issues and solve problems
• Understand how data analysis allows us to create narratives that inspire and drive change

We will use examples and case studies from across the faculty, where data and text analysis have been used by arts and humanities researchers within their work.

This module is worth 10 credits.

Learn the basics of creating and editing audio and visual material.

From podcasting, photo editing, photography, video editing and sound editing, you can work on how your digital skills can be used to communicate and inspire.

You will be guided through a series of tutorials and examples where you can develop your skills and produce your own content.

This work will be developed through examples and case studies from across the faculty, where audio and visual materials have been used by researchers within their work.

Examples include:

• Virtual reality renditions of historical photographs
•  Immersive museum experiences
• Audio installations to share stories about migration and sustainability
• Interactive events to inspire young people about languages and cultures past and present

This module is worth 10 credits.

Epidemics and infectious illnesses have shaped our world. Most recently, the Coronavirus pandemic dramatically changed the way we work and socialise, with lasting effect.

We will explore the past and present of infectious disease, including how cultures, religions, literature and art have been shaped by the interaction between humans and disease.

You will learn about:

• The variety of human responses to sickness
• How ideas about illness are expressed across the world
• Drug resistant bacteria and mutations of viruses
• How the arts help societies to process the impact of disease - it is often through music, literature, philosophy and media that suffering is expressed and issues raised

This module is worth 10 credits.

Our digital revolution has been led by the arts and humanities.

From mobile apps to learn languages, to video tutorials on how to play an instrument, the use of digital platforms has transformed our disciplines.

In an age defined by ecological issues, technological change and political upheaval across the world, it is the arts and humanities which provide vital links between the past, present and future. It is now more important than ever that we connect communities, challenge structures of power and address inequality.

You will examine how the digital arts changed the world, using examples from a range of mediums from across the globe. This could be a community walking app, that has brought hidden histories to light, a crowd-sourced projects that have given a platform to new voices, or social media forums that link music, philosophy and literature to contemporary debates.

This module is worth 10 credits.

We are in a state of climate emergency. Sustainability and climate change is on both political and personal agendas like never before.

On this module, you will:

• Examine the idea of ‘sustainability’ - looking at the social, cultural, political, economic and environmental challenges that sustainability aims to address
• Link issues of climate change, and our responses to them, to shifting ideas about nature and its distinctness from culture, the scientific and industrial revolutions, and the emergence of the Western world
• Examine Western culture’s way of defining the ‘environment’ and our relationship with nature
• Look at the diverse ways in which different cultures imagine nature

The arts and humanities do not offer quick fixes to our problems, but ways of thinking that can change the world. We do this through understanding context, process and change.

We show how the arts and humanities sheds light on the history of the present and directs us towards the future.

This module is worth 10 credits.

Explore how the arts and humanities contribute to sustainability.

From stories, to images and representation, the ways we understand the world also shape how we understand sustainability.

With a focus on globalisation, and the accelerating pace of climate change in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, we will think about the problems raised by the climate crisis. 

You will:

• Learn about debates around the Anthropocene, the era of humanity’s marked impact on the environment
• Examine the controversies and disputes that have emerged about our relationship with nature
• Explore how we can tell stories about climate change – for example through the literature and music of marginalised groups across the world, who feel the impact of climate change first

By considering how everyday life choices are linked to the environment, the module offers an imaginative way to explore the challenges of sustainable living.  You will gain the tools to challenge opinion and identify how local ideas can offer a solution to global problems.

This module is worth 10 credits.

From filters to fake news, we are exposed to a huge amount of information in our day-to-day lives.

Whether through advertising, promotion, policies or the media, the (mis)information we are exposed to is intended to influence us, change our minds, or maybe even censor and withhold information about important issues.

To challenge this, we need to think critically about data. This module will give you the skills to do just that.

You’ll gain the critical skills to observe, question, and act when the facts do not support what’s being represented. We will also introduce approaches you can use to question visual, textual, quantitative and qualitative information. This could include:

• Causality
• Statistics
• Bias
• Content analysis
• Language

Critical analysis is an important skill, not only so we can preserve our freedoms and protect from harm caused by misinformation, but in the workplace too. The ability to make judgements that are based on logic is a key transferable skill.

This module is worth 10 credits.

Writing inspires change. From the academic textbook that demonstrates a new concept, to a blog post that influences habits, writing can change the world.

On this module, you will learn to think critically about yourself and society, through reflecting on how you write.

Writing lets us occupy different spaces and identities. You can write to develop your sense of self, to enlighten others, or to build connections. Writing skills are more than just how to write an academic essay. Writing can give you an insight into who you are, your values and future direction.

During your studies, you will use writing to develop analytical approaches which can enhance your work and prepare you for your future career. Focusing on the diversity of experiences and backgrounds, interests and motivations, we show how meaningful writing can lead, inspire and transform. 

This module is worth 10 credits.

This module introduces students to revivalism as a fundamental aspect of the history of art and visual culture and explores the enduring phenomenon of cultural historical revivals from the Renaissance to the contemporary era, examining their wide-ranging political, ideological and conceptual motives and meanings.

Through case studies drawn and by examining revivalism as a creative and innovative practice, the module considers a variety of attitudes to the past, such as anachronism, nostalgia, utopianism and romanticism.

This module explores histories and critical theories of monuments, cities and urbanism. There is normally an extensive fieldwork element in which students study art, architecture, monuments, and museums in situ, both locally studying sites in Nottingham and then through a guided visit to a European city.

A key objective of this module is for students to research, describe, and analyse a site that they have visited, explored and read about. This module allows students to engage with the material properties of our objects of study and introduces them to key terms and a range of critical and theoretical approaches to describing and analysing cities and historical sites. Structuring themes may include the city as site of memory; material and cultural heritage; alternative sites of display of art. 

This module will explore the British Empire not simply as a vast political and administrative entity driven by trade and commerce (and in many places rooted in slavery and indentured labour), but as an exercise in institutionalised cultural power which laid the foundations for the global and local cultural flows, as well as the neo-colonial structures, characteristic of today’s globalised world.

Students will be equipped with the theoretical tools to analyse the ways in which the Empire promoted a visual, auditory, and material culture - ranging from art and literature, to radio, cinema and television - that shaped the everyday lives of millions of people. 

This module invites students to consider the histories, cultures, and politics of collecting and collections, cutting across art, audio-visual media, memorabilia and fan objects, animals and specimens, archives, museums, galleries, zoos, and public and private cultures of display. It will examine the processes of curation, both institutional and personal, and link these to the social, cultural, and political contexts that shape these practices.

The module will examine the history of collecting and collections and will account for both professional practices of collecting and amateur, private cultures of collecting.

Students will gain an insight into issues of conservation relating to art, object, and media collections. Students will also gain a sense of the contemporary politics of collections management and custodianship.

This module will introduce students to key concepts of narratology and storytelling. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, we will learn how to identify narrative patterns in media texts of different genres and origins, how narrative structures shape world views and how many stories are deeply embedded in global popular cultural narratives, travelling through historical time.

The module will also interrogate the neo-coloniality of popular media narratives and story journeys that include long-standing powerful colonial and racist registers and codes. 

This module tackles the politics of emotion, affect and the senses within art, media, and culture, concepts which have not always been taken seriously within analytical, intellectual contexts.

Emotions and feelings are experienced individually, but are shaped and impacted by cultural norms, linguistic formulation, and social organisation. The module involves questions of how emotions and affect have been captured, represented and expressed in art and across media forms. It asks what role art, audio, visual, and haptic media play in shaping our sensing bodies and private emotional selves. It addresses the methodological challenges posed by researching affect, emotions and the senses, as well as engaging with how we might study emotion, affect and the senses in a rigorous fashion. 

This module is based around a challenge: how do we use the digital humanities?

You are presented with a series of problems about how we can use the arts and humanities to address some of the major issues we face in technology and society.

For example, the acceleration of technology in both private and public life is immense, but this rapid pace of change should not prevent reflection.

In this module, you consider the major contemporary issues of how technology shapes our present and our future. We respond to these concerns using the specific skillset of the arts and humanities, where we ask: what does it mean to be human?

This module is worth 10 credits.

Stand out in your job search with employability skills and hands-on experience.

Learn key skills, from constructing an outstanding CV to practicing interview technique, before completing a part-time placement in the spring. This will be for one day a week, or equivalent, for up to eight weeks.

You can apply for placements in relevant local organisations. The dedicated faculty placement team have an established list of providers, or you can arrange your own placement, subject to approval.

Our placements include a range of sectors, including:

• creative and cultural industries
• media
• marketing
• heritage and museums
• the music industry
• education
• charitable and third-sector organisations

These are subject to change each year.

You will develop a wide range of transferable skills, including:

• communication
• presentation
• organisation
• professionalism
• time management skills

Assessment is through an online portfolio of materials, including application materials, reflective writing and a research report.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Community engagement is important in many careers, from politics and social work to marketing and business.

We do not work in a vacuum - our research and activities are linked to individuals and groups across society. By learning to engage with communities, researchers can reach wide audiences, learn from them and collaboratively make a real contribution to overcoming social problems. 

We need to understand how engagement works in order to work collaboratively, respectfully and sustainability with communities.

In this module, we will:

• Explore how our staff and students work with communities – from supporting immigrant communities settling into Nottingham, to engaging with schools to promote literacy and career opportunities
• Discuss how activism and advocacy can become part of academic work
• Explore how community engagement is structured and organised and how we can ensure our work within the arts and humanities has relevance and impact for diverse audiences

This module will prepare you for your future career, by focusing on the key skill of the arts and humanities: our ability to support and engage with those around us.

This module is worth 10 credits.

Explore the histories and legacies of colonisation, alongside the routes to justice through decolonisation.

Using examples from across the globe, we explore the impact of colonisation on society, politics, economics, and culture.

You will consider contemporary examples and a wide range of evidence, sources and perspectives, including from:

• art
• film
• literature
• archive materials and documents
• music and performance

You will also explore the debates around reconciliation, restitution and justice.

Together we will build an interdisciplinary analysis, drawing upon the research of the whole faculty to uncover, assess and deconstruct the practices of colonialism and their implications for our contemporary world.  

This module is worth 10 credits.

Doing an arts and humanities degree means you’ll gain the skills which are essential for changing the world we live in. Not only that, you are uniquely positioned to understand people, processes and culture.

This module lets you apply that knowledge to solve a real-life problem. The aim is for you to develop your understanding of your degree, and the range of careers open to you.

You will work in an interdisciplinary team on a real project connected to impact, which we define as our ability to ‘make change happen’. These projects have been designed by individuals, groups and organisations that are looking to make a difference to our world. This might be about sustainability, business, equality, culture, politics or society.

Teams will be given a project brief. You will then be guided through how to shape a project, and how to work as a team and deliver results. This will give you the employment skills and experience to show how you can make an impact as an arts and humanities graduate.

This module is worth 20 credits.

Wellbeing, the crisis in mental health care, and clapping for NHS staff during the Covid pandemic are all examples of health humanities. On this module, you will be exploring contemporary challenges in this area.

To build a healthier society, enabling access to healthcare for all, we must consider how people act, behave and build connections.

You will look at:

• how the arts and humanities respond to major issues in health, medicine and wellbeing – i.e. exploring how individuals use art, literature and culture to understand pain and loss, or analysing human behaviour with regard to new medicines and our relationship to health sciences
• topics such as cultural representations of health, places of medical treatment, or the relationship between medicine and emotions

The major challenges in health provision and healthcare can be influenced and directed by the arts and humanities. This module shows you how this field can be a powerful tool for change.

This module is worth 10 credits.

Discover how our world is experienced through language.

We live in a global society, where different languages build our perceptions, ideas and values. In this module, we respect that difference and participate in it.

You will:

• Use multilingualism as a tool to challenge our own thinking and to comprehend the lives of others in society
• Work through etymologies and translations from a wide range of languages, including Russian, Spanish, French and German
• Learn how understanding languages - not just speaking and reading them - can be vital in contributing to our community, enriching your experience, and participating in a global society

No knowledge of any language is needed, as we focus on understanding what it means to live in our multi-lingual world.

This module is worth 10 credits.

Explore how Nottingham creates ideas, identities, culture and products, alongside how you as a student are also ‘Made in Nottingham’.

This module will help you begin shaping your skills for the career you want, drawing upon the way arts and humanities work has transformed the city.

From the entrepreneurs who have set up businesses or those who have created and enriched charities and social projects, to the writers, artists, musicians and teachers who have all been created in Nottingham. We use their experience, their understanding and their skills to help you define your own path for after university.

You will be able to build your profile through this module, develop your own career narrative to use in your future work as well as engage in the variety of opportunities that are open to you as an arts graduate.

Through this module, we’ll address what it means to be ‘Made in Nottingham’.

This module is worth 10 credits.

Throughout history, artists have sought to imagine new futures by breaking with the past. This module considers the utopian, experimental, revolutionary impulses that are revealed in significant moments of cultural rupture.

The module explores episodes in which artists, art critics and art historians have attempted to break with the past through new ideas, forms of technology, subjects, styles and materials. In dialogue with the ‘Revivals’ module in the second year, which analyses artistic returns to the past, ‘Ruptures’ explores breaking with the past as a polarised creative tendency.

Through case studies taken from across a range of historical and geographical contexts, the module explores how artists have consciously and deliberately departed from tradition and engaged in wilful and considered rejection of the past. 

This module examines the issues and debates that surround curatorial practices in the visual arts.

The module takes a thematic approach, exploring exhibition histories to investigate key questions relating to identity, politics and spectatorship. It will consider the aesthetic, ideological, political and moral effects and motivations of exhibitions, as well as the impact of curatorial agendas on viewing experiences.

Students will be encouraged to reflect critically on the role of exhibitions in shaping histories of art and visual culture through a broad chronological study of how, where and why they are created. In this way, the module will consider questions of institutional responsibility, cultural ownership and appropriation, coloniality and soft power, and the museum as a site of social practice and/or resistance.

This module will involve direct engagement with emerging issues, challenges and opportunities across the media, screen, arts cultural and heritage sectors.

Due to the rapidly changing nature of these sectors as a result of technological, socio-cultural, political and economic dynamics, module content will be responsive and focus on the most timely and urgent issues for the period of the module’s duration.

Staff will lead interdisciplinary and cross-sector conversations around each topic, challenge or opportunity. These discussions will suggest frameworks for considering how issues, challenges and opportunities emerge from specific contexts but are experienced inequitably as a result of different sector-relevant, geographic, socio-cultural, political and economic dynamics. 

Media and culture are key sources of information, narratives and stories, however all of them are subject to restriction and redaction. This module examines how stories are shaped by multiple actors, in various forms and media, and in specific social and cultural contexts.

This module will interrogate the role of both formal and informal regulation in cultural processes, identify multiple factors and stakeholders, examine the histories, traditions and contemporary instances of censorship in a global context, and develop critical vocabulary and analytical tools to analyse narrative inclusion and exclusion. 

This module will explore a wide range of work by artists, filmmakers, showrunners and curators working in Africa, Europe and the Americas from 1900 to ‘the present’.

This module will examine how practitioners of African heritage have responded to legacies of colonialism and European/American actions, as well as local, national and global issues, in their work.

By encompassing visual art, film and television in its structure, the module will explore diverse visual forms, which may include cultural phenomena like Nollywood and Afrofuturism, genres like Blaxploitation, and formal tendencies like post-Black satire. 

This module will explore concepts and experiences of ‘play’ in relation to a number of formats that may include (but not be limited to) videogames, board games, escape rooms and immersive experiences (for example art installations, experiential theatre and performance art).

It will bring together related concepts such as the ludic, immersion, interactivity, gamification, participation and embodiment to explore what it means to create a playful experience, how such experiences are designed, the kinds of outcome they aim to achieve for audiences and the value that gets ascribed to them.

The module will contain a historical consideration of play as well as how it has been deployed to meet political or ideological aims. This will include how ‘play’ is increasingly used within a range of cultural sectors and practices.

This module explores the social and political role of organised civil society, with a particular focus on local, national and transnational social movements and labour movements around the world and in historical context.

It will examine the ways in which protest repertoires emerge and develop in different political opportunity structures that facilitate and delimit the ways in which citizens can make their voices heard. 

This module considers histories and theories, and, crucially, objects understood to be 'outmoded,’ by examining the lifecycle of a diverse array of objects and media, beginning with the moment of their declared obsolescence and proceeding to consider their multifaceted cultural afterlives.

Focusing on a wide range of objects and techniques, this module examines how artists, filmmakers, curators, museum conservators and other creative practitioners engage with outmoded objects and ideas, across many forms of cultural production.

By recontextualizing the 'outmoded,' students will gain a deeper understanding of the dynamic nature of cultural tastes and values. 

Sound is everywhere in our daily lives, from the ubiquity of voices and music on screens to the background rumble of cities. Yet these sounds often evade our notice and critical attention. This module sets students to work on a mission to document their everyday listening.

We will examine a range of theories and methods that help us to investigate and explain everyday sound’s role in forming us as sensing subjects, linking us to communities and cultural spaces, mediating our relationship with urban and natural environments, and structuring our daily routines.