Handbook

Psychologist Kurt Lewin once opined that ‘there's nothing so practical as good theory.' What he meant was that since theory is a distillation and modelling of human experience, it may be advantageously projected over otherwise uncertain milieux—helping us to understand the way things are and the way they might be. With a focus on structuralism, you are introduced to a range of critical perspectives in communication. Accordingly, this course will help you to recognise and understand the power of the cultural formations behind political and advocacy campaigns. You will learn how to identify the deep-seated patterns either consciously or unconsciously engaged by political actors. With an emphasis on key political texts, the course asks: What are the cultural-structural engines that shape the political proposition? What influences—or even determines—our reception and response? To which deeply anchored concepts do particular political texts speak? This course, then, proposes that such texts—and all texts, in fact—are rooted in a vast historical-cultural matrix and that our understanding of them is greatly enhanced when we can locate them (as far as we might) in a broader paradigmatic field. Accordingly, this course will help you to become far better thinkers; better critics of political campaigns.