Course: Culture and Communication (2014 - 2015)

Time frame: 1st semester, 2nd year; 6 lectures, 6 seminars;

Teaching staff: Senior Lecturer Malina Ciocea, PhD; Lecturer Alexandru Crlan, Drd.
Contacts: malina.ciocea@comunicare.ro, alex.carlan@gmail.com
Attendance/Participation:
Attendance is mandatory for at least 3 lectures and 4 seminars
Requirements and evaluation:
Active participation in discussions at seminars, based on bibliography (30% of the final grade).
In the second seminar (November 26) students will present a draft of their paper (brief
presentation of theoretical background, case research, research questions) and will receive
feed-back. Further details about the draft will be given in due time;
Research paper: see topics below. Deadline for forming a team and selecting a topic: 1 st
seminar (November 5). Teams of 3-4 students will work on a single research paper. The paper
will be presented in one of the last 4 seminars (starting December, 10). Students will schedule
their presentation by the second seminar (November 26). The presentation, which will last
around 30 minutes, will be accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. The students will
submit the final version of the research paper, based on the feed-back received during the
presentation, on January 26, at one of the above e-mail addresses. Papers will be around 25
pages long and will follow the criteria that are to be presented to students in a separate
document. Any form of plagiarism leads to disqualification of the paper from the evaluation
process (40% of the final grade);

Written exam: students will select 3 lecture topics (see lecture topics below). Mandatory
readings are indicated for each lecture. The exam will cover 2 of the selected topics (30% of
the final grade);
All tasks are mandatory.
Readings:
The mandatory readings will be available either online or in print.
Schedule of activities
Date
Type of activity / Professor / Topic / objectives
Room
15 Oct. 2014
Lecture 1 / Alexandru Crlan / Introductory lecture: theoretical approaches on
306
culture. Mediation and mediatization as key
analytical categories in understanding culture.
22 Oct. 2014
Lecture 2 / Alexandru Crlan / The public sphere as a regime of visibility: new
306
forms of visibility, new forms of surveillance.
29 Oct. 2014
Lecture 3 / Alexandru Crlan / Critical approaches to media culture. Consuming
306
a misleading metaphor?
5 Nov. 2014
Seminar 1 / Alexandru Crlan / Methodological seminar (dread and discuss the
306
articles). Allocation of topics for projects.
12 Nov. 2014
Lecture 4 / Mlina Ciocea /306
Culture and identity. Values in a globalized world.
19 Nov. 2014
Lecture 5 / Mlina Ciocea / 306 Transnationalism
and
cosmopolitanism.
Transnational social fields, homeland and
diasporic communities.
26 Nov. 2014
Seminar 2 / Mlina Ciocea & Presentations of the outlines of projects: topic,
Alexandru Crlan / 306
case study, analytical framework, research
questions, methodological considerations.

3 Dec. 2014

Lecture 6 / Mlina Ciocea / 306

10 Dec. 2014

Seminar 3 / Mlina Ciocea & Presentations of projects: Culture as mediation

Alexandru Crlan / 306
and mediatization of culture: texts and practices
(lectures 1 &3)
Seminar 4 / Mlina Ciocea & Presentation of projects: Visibility, media logics
Alexandru Crlan / 306
and the public sphere (lecture 2)
Seminar 5 / Mlina Ciocea & Presentation of projects: lectures 4&5
Alexandru Crlan / 306
Seminar 6 / Mlina Ciocea & Presentation of projects: The commodification of
Alexandru Crlan / 306
memory (lecture 6)

17 Dec. 2014
7 Jan. 2015
14 Jan. 2015

The otherness of the Past: the politics of memory.

Lecture topics:
Lecture 1 (October 15, AC)
Introductory lecture. Fundamentals. Theoretical approaches on culture. The question of
modernity
Mandatory readings:
Hepp, Andreas. Cultures of mediatization. London: Polity, 2013, Introduction, Ch. I-IV.
Thompson, John B. Ideology and Modern Culture, Standford, Standford University Press, 1990, Ch. 3
- The Concept of Culture, pp. 122-162.
Thompson, John B. The Media and Modernity: a Social Theory of the Media, Cambridge, Oxford:
Polity Press, 1995, Introduction, Ch. 1-3, pp. 1 118.
Further readings:
Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2005, first edition 1990. Ch. I.
The Reflexivity of Modernity, pp. 36-45, 53-54.
Hjarvard, Stig. The Mediatization of Culture & Society, London: Routledge: 2013.
Jenks, Chris. Culture. 2nd Edition. London: Routledge, 2004 [1993].
Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: the Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Chicago, The University of Chicago
Press, 1990, Prologue, Ch. 1. What is the Problem about Modernity?, pp. 1-44.
Lecture 2 (October 22, AC)
The public sphere and its cultural relevance: new forms of visibility, new forms of surveillance
Mandatory readings:
Habermas, J. Public Sphere: an encyclopedia article, in Meenakshi Gigi Durham & Douglas M.
Kellner. Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (pp. 163-173), London: Blackwell, 2006.
Hepp, Andreas. Cultures of Mediatization, Cambridge&Malden, Polity Press, 2013;
Thompson, John B. The Media and Modernity: a Social Theory of the Media, Cambridge, Oxford:
Polity Press, 1995, Ch. 4, pp. 149-148; Ch. 8, pp. 235-265.
Thompson, John B: The new visibility: Theory, Culture and Society, 22/6 (2005), pp. 31-51.
Thompson, John B: Shifting Boundaries of Public and Private Life Theory, Culture and Society,
28/4 (2011), pp. 49-70,
Further readings:
Brighenti, Mubi Andrea: Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research, Palgrave, McMillan:
London, New York, 2010;
Marx, Garry T., Whats New About the New Surveillance? Classifying for Change and Continuity,
Surveillance & Society 1(1): 9-29;

(Eds.) Sean Hier & Joshua The Surveillance Studies Reader, Part 1, ch. 3, 5, Part 2, ch. 6; Part 6, Ch.
21; Open University Press, McGraw - Hill, 2007.
Sheller, M., & Urry, J.,: Mobile transformations of public and private life. Theory, Culture and
Society, Vol. 20(3): 2003, pp. 107125
Lecture 3 (October 29, AC)
Critical approaches to media culture. Consuming a misleading metaphor?
Mandatory readings:
Adorno, Theodor. Culture Industry Reconsidered in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass
Culture, Routledge: London, New York, 1991, pp. 98-106.
Arendt, Hannah. The crisis in culture n Between past and future: Eight exercises in political
thought. London: Penguin, 1968.
Baudrillard, Jean. The consumer society: Myths and structures. Vol. 53. Sage, 1998.
Heath, Joseph & Potter, Andrew. The rebel sell. Why culture cant be jammed, Toronto: Capstone. (I1,
I4, I5, II6-10);
Stuart Hall. Encoding / decoding in (eds). Meenakshi Gigi Durham & Douglas M. Kellner. Media
and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (pp. 163-173), London: Blackwell, 2006.
Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetics. Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (2nd edition), Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers, 2000, ch 6-7, pp. 169-235.
Mandatory Film:
The perverts guide to ideology (2012, Sophie Fiennes, Slavoj Zizek)
Further readings:
Lull, J. Media, Communication, Culture. A Global Approach, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995, 2nd Ed.
2000. Ch. 7, Symbolic Power and Popular Culture, pp. 160-176.
Horkheimer, Max & Adorno Theodor. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception in
(eds). Meenakshi Gigi Durham & Douglas M. Kellner Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks (pp. 4172), London: Blackwell, 2006.
Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer culture: History, theory and politics. Sage, 2007.
Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatist Aesthetics. Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (2nd edition), Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
Thompson, John B. The Media and Modernity: a Social Theory of the Media, Cambridge, Oxford:
Polity Press, 1995, Introduction, Ch. 7, pp. 207 234;
Lecture 4 (November 12, MC)
Culture and identity. Values in a globalised world
Mandatory readings:
Albrow, M. The Global Age. Stanford University Press, 1997. Ch. 7, pp. 144-151.
Berger, P. Introduction. The Cultural Dynamics of Globalization, in Peter L. Berger, Samuel P.
Huntington (eds.), Many Globalizations. Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, Oxford
University Press, 2002, pp. 1-16.
Berger, Peter L., Four Faces of Global Culture, in OMeara, Patrick, Mehlinger, Howard D., Krain,
Matthew (eds.), Globalization and the Challenges of a New Century: A Reader, Indiana University
Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2000.
Steger, M.B. Globalization and Ideology, in George Ritzer (ed.). The Blackwell Companion to
Globalization, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Tomlinson, John, Cultural Globalization, in Ritzer, George (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to
Globalization, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, 2007, pp. 352-366.

Tomlinson, J. Globalization and Cultural Identity, in David Held and Anthony McGrew (eds.), The
Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, Cambridge, Polity
Press, 2000, second edition 2003.
Further readings:
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso, 1983, revised edition 1991, pp. 9-36, 37-46.
Appadurai, A. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press, 1996.
Appiah, K.A. The Ethics of Identity, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2004.
Chouliaraki, Lilie. The ironic spectator: solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism. Polity, 2013.
Dussel, E. Beyond Eurocentrism, in Jameson, Fredric, Miyoshi Masao (eds.), The Cultures of
Globalization, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1998/2004, pp. 3-31.
Lull, J. The Push and Pull of Global Culture, in James Curran and David Morley (eds.), Media and
Cultural Theory, London, Routledge, 2006, pp. 44-57.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen. Globalization as Hybridization. In Durhan, M.G., Kellner, D. (eds.), Media
and Cultural Studies, Blackwell Publishing, 2001, revised edition 2006. pp. 658-680.
Scholte, J. A. Globalization. A Critical Introduction, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000.
Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. Penguin Books, 1991, pp. 1-18, 71-99.
Lecture 5 (November 19, MC)
Transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Transnational social fields, homeland and diasporic
communities
Mandatory readings:
Appiah, K.A. Cosmopolitanism. Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York, London, Norton, 2006,
Chapter 9. The Counter-Cosmopolitans, pp.137-143, 151-153.
Balabanova, E., Balch, A. (2010). Sending and Receiving: The Ethical Framing of Intra-EU Migration
in the European Press. European Journal of Communication, 25 (4), Sage, pp. 382-397.
Beck, U. Cosmopolitanism: A Critical Theory for the Twenty-first Century, in George Ritzer (ed.).
The Blackwell Companion to Globalization, Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. 162-176.
Beck, U., Levy, D. Cosmopolitanized Nations: re-imagining collectivity in world risk society, Theory,
Culture, Society, Sage, 2013, 30 (2) 3-31.
Brubaker, R. (2005). The diaspora diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies. 28(1) pp. 1-19.
De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., &Wodak, R. (1999). The discursive construction of national identities.
Discourse & Society. Vol 10(2), 149173.
Kaneva, Nadia. "Nation branding: Toward an agenda for critical research." International Journal of
Communication 5 (2011): 117-141.
Ong, Jonathan Corpus. "The cosmopolitan continuum: locating cosmopolitanism in media and cultural
studies." Media, Culture & Society 31.3 (2009): 449-466.
Stevenson, Nick. European Cosmopolitan Solidarity. Questions of Citizenship, Difference and PostMaterialism, European Journal of Social Theory, 2006, 9 (4), Sage, pp. 485-500.
Further readings:
Appadurai, Arjun. Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination, Public Culture 2000, 12
(1), Duke University Press, pp. 1-19.
Beck, U. The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies, Theory, Culture and Society, 2002, vol. 19, No.
1-2, Sage, pp. 17-44.
Kaneva, Nadia, and Delia Popescu. "National identity lite Nation branding in post-Communist
Romania and Bulgaria." International Journal of Cultural Studies 14.2 (2011): 191-207.
Kivisto, P., Faist, T. (2007). Citizenship. Discourse, Theory, and Transnational Porspects. Blackwell
Publishing.

Turner, Bryan S. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford,
1996/2000.
Khagram, Sanjeev, Levitt, Peggy (eds.). (2008). The Transnational Studies Reader. Interactions and
Innovations. Routledge.
Lecture 6 (December 3, MC)
The otherness of the Past: the politics of memory
Mandatory readings:
Assman, J. (2008). Communicative and Cultural Memory, in (Eds.) Erll, A., Nnning A. Cultural
Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Berlin, New York, Walter de
Gruyter; pp. 109-118;
Huyssen, A. (2011). Present pasts: Media, politics, amnesia. In J. K. Olick, V. Vinitzky-Seroussi & D.
Levy. (Eds.). The collective memory reader (pp. 430-436). Oxford: Oxford University Press;
Jasinsky, J. (2001). Memory. In J. Jasinsky. (ed.). Sourcebook on Rhetoric: Key Concepts in
Contemporary Rhetorical Studies (pp. 355-363). London, New Delhi: Thousand Oaks, Sage
Publications.
Landsberg, A. (1997). America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory. Toward a Radical
Politics of Empathy. New German Critique, 71(1), pp. 63-86;
Pickering, M., Keightley, E. (2009). Trauma, discourse and communicative limits. Critical Discourse
Studies. 6(4), 237-249;
Radstone, S., Schwarz, B.(2010). Introduction. Mapping Memory. in (Eds.) Radstone, S., Schwarz,
B. Memory: histories, theories, debates. Fordham Univ Press, pp. 1-14;
Tileag, C. (2011). (Re)writing biography: Memory, identity, and textually mediated reality in coming
to terms with the past. Culture and Psychology, 17(2), 197-215.
Further readings:
Assmann, J. (2010). Globalization, Universalism and the Erosion of Cultural Memory, in (Eds.)
Assmann, A., Conrad, S. Memory in a Global Age. Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, Palgrave,
Macmillan; pp. 121-137;
Berger, J. (2007). Which prosthetic? Mass media, narrative, empathy and progressive politics.
Rethinking History, 11(4), 597-612;
Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hirsch, M. (2001). Surviving images: Holocaust photographs and the work of postmemory. The Yale
Journal of Criticism. 14(1), 5-37.
Landsberg, A. (2004). Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age
of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press;
Tileag, C. (2008). What is a revolution? National commemoration, collective memory and managing
authenticity in the representation of a political event. Discourse & Society, 19(3), 359-382.
Tileag, C. (2012). Communism in retrospect: The rhetoric of historical representation and writing the
collective memory of recent past. Memory Studies, 5(4), 462-478.
Landsberg, Alison: Prosthetic memories: The transformation of American remembrance in the age of
mass culture, Columbia University Press, 2004;
Garde-Hansen, Joanne: Media and Memory, Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2011;
Seminar topics:
Seminar 1 (November 5 - AC)
Methodological issues & bibliography:
Bent Flyvbjerg: Five Misunderstandings about Case-Study Research in Qualitative Inquiry 12 (2),
2006.
J. Sandberg & M. Alvesson: Ways of Constructing Research Questions: Gap-spotting or
Problematization?, in Organization. 18 (1), 2011.

Gary Thomas: A Typology for the Case Study in Social Science Following a Review of Definition,
Discourse, and Structure, in Qualitative Inquiry 17 (6), 2011.
M. Alvesson & J. Sandberg: Generating Research Questions Through Problematization in Academy
of Management Review 2011, Vol. 36, No. 2, 247271.
Topics for research papers:
Seminar 3 (December 10)
Culture as mediation and mediatization of culture: texts and practices
1. The mediatization of social movements: virtual communitization; online and offline interaction
in social movements; flashmobs;
2. The commodification of counter-culture: brands as ideological containers; rebels as
trendsetters;
3. Culture industry and the aesthetics for the post-modern taste: mixing, jamming and hip-hop
rhetoric.
4. Constructing the self in the network: personal branding & authenticity.
Seminar 4 (December 17)
Visibility, media logics and the public sphere
1. Media logics and the public sphere desperately seeking for audiences;
2. Melting borders between public and private: religious issues, smoking in public, social media
and work relations;
3. Managing visibility (1): the banalisation of surveillance (malls, airports, supermarkets, roadtraffic);
4. Managing visibility (2): private / secrete affairs gone public Hacked accounts of celebrities,
uncovering agents in politics, uncovering surveillance (Wikileaks, Snowden, Rupert Murdoch);
Seminar 5 (January 7)
Active publics and citizenship in mediatized cultures. Diasporic social fields
1. Empowered individuals. Deliberative journalism and participative civic campaigns (Lets do it,
Romania! Protests against shale gas exploitation, etc.)
2. New social movements and social activism: womens movements, radical ecologists, peace
activists, Occupy.
3. Diasporic identity and media discourse on migrants. Romanians in Italy, Spain, UK.
4. Globalization awareness. Moral distance and care for the others. The case of humanitarian
campaigns.
Seminar 6 (January 14)
The commodification of memory
1. (Personal, public) archives and collective memory.
2. Prosthetic memories & media culture: the commodification of memory, nostalgia & cool
communism.
3. Prosthetic memory and post-memory in museums. Remembrance practices and the publics of
museums.
4. Living together the nation. Inventing traditions on the go: public celebrations of national events
in the paradigm of symbolic consumption.