HMEA03125U Media, Violence, Audiences

Media violence has for long for been a central topic within media studies, where questions regarding how to define and understand media violence and its effects on audiences have led to much theoretical and methodological controversy. This course will look into these debates and invite students to investigate the relations between various media and their audiences and users, and the question of how these relations can be studied empirically. Theoretically, the course will introduce students to perspectives on media violence and audience effects, how media violence operates, and how audiences respond to and make sense of media violence. The course will furthermore explore how such epistemological and theoretical perspectives are interlinked with methodological considerations regarding operationalizations of (media) violence and quantitative and qualitative research designs for empirical studies of media violence.