HFMK03071U FM, Modul 4, 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 seminar 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 seminar 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 seminar 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. Throughout the seminar, media violence will be used as a focal point to explore how diverging theoretical understandings and methodological approaches have implications for the conclusions and results that can be produced within audience and user studies. Students will prepare, undertake, and present a small-scale empirical study on media violence from an audience or user perspective.