ATS3160 · Media, politics and your body

Overview

In this unit, you will explore how digital technologies shape the way our bodies are seen, tracked, and controlled in everyday life. We’ll look at how images, data systems, and online platforms influence what bodies mean and how they are treated in society. You will study topics such as how ideas about gender and race show up in digital media, how digital technologies are used to identify people and to optimise our exercise and daily routines, and how workplaces use data and algorithms to manage workers. Using these examples, you’ll learn how bodies are increasingly turned into data that can be measured, watched, and regulated. At the same time, we’ll consider how people push back against these systems and use technology in their own ways. The unit will introduce key ideas from media and technology studies to help you understand how power works through digital tools today. You’ll also be encouraged to reflect on your own experiences with social media, apps, and other technologies in your daily life.

Areas of study: Communications and media

Offerings

Assessment

The Handbook does not list a final examination among the assessment items. That is not a guarantee there is none.

Within semester assessment: 100%

Assessment details may change. Please refer to the assessment information in Moodle closer to the start of the teaching period.

Requisites

The Handbook lists no prerequisite, corequisite or prohibition for this unit.

Learning outcomes

1. critically examine the relations between technology, the body, and contemporary politics;
2. analyse the way that media systems shape representation, measurement, and governance of bodies within different social and cultural contexts;
3. engage with key scholarship and contemporary public debates in media studies and science and technology studies on the social and political implications of emerging technologies;
4. evaluate the ethical, cultural, and political issues raised by technologies that capture, interpret, and manage human bodies and behaviour;
5. effectively communicate critical arguments and analyses of media technologies and embodied experience.

Workload

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours typically comprising a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study. Scheduled activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning and online engagement.

Student experience, not official rules. Nothing here changes what the Handbook says.