The Lab Themes

The big outcome today are the lab themes. The themes are set, the description still in draft mode.

(insert drumroll)The Themes(/remove drumroll)

Advocacy Lab
The Advocacy Lab provides an opportunity for you to engage with real world problems in the context of community engagement and social issues. You will work in interdisciplinary teams to investigate problems and issues which matter to communities. The lab is an opportunity to facilitate your engagement with sustainable and responsible practice in the communication and media industries.

Critical and creative thinking will be used to enhance your disciplinary knowledge. This course offers you a deep level of engagement with social problems; you may work with community groups, not-for-profit organizations, or industry on real-world problems.

This is a lab where you are able to use your media and communication abilities to transform your, and others, understanding of ethical questions to empower and make a difference.

Slow Lab
The Slow Lab provides an opportunity for you to undertake speculative research and making around the concept of the ‘slow’. You will work in interdisciplinary teams to define, sketch, elaborate upon, unpack and describe how the recent idea of the ‘slow’ may be relevant to media and communication in terms of theory and practice.

This concept of the slow has arisen in reaction to the increased velocity and intensification of contemporary media, communication, manufacturing and consumption. It is concerned with sustainability and the romantic restoration of the ‘human’ within what some characterise as the ‘in’ or ‘posthuman’ of a contemporary knowledge society. You will interrogate the concept of slowness in this lab.

This is a lab where the slow movement will be appropriated to think about slow media, slow technology, and slow communication. You will use your media and communication abilities to consider the role and relevance of the slow in relation to a problem of your choice.

UnFiction Lab
The UnFiction Lab provides a space to investigate, critique and undertake studies in non fiction theory, practice and form. You will work in interdisciplinary teams to deepen your understanding of key issues in factual, documentary and nonfiction research. These issues may include the relation of fiction to nonfiction, the place of creativity and invention in nonfiction, the ethics of documentary, and asks where nonfiction occurs and why.