This module asks you to engage with and critically reflect on areas of the creative and cultural industries in relation to your career aspirations and with consideration of issues of sustainability and EDI. You will undertake short projects in response to live briefs set by industry partners, study and apply industry-standard methods of project management and user testing. You will conduct your own research into aspects of industry and employment that interest you and relate to your professional development and identity as a creative technologist.
On this module, you will identify and develop research on an areas of the broad field of creative technologies industry that connects with your creative or vocational interests and trajectory. This could be an organisation in the creative and cultural sector, a mode of design or art production, NGOs and activism, etc. You will consider issues of ethics and sustainability in your chosen sector, and reflect on your own professional ambitions.
This is the culmination of your MA programme. It gives you the opportunity to carry out a sustained piece of writing independently, and bring to bear the ideas, skills, and insights that have been learned on the programme. You will do this under the guidance of a supervisor who will meet with you at three times during the project, and read a draft of the final work in time for a period of revision. The final submission will include extended discussion of a technique, critical issue, literary genre, or piece of research explored in the creative submission.
The Creative Writing Skills Workshop is the heart of the Creative Writing MA. It is a supportive, exacting space for mini-lectures on craft, guided group feedback, and individual mentoring. It is a two-semester module that runs weekly. All students on the MA Creative Writing take part in this workshop. The Workshop is based around close reading of a current draft of your work-in-progress, seeking to develop it in keeping with your aims as a writer. Through this, you will be encouraged to develop your awareness of the contemporary literary scene, and a deepen your understanding of genre. You will also be encouraged to develop skills in critical reading and listening to the work of your peers. There will be in-class writing prompts, focussed homework exercises. All students will meet with their tutor for one-on-one mentoring during the semester.
In this module you will explore principles of programming and creative production for innovative technological applications. Using accessible platforms including block-based coding, simple robotics and front-end web design you will work on exercises that will quickly develop your technical skills and allow you to experiment with creative ideas.
In this module you will build on your technical and creative practice in programming to explore the possibilities of applied and pervasive computing. Through workshops you will experiment with hardware and material systems that might include wearable tech, locative applications or simple robotic or Arduino systems. You will consider the social and ethical implications of creative technical systems and applications.
The module been designed for the purpose of promoting and developing creative thinking and problem solving (CTPS) skills and addresses the need for individuals and teams who can ‘think outside the box’, and apply fresh thinking to practical, ‘real world’ problems. The module programme begins by examining the nature of creativity and the characteristics of creative people. It then proceeds to look at what blocks us creatively, and strategies for preventing or breaking through such blocks. The concept of ‘lateral thinking’ will be introduced together with processes for applying lateral thinking to problems that require creative solutions. You will be introduced to a variety of creative problem-solving techniques and approaches to use as ‘tools’ for re-interpreting problems, finding solutions and generating ideas. Practical demonstrations, exercises and task simulations will enable you to gain a deeper knowledge and understanding of these creative tools and the capacity to re-apply them or facilitate their use to generate concepts and ideas.
Are you interested in helping young people study English? This module will introduce you to teaching creative writing in secondary schools by providing training in effective classroom management and guidance on designing lesson plans for studying fiction and poetry. With a fellow student on the course, you will go on a placement in a secondary school in Southampton where you will help pupils develop their creativity and their knowledge of literary culture. Throughout the module, you will be encouraged to reflect on the critical and practical problems you encounter teaching, and to consider how the National Curriculum supports creativity in the classroom.
The module will start by defining the concept of data analytics and demonstrating the processes in three steps: data pre-processing, data mining and post-processing. Next, we will zoom into the data mining step and distinguish three types of data mining: descriptive/diagnostic data analytics (e.g. clustering, association rules), predictive data analytics (e.g. regression and classification), and prescriptive data analytics. The module will then illustrate how machine learning models can be successfully used to develop different application areas with a focus on retail credit risk. The theoretical concepts will be illustrated using real-life application cases and the relevant software.
This module is structured in two parts: the foundations of data analytics and its applications in credit risk assessment. In the first part, students will be introduced to the core concepts and workflow of data analytics, with a focus on data pre-processing and data mining techniques. Key analytical methods covered include linear regression, classification techniques (such as logistic regression and decision trees), and clustering approaches (including K-means and hierarchical clustering). Essential modelling techniques—such as model selection, regularisation, and cross-validation—will also be explored to ensure robust and interpretable analysis. All practical work will be conducted using the Python programming language. The second part focuses on the application of these techniques to credit risk assessment, particularly in the context of retail credit scoring. It covers data preparation techniques such as cleaning, visualisation, standardisation, binning, and Weight of Evidence (WOE) transformation. Students will learn how to develop and evaluate credit scorecards, and how to measure and compare model performance using appropriate metrics. Ethical and sustainability considerations, such as fairness in model outcomes, will also be addressed. Real-world datasets and case studies will provide practical context throughout.
We often take it for granted that one job of the state is to catch and punish murderers, thieves, and fraudsters. But we shouldn’t take this for granted. Criminal punishment is one of the worse things the state is allowed to do to us, as it intentionally creates suffering and deprives people of their liberty. What, if anything, can justify such a practice? Many different justifications have been offered by philosophers and legal theorists. Some claim punishment justified because of its consequences, some on the grounds that criminals should get their just deserts. Others have claimed punishment is justified because of the message it communicates to the criminal or to wider society. Do any of these justifications work, or should the practice be abolished? And if the practice of criminal punishment is justified, what are the principles that determine who should get punished, and for what? Should we only punish those who cause harm, or is it justified to also punish those who merely attempt or conspire to commit crimes? Should we only punish people who harm others deliberately, or is it also legitimate to punish those who do so unawares? This module will look at questions like these, drawing on a combination of both philosophy and criminal law theory.
This course will span the period c.1688-c.1840, beginning with the reforms of the criminal code introduced following the Glorious Revolution, known as the ‘Bloody Code’, and concluding in the mid-nineteenth century with the introduction of the police force under Peel and the first acts removing capital punishment from felonies. You will be asked to consider both the nature and incidence of crime and whether historians’ research confirms contemporary perceptions of the lawlessness of society. You will be asked to address whether a poor man’s [and woman’s] system of justice operated in the eighteenth century or whether the criminal law solely acted as the ‘ideology’ of the ruling classes. You will be introduced to a wide range of sources for examining the history of crime and punishment, both qualitative and quantitative. A variety of legal material will be drawn upon; indictment and deposition records from Quarter Sessions, Assize Circuits, the Kings Bench and the very rich Old Bailey Sessions Papers and Newgate Calendar. Alongside this the writings of contemporaries such as Defoe, Fielding, Smollett will be considered. Criminal biographies, judges’ notebooks, newspapers, canting dictionaries and satirical images also provide interesting and informative sources.
This course will span the period c.1688-c.1840, beginning with the reforms of the criminal code introduced following the Glorious Revolution, known as the ‘Bloody Code’, and concluding in the mid-nineteenth century with the introduction of the police force under Peel and the first acts removing capital punishment from felonies. You will be asked to consider why the legal system moved away from capital punishment towards firstly the transportation and ultimately the imprisonment of felons and what led to the establishment of the police force. You will be introduced to a wide range of sources for examining the history of crime and punishment, both qualitative and quantitative. In looking at punishment, the ideas of Beccaria, Howard and Bentham will be examined in addition to prison and Home Office records. The material of Colquhoun and Peel form the basis of a consideration of early policing. A final component of the course will be to address modern representations of the history of crime and punishment through the watching of films and documentaries (ranging from Dick Turpin to Blackadder) to examine and deconstruct some of the myths that have grown up around the period and subject.
This module examines crime and criminal law in its broader cultural and historical context. It focuses on the strategies and techniques that lawyers, judges and commentators use to persuade others to their viewpoint, and that give us the fascinating stories, characters and ideas that make up criminal law. We look at the way that these stories and characters have been derived from outside of law: from fiction, drama and art, and which have in turn guided the development of our laws and key legal judgments. The module involves discussion of certain offences, e.g. murder, manslaughter, piracy, rape, as well as important broader issues, e.g. criminal justice as a spectacle (what does modern justice owe to visual art and theatrical performance?); 'hot' and 'cold'- blooded killing (what is the moral and legal distinction?); justice and revenge (what's the difference?); the role of metaphors such as the 'scales of justice' (what does criminal justice owe to ancient practices of trade and commerce?).
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Crime detection is prolific on television; a topic discussed across news and current affairs programming, documentaries, reality TV and, not the least, numerous crime dramas. This module examines different type of crime investigation narratives on television, providing you with tools for analysing the dynamic and contested cultural roles of crime TV. We will engage with diverse theoretical approaches to the relationship between crime detection and television, enabling your active participation in both popular and academic debates on this topic. In order to unpick the diverse cultural meanings that saturate and circulate different programmes, we will study their wider socio-historical contexts as well as cultural reception. Doing so, we pay particular attention to the specific aesthetic forms, narrative structures, figures, settings and themes that characterises televisual portrayals of different crime investigation practices, but we also consider genre linkages to literature, radio, cinema, and digital culture. Approaching the study of crime TV from the unique perspectives of film and television studies, this module will also highlight television’s contributions to the wider discursive construction of moving-image creation as a key technology of detection in modern culture.
