Anthropology and Media

Anthropology and media is a combination that brings two very different but complementary ways of understanding culture, communication, and society into productive dialogue. Anthropology examines human social life through sustained observation, ethnography, and cross-cultural comparison, asking how people make meaning, organise their relationships, and understand their world. Media studies examines the systems, technologies, and practices through which images, information, and stories are produced and circulated, and asks how media shapes and is shaped by the societies it operates within.

Together, the two disciplines allow you to investigate culture both as lived experience and as mediated representation.

At Goldsmiths College, this three-year full-time programme is taught within an institution with internationally recognised strength in both anthropology and media and communications, and with a critical, interdisciplinary tradition that makes it particularly well suited to this combination. Goldsmiths has a history of producing graduates who go on to careers in the creative industries, journalism, documentary, social research, and cultural work, and the combination of anthropological depth and media literacy that this degree develops is genuinely distinctive in that market.

You will study ethnographic methods and social theory, approaches to cross-cultural understanding, the history and theory of media, digital cultures and social media, journalism and documentary practice, and the political economy of media industries. The degree trains you to think critically about representation, about whose voices are heard and whose are absent, and to investigate those questions with the rigour that both anthropology and media studies demand.

Graduates in anthropology and media work in documentary filmmaking, journalism, broadcasting, publishing, social research, digital media, international development communications, the cultural sector, and advocacy organisations. The combination of fieldwork skills and media literacy is valued in roles that require both the ability to understand communities from the inside and to communicate about them to wider audiences. Postgraduate study in anthropology, media, social research, or documentary practice is a natural continuation.