ARTS 2004 - Arts Masterclass: Visiting International Academics

Persona Studies: the performance of identity through media Taught by world-leading persona studies researcher Prof. P. David Marshall, this course will give students an advanced understanding of the history, theory, practice, and impact of strategic identity performance and digital identity produced by celebrities, brands, politicians, and the broader public. Whereas many approaches to media and communication have tended to focus on the production of highly mediated and high quality forms of production that are generated by large entertainment industries - television, film, news, or public relations, for example - this course will be a study of the particular change in the structure of our forms of media and communication, in which the individual is privileged as one of the key centres of meaning contemporary online culture. Drawing on examples as diverse as arts, digital games, influencer culture, and law, the course will trace the ways that the performance of self has shifted in form and function in response to the decentralisation of media technology and production. Students will use research, methods and theory developed in the emerging field of Persona Studies to investigate this media communication transformation. The course is divided into 3 main parts. Part one, 'Mapping the historical constitution of self and collective in past and current forms of media and communication', will work from the historical to the contemporary in considering the mediated constitution of the self and the collective. Part two, 'The Mediatization and its Curation: Persona Online', explores the ways that we reproduce ourselves in online spaces, and the implications of those reproductions. Part three, 'Analysing persona', will introduce students to a variety of methods of analysis through case studies on gamers, artists, scientists, doctors/surgeons, lawyers, and emerging professions.