Digital Media, Culture and Africa and Black Diaspora

Digital media, culture, and Africa and Black Diaspora is a programme that combines critical engagement with digital technologies and their cultural impacts with specialist study of African and African-diasporic cultures, histories, and contemporary realities. Digital media and culture examines how the internet, social media, streaming, games, and other digital forms are reshaping communication, identity, politics, and everyday life, developing the critical frameworks needed to analyse digital environments as cultural spaces. Africa and Black Diaspora studies provides deep engagement with the cultures, intellectual traditions, and historical experiences of African peoples, from the continent to the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, and beyond.

This three-year, full-time programme at SOAS includes a foundation year that provides additional preparation before the main degree content. SOAS is uniquely positioned in British higher education to offer this combination, with world-leading expertise in African and diasporic studies alongside a sophisticated understanding of how digital media operate in global and postcolonial contexts. You will engage with how digital technologies are shaping African and diasporic cultural life and how African and Black creative practitioners are using digital platforms, and you will develop the critical vocabulary to analyse these intersections rigorously.

Graduates of this programme move into careers in the media and cultural sectors, digital communications, arts and cultural organisations, journalism, non-governmental organisations focused on Africa and the diaspora, and academic research. The combination of digital media expertise and specialist regional knowledge is particularly valuable in organisations that work across Africa and the Black Atlantic, and in media organisations committed to representing these communities and perspectives fully. Further postgraduate study in African studies, digital media, or cultural studies is a natural extension for those who wish to develop specialist expertise.