Digital Media, Culture and Social Anthropology

Digital media, culture, and social anthropology brings together three disciplines that, between them, provide a remarkably complete lens for understanding contemporary social life. Digital media studies examines how platforms, algorithms, and networked communication shape culture, politics, and identity. Cultural studies interrogates the meanings, practices, and power relations embedded in media, texts, and everyday life.

Social anthropology investigates how human societies organise themselves, how culture is produced and transmitted, and what people's lives look like from the inside. Together, these approaches give you both the critical tools to analyse media and technology and the ethnographic sensibility to understand them in their social and cultural contexts.

At the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, this three-year full-time degree carries the distinctive character of SOAS, an institution whose expertise lies in the study of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. This gives the degree a genuinely global orientation, drawing on case studies and research traditions that extend well beyond the Western-centred perspective of many media and cultural studies programmes. The programme includes a foundation year, providing a supported introduction to the disciplines before the full degree begins.

You will study digital cultures, media theory, ethnographic methods, social and cultural theory, and anthropological approaches to understanding society and communication.

You will develop the capacity to think critically about media systems, to conduct qualitative research, and to engage with cultures and societies that differ significantly from your own, capacities that are increasingly valuable in a globally connected professional world.

Graduates move into careers in the media, communications, international development, the NGO and third sector, policy, research, journalism, and cultural organisations. Postgraduate study in anthropology, media studies, development studies, or area studies is a natural pathway for those who want to deepen their expertise.