 My name is Dr Gareth Bentley, and I teach Critical Media and Communications in If-Cells, SOAS. I teach on FTPS media. I am a long-standing member of the If-Cells, SOAS department. I've been working here for 20 years. I did my master's degree at Glasgow University in media, did international relations, and I studied my PhD here in SOAS to finish that in 2013. I've always been interested in media and alienation. I've been studying it for at least half of my working life, and I now teach it. I did my PhD here at SOAS on journalistic agency and international foreign correspondence. The main topics on the module that I teach are theoretical but critical. From a theoretical perspective, I look at political, economic and structural Marxist approaches to the study of mass media, as well as contrasting that and that with pluralist approaches, psychoanalytic approaches to agency. What's really interesting about studying media today is that media is an extremely powerful structure and agency in the world. We are all structured by it, but we also have the ability to be active media participants as well, and that's what makes it so exciting. Some of the world's most powerful countries and corporations rely very heavily on media, and that's why I would say that studying media today is extremely important. Of course we study the most important media topics including news, advertising, film, television and the internet. I think it's a nice balance of theory and practice. What's amazing about studying media is that it's not just like a traditional subject, it's interdisciplinary, and it's a subject that we're all immersed in, we inhabit, we experience on an everyday basis. So it's got a nice combination of theory where you can test the theory against the practice, and if you like, come up with your own theory, such as complex agents. The purpose of the module is to teach critical media engagement and literacy and to encourage students to be active political participants. The best thing about this module is that it has a healthy balance of theory and practice. I argue that what makes media unique as a subject is that we're all interacting with it on a daily basis, especially in the context of digital media. Although the course has a certain amount of theory, we can excitingly apply the theory to our everyday experience and be creative rather than just passive receivers of media theory and information. The best thing for me about teaching this module is that over the 20 years or so that I've been teaching it, students often struggle at the beginning with the amount of theory, but by the end of the course or at least halfway through they often start coming up to me and saying how exciting and interesting and how they're able to connect the theory with their own experience and practice. And they literally say to me, I really see the media in a totally different way now and it's great.