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Monday 08:00 - 16:00 Tuesday 08:00 - 16:00 Wednesday 08:00 - 16:00 Thursday 08:00 - 16:00 Friday 08:00 - 16:00

Centre for Film and Media Studies - UCT

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Centre for Film and Media Studies - UCT

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Equipping students to tell stories: Fictional ones, true ones, and analytical ones. We also offer the MA and PhD by dissertation if we can supervise adequately.

* Media and writing and Film and television studies

We offer two majors in the Faculty of Humanities: in Media and Writing and in Film and Television Studies. Students may elect to major in either or both of these subjects.

* Film and Media Production Programme

Production training is offered in the sought-after Film and Media Production Programme. Students apply for admission to the production programme in their second year and can opt for the screen, print, radio, screen-writing or interactive media production streams. Short screen production courses may also be offered during the summer term (Dec/Jan).

* Postgraduate studies
We offer a range of taught postgraduate courses: an Honours in Film Theory and Practice; an Honours in Film Studies; an Honours/Masters in Media Theory and Practice; and an Honours/Masters in Political Communication. Many of these taught courses can be taken part-time as they are taught in the late afternoon. In most cases, students can include creative projects as part of the degree requirements. The department has some of the country's leading journalists and media practitioners amongs its postgraduates and is keen to develop its research strength by attracting post-doctoral students. Please contact Ursula Smith for more information.

* Research

The Centre tries to base much of its teaching on current research and on creative projects. (Staff research interests are set out under staff profiles on the Faculty and Administrative Staff page.) Students will be expected to develop creative attitudes and a spirit of critical inquiry.

30/10/2026

CFMS Students Shining Bright!

The Centre for Film and Media Studies is proud to have been so well-represented by their 3 honours students at the Harry Garuba Fellowship event.

Ahmad Johardien, Arwen Lehmann, and Bantu Mangcu each received one-year scholarships for this year.

They presented their work beautifully in an event that really impressed with the quality and diversity of research being undertaken in the Humanities at UCT.

30/10/2026

Coast-to-coast Hip Hop collaborations!

Prof Adam Haupt gave a guest lecture in Assoc Prof Gabriel Dattatreyan's Global Hip Hop course at NYU in the Dept of Anthropology's Culture and Media Programme during the week. Cross-institutional collaborations and learning form a fundamental part of advancing nuanced and holistic scholarship, and as a department we are always excited to be a part of these incredible opportunities!

26/10/2026

New book by Prof Tanja Bosch!

Prof Tanja Bosch's latest book, 'Calibrated Intimacies: Algorithms, Emotion, and the Soft Power of Apps' has just been launched and is ready to download! In this work, Prof Bosch explores how digital intimacies culminate in enmeshed concepts of care and control in everyday, platform-mediated social life.

You can find the open access ebook on Springer Nature (link in bio).

About this book:

This open access Palgrave Pivot examines how mobile apps organise emotional life, digital intimacy and everyday forms of platform power. Bringing platform studies and app studies into dialogue with digital sociology, feminist theory and the sociology of emotions, Tanja Bosch develops four connected concepts: affective legibility, calibrated intimacy, emotional governance and the soft power of apps.

Through critical autoethnography, interface analysis, reflective diaries, screenshots and platform data, the book follows embodied, ambient, precarious and domestic forms of app-based intimacy. It considers fitness tracking through Garmin Connect and Strava; recommendation and everyday accompaniment through Spotify, Instagram and Google Maps; uneven visibility and risk on Tinder and TikTok; and protective surveillance through Life360, smart-home systems and menstrual tracking apps. Across these settings, metrics, notifications, recommendations and feedback loops make feelings, bodies and relationships legible while shaping expectations of progress, care, safety and recognition.

Grounded in South African experience and attentive to majority-world infrastructures, the book develops concepts for understanding digital intimacy across platform societies. It shows how prepaid data, interrupted electricity, racialised inequality, gendered vulnerability and uneven infrastructures of safety expose assumptions of continuous connectivity in platform theory. It also traces how users negotiate platform power through selective visibility, opacity, refusal and disconnection. Calibrated Intimacies offers a new conceptual vocabulary for understanding how care and control become entangled in the ordinary infrastructures of app-based life.

20/10/2026

"Pessimism is a privilege for those who can afford to despair"

Prof Payal Arora presented her seminar, 'Reclaiming Hope in the Age of AI', to a packed house as part of the CFMS and DMS Lab Tuesday Seminar series.

Prof Arora spoke on the need for pragmatic approaches to AI that are hope-focussed rather than pessimistic. As academics this means dealing with the tensions around tech, offering not only critical but nuanced approaches to AI-infrastructure, and finding pragmatic pathways towards public infrastructure, policy, and research.

We are grateful to Prof Arora for giving us so much of her time, challenging us, and presenting hope-filled perspectives!

19/10/2026

🚀 Ship in the Sky Book Launch 🚀

🚨 CFMS Senior Lecturer Dr. Ron Irwin invites you to his MA supervisee's launch of her novel Ship in the Sky, written as part of her MA for the MA in Creative Writing. He will be in conversation with Ellen (Elle) Evans about her creative process and the journey that was involved in writing this book. Please join us and RSVP direct to The Book Lounge at [email protected] to reserve your place. 🥳 📚 🍷

Thursday 22 October, 17:30 for 18:00.

Centre for Film and Media Studies - UCT

13/10/2026

Video games as cultural text

Dr Danielle Becker presented a walkthrough of the South African video game 'Relooted', in hwr seminar titled 'Games as Cultural Text: Adapting the Walkthrough Method for the Critical Study of African Video Games'. In this research Dr Becker explored affordances of games and player agency in the representation of contested histories.

Researching games such as this falls under the new postgraduate Digital Games Research Stream at the CFMS and DMS Lab led by Prof Tanja Bosch and Dr Danielle Becker.

Abstract:
As video games become important sites for representing contested histories, media and cultural studies researchers need methods that account for what games depict and how they structure play, development and industry structure. This paper adapts the walkthrough method (Light, Burgess and Duguay, 2018), first developed for studying apps, for the critical analysis of video games with a look at the case study of Relooted (2026), a game by South African studio Nyamakop in which players retrieve African artifacts looted during colonialism from Western museums. Drawing on Consalvo and Dutton (2006), Stanfill (2015) and the Digital Game Analysis Protocol (Daneels et al., 2022), the paper considers how the method must change for games, including the researcher's dual role as player and analyst and the need for reflexive documentation. Applied to Relooted, the method shows how the game makes the fantasy of repatriation playable while its mechanics of acquisition and display risk reproducing colonial logics of possession. The paper argues that the adapted method offers a structured, reflexive way to analyse games as cultural texts within a broader sphere of questions about the decolonisation of culture and epistemology.

13/10/2026

Festschrift in honour of the Prof. Lis Lange.

Date: 19 October 2026
Time: 17h00-19h00
Venue: LT1, Neville Alexander (School of Education) Building, Lower Campus
RSVP: Please scan the code below

Registered attendees will receive a link to the digital version of the book.

09/10/2026

Ever thought about games as a cultural text?

Join the Centre for Film and Media Studies for a seminar presented by Dr Danielle Becker, titled 'Games as Cultural Text: Adapting the Walkthrough Method for the Critical Study of African Video Games', where she will explore how digital games are spaces for representing contested cultural histories.

Dr Becker and Prof Tanja Bosch are launching a postgraduate Digital Games Research Stream as part of the Centre for Film and Media Studies and the Digital Media Sociology lab from 2027, so if you would like to find out more information, be sure to join us on Tuesday!

📅 Tuesday, 13 October 2026
🕐 13h00 to 14H00
📍 CFMS Seminar Room, AC Jordan Building, A205-A207

Abstract:
As video games become important sites for representing contested histories, media and cultural studies researchers need methods that account for what games depict and how they structure play, development and industry structure. This paper adapts the walkthrough method (Light, Burgess and Duguay, 2018), first developed for studying apps, for the critical analysis of video games with a look at the case study of Relooted (2026), a game by South African studio Nyamakop in which players retrieve African artifacts looted during colonialism from Western museums. Drawing on Consalvo and Dutton (2006), Stanfill (2015) and the Digital Game Analysis Protocol (Daneels et al., 2022), the paper considers how the method must change for games, including the researcher's dual role as player and analyst and the need for reflexive documentation. Applied to Relooted, the method shows how the game makes the fantasy of repatriation playable while its mechanics of acquisition and display risk reproducing colonial logics of possession. The paper argues that the adapted method offers a structured, reflexive way to analyse games as cultural texts within a broader sphere of questions about the decolonisation of culture and epistemology.

About Dr Becker:
Dr. Danielle Becker is a lecturer at the Centre for Film and Media Studies. She holds an MA in Art History from the University of Manchester and a PhD in Media Studies (UCT) and has lectured at various institutions within the

07/10/2026

How does slow violence play out in South African news framing?

MA student at the CFMS and DMS Lab, Matthew Jordaan, presented his research on the slow violence inherent in news framing practices in select South African media. This research shows that the media unwittingly become a political battleground while obscuring the voice and visibility of vulnerable communities that live with the daily reality of Cape Town's sewage crisis.

Abstract:
Environmental pollution and water issues are universal problems; however, their impacts are often unevenly distributed, with vulnerable communities experiencing them disproportionately. The news media play a pivotal role in shaping economic, political, and social realities by framing events and giving greater salience to specific problems, interpretations, moral evaluations, or solutions. Through current journalistic practices that, intentionally or unintentionally, exclude or obscure the voices of vulnerable communities, South African news media contribute to inflicting a form of slow violence on communities whose experiences are already rendered invisible. News media often inadvertently contribute to environmental injustices and harmful impacts by obscuring the experiences of marginalised groups, and in doing so, perpetuate forms of slow violence. Slow violence is a problem of representation that can only be combated through imaginative approaches that amplify the voices of vulnerable groups, thereby promoting ethical treatment and solutions. By analysing the news framing of wastewater and sewage-related issues across high- and low-income communities in a cross-section of mainstream South African news media, this research argues that vulnerable communities’ voices and visibility are obscured, and are presented with less content to inform their decisions or represent their lived experiences, contributing to the effects of slow violence. This is in part due to the South African news media’s preference for spectacular or dramatic events over the incremental, gradual, slow violence experienced by vulnerable communities, which is manifest in greater salience and voice given to affluent, tourist-centric areas than to the human

07/10/2026

MilLi, CINIA, and Stellenbosch University will be hosting a free three day media literacy workshop run by a Namibian media literacy organisation at SU from 21-23 October for students. The idea of the workshop is to ’train the trainers’ to facilitate media literacy work in their respective communities or networks.

Scan the QR code below to apply!

Address

Arts Block, Upper Campus, University Of Cape Town, Rondebosch
Cape Town
7600

Opening Hours

Monday	08:00 - 16:00
Tuesday	08:00 - 16:00
Wednesday	08:00 - 16:00
Thursday	08:00 - 16:00
Friday	08:00 - 16:00

Telephone

+27216502852

Website

http://www.cfms.uct.ac.za/

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