Centre for Film and Media Studies - UCT

30/09/2026

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29/09/2026

Be there!

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28/09/2026

When our students are happy, we are happy!

Loved receiving this great feedback from BA Hons student Nurah Fisher! Thank you Nurah, so glad these sessions have been such an inspiration!

26/09/2026

Out of your comfort zone in the best possible way!

Kai Reynolds ( Kai Reynolds ) graduated his BA Honours in Film Theory and Practice from the Centre for Film and Media Studies launching his freelance videography and filmmaking career. His Film, 'Before the Sold The Sky' was recently shown as part of the Venice Film Festival. It is so encouraging to see our graduates go on to do amazing things!

Whether you want to lead digital innovation, create documentary films, critique contemporary culture, write for online and offline audiences, or shape public policy, the Centre for Film and Media Studies' postgraduate degrees provide you with the critical tools and industry insights to succeed in a rapidly evolving global landscape.

Honours and MA Programmes at the UCT Centre for Film and Media Studies:
Media Studies,
Film and TV Studies,
Documentary Production,
Film and Media Theory and Practice, or
Political Communication.

Learn more by visiting our web site at https://humanities.uct.ac.za/cfms

Ready to Apply?
• Application Hub: Submit your online application directly through the UCT Online Admissions Portal. Learn more here: https://uct.ac.za/students/applications-apply/forms
• Applications close September 30!
• Get in Touch: For queries regarding curriculum structure, contact [email protected]

26/09/2026

Prof Tanja Bosch's latest article!

Professor Tanja Bosch recently co-authored an article about the political uses of WhatsApp with Marcelo Santos titled, 'Encrypted politics in the Global South: a decolonial systematic review of WhatsApp and political communication"

Abstract:
This article presents a systematic review of scholarly research on the political uses of WhatsApp, with a particular focus on studies conducted in or about the Global South. While research on digital politics has largely centered on open, platform-visible spaces such as Twitter and Facebook, WhatsApp constitutes a distinct political communication environment: encrypted, mobile-first, and shaped by vernacular practices that complicate visibility, data access, and governance. Drawing on a dataset of 239 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2016 and 2024 and indexed in Scopus, the review maps dominant themes, methodological approaches, geographic distributions, and patterns of authorship and collaboration in the field. The findings show that scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on misinformation, elections, and activism, often framing WhatsApp primarily through risk, harm, and regulation. In contrast, everyday political communication, participatory vernaculars, democratic affordances, and the mundane political uses of encrypted messaging remain comparatively underexplored. Methodologically, the literature is skewed toward surveys and content analysis, with limited use of ethnographic, critical, or computational approaches capable of engaging encrypted environments on their own terms. The review also reveals persistent structural asymmetries in knowledge production, including disparities in funding, institutional affiliation, collaboration patterns, language of publication, and epistemic authority, particularly between Global North institutions and Global South research contexts. Adopting a decolonial perspective, the article argues that the study of encrypted messaging platforms requires methodological and epistemological approaches attentive to opacity, infrastructural inequality, and locally grounded political practice. By theorizing the political affordances of encrypted com

25/09/2026

Finding meaning through cultural geometries

SEMINAR | Digital Methods and the Geometry of Meaning: The Epistemology of Word Embeddings and Projections

SPEAKERS: Natalie Alexander (PhD Computer Science, UCT, Google Fellowship) and Storm Sadovsky (MA Media Theory and Practice, DMS Lab, UCT, Lecturer)

Language has meaning. Language models convert natural language into numerical representations in a shared space, where position itself has meaning. This seminar aims to provide the necessary background in meaning representation and what it offers to humanities research.

📅 Tuesday, 29 September 2026
🕐 13h00
📍 CFMS Seminar Room, AC Jordan A205-A207

Natalie Alexander presents a foundational overview and brief history of representation learning, including what makes a representation useful. She also draws on her master’s research, which investigates text-to-code translation, completed during her internship at IBM Research Johannesburg, to illustrate strengths and weaknesses of representation learning in a real-world application.

Storm Sadovsky reports back from Cultural Geometries, a project developed at the Digital Methods Winter School at the University of Amsterdam in January 2026. Following Kozlowski, Taddy and Evans, the method builds an axis from two opposing sets of words and gives every other word a position along it. The project applies this to four manosphere subreddits, and then to 169,509 publicly geotagged South African posts from the 2020 lockdown, where words for state actors and words for community institutions settle in different regions of the same map.

One claim is consistent through this talk: an axis is authored rather than discovered, and deciding which contrast is worth measuring, and which words mark each end, is already an act of interpretation.

A practical workshop follows later in the term, where participants build on the foundations of natural language processing and build one of these projections themselves.

UCT

24/09/2026

Professors Griff Rollefson, Adam Haupt, Murray Forman and Dr Sina Nitzsche bring you the latest issue of Global Hip Hop Studies. It includes a piece on Palestinian hip hop. It's open access. Give it a read, pass it on to a friend, follow them on the socials. Tell Ed Sheeran.

Intellect is pleased to present Global Hip Hop Studies 7.1! The issue is fully free to access through the Diamond Open Access model.

Global Hip Hop Studies (GHHS) is a community-responsive academic journal that publishes research on contemporary as well as historical issues and debates surrounding hip hop music and culture around the world, twice annually. GHHS is Open Access through a Subscribe to Open (S2O) model and does not charge APCs or submission fees.

Including ‘Palestinian hip hop: Temporal subversion and the creation of futurities for Palestine’ by Felícia Marchi Beltrão Campos and ‘Market screamers or witches? The womanly face(s) of Russian and Ukrainian rap at the turn of the 2010s and 2020s’ by Francesca Lazzarin.


For more information about the journal and issue click here 👉
https://www.intellectbooks.com/global-hip-hop-studies

Access the issue via Discover 👉
https://intellectdiscover.com/content/journals/ghhs/7/1

Global Hip Hop Studies

23/09/2026

Learn how integrated all forms of digital media are

Zach Heynes ( Zach Heynes 🎞️ ) graduated his BA Honours in Media Theory and Pratcice from the Centre for Film and Media Studies with distinction. Zach was part of the Digital Media Sociology Lab ( Digital Media Sociology Lab ) and feom his time in our department learned how deeply intertwined all forms of media truly are. He is currently working as a multimedia freelancer, putting all of his theoretical and practical skills to good use!

Whether you want to lead digital innovation, create documentary films, critique contemporary culture, write for online and offline audiences, or shape public policy, the Centre for Film and Media Studies' postgraduate degrees provide you with the critical tools and industry insights to succeed in a rapidly evolving global landscape.

Honours and MA Programmes at the UCT Centre for Film and Media Studies:
Media Studies,
Film and TV Studies,
Documentary Production,
Film and Media Theory and Practice, or
Political Communication.

Learn more by visiting our web site at https://humanities.uct.ac.za/cfms

Ready to Apply?
• Application Hub: Submit your online application directly through the UCT Online Admissions Portal. Learn more here: https://uct.ac.za/students/applications-apply/forms
• Applications close September 30!
• Get in Touch: For queries regarding curriculum structure, contact [email protected]

22/09/2026

What are the different populist discourses discussing on X?

In this seminar, DMS Lab postdoctoral fellow Dr Nicola Davies-Laubscher explored how South African populist political parties and leaders across the ideological spectrum use X to articulate social and economic crises, deploy different linguistic registers and affective tones, and attribute blame to particular out-groups in their posts.

Abstract:
In South Africa’s fragmented and highly mediatised political landscape, social media platforms have become central sites for the performance of political identity, the mobilisation of affect, and the negotiation of belonging and exclusion. As legacy political institutions face declining levels of trust and legitimacy, platforms such as X increasingly function as spaces in which political authority is asserted, contested, and reassembled in real time through language, symbolism, and affective appeals. One important manifestation of this dynamic is populism, understood as a thin-centred ideology that constructs politics around a distinction between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ or perceived outsiders, and that can attach itself to both left- and right-wing ideological projects. This seminar examines how South African populist political parties and leaders across the ideological spectrum use X to articulate social and economic crises, deploy different linguistic registers and affective tones, and attribute blame to particular out-groups in their tweets.

21/09/2026

Another prominent guest for Crisis Communication in Africa!

In Friday, 18 September Mr. Andre Oberholzer joined Dr Ron Irwin's crisis communication class to talk about crisis management at the highest level of South African business. Mr Oberholzer joined Sappi Limited in 2001 as the Group Head for Corporate Affairs. In this role he has global responsibility for Sappi’s internal, external, corporate and business communication and reputation management programmes. In addition, he has line responsibility for Sappi’s Southern African communication function. Prior to joining Sappi, he worked for 14 years as a diplomat for South Africa, focused on multilateral affairs. It was wonderful hearing his perspective about how this very important South African company manages change and crisis.