The module will seek to cover the main traditions and disciplinary sources for conceptualising and researching audience relations to a number of cultural and media practices, most notably: the mass communications tradition; the uses and gratifications tradition; the cultural studies tradition; the American reception studies tradition; sociological and historical approaches relating to the formation of taste cultures; and fan studies. Through these, a range of questions about the meanings of `audience' and `reception' will be addressed. The primary focus of the module will be on traditions of work that have informed in various ways audience and reception studies in media and cultural studies (with particular focus on film and television), along with consideration of the weaker but still important traditions of research around theatrical and performance audiences. However some attention will also be given to related works on other media (eg, popular literature and magazines, comic books, and the press), and students will be encouraged to draw on backgrounds in other fields (for instance literary studies) for parallel traditions of enquiry. The module will lead to a consideration of the changes introduced by the arrival of new media, where new kinds of `audiencing', centred on interaction, are involved.