This module will provide you with the fundamental principles of fashion business. Throughout this module, you'll explore the architecture of different global and local enterprise; examine their value creation process; consider their global expansion; understand supply chains as well as their marketing, business and product development; and consider ethics and sustainability within a business environment. Fundamentals of Fashion Business will equip you with an overview of how the global fashion industry operates, by understanding the key elements that constitute a successful enterprise. Through a series of lectures, seminars, workshops, and talks, you'll develop an ability to observe and describe the crucial functions of a fashion business. In addition, you'll build an informed awareness of how a fashion brand is constructed both over time, and across different markets, as well as how fashion products are designed, developed, distributed and communicated in competitive environments. By the end of this module, you'll have gained a deeper understanding of the strategic relations of different departments that support growth and expansion, with a particular focus on the development of new ranges and products, their branding and communication.
View the full module definitionThis is a critical and contextual studies module, which will introduce you to fashion history and contexts, and help you to understand how these issues inform and underpin fashion communication and branding more broadly. This module will provide you with the foundations of fashion research, critical thinking, and contextual studies, and will help you to articulate your ideas orally, visually, and through written text. The content will explore global approaches to fashion, and will help you to consider fashion through industry, style, dress, the body, as well as fashion business, media, communication, and branding. The module will help you to investigate the importance of fashion history in relation to key concepts such as gender, class, and sustainability, and help you to position fashion within a broader social and contextual framework. These concepts will serve as a basis for subsequent modules at levels 5 and 6, and will provide you with support for engaging with the fundamental skills for future critical and contextual studies modules. You'll be taught through lectures, seminars, and workshops, as well as field trips, study support, independent reading, and seminar activities. By the end of this module, you'll be able to understand and contextualise your own position as a creative and critical fashion researcher and practitioner, and be confident in employing critical thinking, research, and communication skills.
View the full module definitionThis module will equip you with the fundamental principles of fashion marketing. This module takes an explorative approach to the creation, development and delivery tactics and strategies around the omni-channel approach of contemporary fashion enterprise. Throughout this module, you'll be introduced to the foundational and central concepts of fashion marketing management, so that you're able to practice the varied aspects of marketing and contextualise its relations to communication and branding. Through a series of lectures, seminars, workshops, demonstrations, and case studies, you'll develop an informed awareness of the local and global fashion marketing environment. You'll become aware of the marketing and communications mix; and understand the process chain of concept, design, production, distribution, and marketing, as well as sales. You'll learn how to design consumer-centric marketing strategies, and you will be introduced to the role of marketing audits and marketing plans, in order to consider how brands define and identify a target market. By the end of this module, you'll have gained a broad perspective of the fashion industry, and will be able to establish the progression of contemporary fashion marketing within its cultural and sociological contexts, preparing you for further developments at Level 5 and beyond.
View the full module definitionThis module will allow you to understand, interrogate, and produce, the multitude of ways that fashion communication is used within industry and academic contexts. You'll be introduced to a range of techniques, styles, and structures of effective fashion communication through written and visual examples which you might engage with professionally. These might include: fiction pieces; news and journalism; advertising and marketing; travel writing; beauty and lifestyle writing; exhibitions and museums, runways and events; and business or policy reports. Throughout this module, you'll explore and analyse some of the key elements of effective written and visual fashion communication. You'll learn about these through lectures, seminars, tutorials, and workshops, which will support you to understand and produce different examples of fashion communication from various professional contexts. By the end of this module, you'll have developed your skills and confidence as a creative, agile, and innovative communicator. You'll also be able to understand the different contexts of fashion communication, and be confident in your practical skills as a fashion communicator, which you'll continue building upon in subsequent modules at Level 4 and Level 5.
View the full module definitionThis module introduces content creation for the web and social media through the production of photography, video, and interactive content. This module introduces new digital skills and software. It is designed to equip you with the technical vocabulary necessary for the description and analysis of web and social media material, and a working knowledge of industry-standard tools. You'll explore a variety of methods and analyse the effectiveness of different approaches and outcomes, supported via lectures, workshops, and seminars to enable you to create content for different social media platforms utilising a range of content creation software. Having built confidence in your new skills, you'll then go on to apply them by responding to projects designed to help you explore and demonstrate an understanding of effective content creation processes. These will be presented in a portfolio at the end of the trimester for assessment.
View the full module definitionEntering higher education is exciting; but it can also be a daunting experience. At ARU, we want all our students to make the most of the opportunities higher education provides, reach your potential, become lifelong learners and find fulfilling careers. However, we appreciate that the shift from secondary education, or a return to formal education is, in itself, quite a journey. This module is designed to ease that transition. You'll be enrolled on it as soon as you receive an offer from ARU so you can begin to learn about university life before your course starts. Through Into ARU, you'll explore a virtual land modelled around ARU values: Courage, Innovation, Community, Integrity, Responsibility, and Ambition. This innovative module is designed as a game, where you collect knowledge and complete mini tasks. You'll proceed at your own pace, though we you to have completed your Into ARU exploration by week 6. If for any reason you're unable to complete by that date, we'll signpost to existing services so that we can be confident that you are supported.
View the full module definitionThis module builds upon and enhances your skills in taking a strategic approach to analysing, developing, creating, and managing fashion marketing communication strategies, which you were introduced to at Level 4. This module will help you to establish the differences in the relationship between Marketing Communication and Integrated Communication, and will give you the tools needed to apply an advanced, practical framework for the design, implementation, and evaluation of strategic options for fashion enterprises, through the creation and delivery of holistic campaigns that are efficient, effective, and measurable. Through a series of lectures, seminars, workshops, and talks, you'll develop the ability to create and deliver strategic campaigns that offer a clear impact on your target audience and a return on investment (ROI). By the end of this module, you'll be able to examine, produce, and innovate processes of Marketing Communication, and be able to critically evaluate the development of a range of areas of integrated communication within a variety of contemporary fashion enterprises.
View the full module definitionYou'll develop core marketing principles in a retail and experiential context and specialist knowledge of the retail and experience industry, such as museums, galleries, and physical visitor experiences, all from a marketing perspective. You'll explore retail and experiential marketing's key issues such as retail mixes and strategies, the 'retail product', experiential elements of customer satisfaction, digital retailing, behaviour research and supply chain management and retail performance. You'll look at the synergy between retail marketing and the marketing of experiences focusing on the services area of marketing. The sustainable and ethical issues of retail and experience operations are considered including the growth of consumerism, use of consumer data, environmental impact and consumer attitudes to debt.
View the full module definitionThis module builds on the histories, contexts, and theories introduced at Level 4, and is designed to enable you to build a framework in which to situate yourself and your developing practice as a critical, creative practitioner. With the support of lectures, seminars, as well as independent reading and research, you will consider your work, as well as the work of other creative professionals, within broader historical, theoretical, and critically informed contexts. You'll also start to engage with the ethical considerations and responsibilities that are increasingly urgent for professionals working in the creative industries today and begin to develop an increasingly detailed theoretical knowledge of your discipline. You'll explore and examine critical issues and debates within a variety of creative practices, through examples that address, complicate and problematise key topics which you will analyse in depth. The curriculum content is responsive, meaning that learning activities are open and flexible, and function in relationship to current events, discourses, and emerging debates.
View the full module definitionIn this module you'll develop an understanding of different career paths in the creative industries. You'll explore different professional environments, business models and patterns of career progression relevant to creative practitioners. You'll explore contemporary developments in the creative industries and examine the role of the creative professional in fast-changing business environments. Through lectures, workshops, and seminars, you'll learn about self-employment and entrepreneurship, and you'll investigate the practical considerations involved in setting up a studio, brand or agency, and the significance of small-scale enterprises within the creative sector. Individual and group tutorials will address your personal career aspirations and help you to reflect on your individual qualities as a professional. You'll also identify which sectors of industry and which types of working environments may best suit your qualities and skills. You'll prepare for future work opportunities, a Placement Year, or progress directly into Level 6. By the end of this module, you'll have developed your professional aspirations, considered the career route you might take after graduating, and understand the steps to take to launch your career.
View the full module definitionFashion Communication, Promotion, and Events enables you to develop your creative communication skills across a range of media, including fashion photography and styling, art direction and graphics, to create brand campaigns that attract consumers and influencers to brands within the industry. This module capitalises on your previous knowledge and understanding of fashion brands, and will support you to develop the essential skills and techniques needed to develop your confidence in understanding and designing effective languages of visual culture in fashion promotion, and how to create and implement fashion promotion and events. By the end of this module your employability and enterprise skills will be enhanced through the learning undertaken and projects created. Lectures, seminars, workshops, and self-directed learning will help you to critically explore and challenge global perspectives on the different tools and techniques used by the fashion industry, both digital and analogue, for creating fashion narratives for different markets and audiences. By the end of this module, you will be able to undertake deeper, more focused analysis of the strategies and key success factors of a range of fashion promotion methods
Ruskin Modules are designed to prepare our students for a complex, challenging and changing future. These interdisciplinary modules provide the opportunity to further broaden your perspectives, develop your intellectual flexibility and creativity. You will work with others from different disciplines to enable you to reflect critically on the limitations of a single discipline to solve wider societal concerns. You will be supported to create meaningful connections across disciplines to apply new knowledge to tackle complex problems and key challenges. Ruskin Modules are designed to grow your confidence, seek and maximise opportunities to realise your potential to give you a distinctive edge and enhance your success in the workplace.
Contemporary media culture is primarily a culture of the digital, mediated through digital computers, mobile communication devices and networks. By now it is clear that social and networked media has transformed many of the ways that we communicate and connect, think, act, and feel in the 21st century. This module introduces you to the key themes and debates through which to understand digital culture, including the history of digital technologies and the internet. Themes discussed in the module include: the study of specific social media platforms and practices (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter); memes and virality; data visualisation and interface design; affective computing; Cyborgs, sentient robots, and AI; attention, distraction, and cognition in online cultures; GIF cultures; networked temporality; postdigital aesthetics; and other topics. You'll have the opportunity to engage directly with digital technologies and platforms, as well as to study and reflect on how they are used. The module seeks to promote digital literacy as well as foster critical thinking around digital media cultures and subjects.
View the full module definitionThe module aims to develop your skills in web-based journalism and online media production using a range of online media formats. Through a series of topic led discussions, reading, class exercises and small project briefs you will examine the language and practice of new/digital media and reflect on its uses. Online Journalism is presented as a distinct practice involving the use of a variety of writing styles from multimedia content to interactive and social media. The module includes examples from factual and non-factual content and addresses a range of topics including fake/false news, blogging, vlogging, the rise of the image driven web, implications of media sharing, online communities, citizen journalism, personal online profile management, digital storytelling, working with images, building a freelance career.
View the full module definitionThis module focuses on the idea of ‘cult’ in relation to film, television and wider media. It explores key themes and debates concerning the distinction between cult and mainstream media, and how cult media, along with its cultures and practices, influences and shapes trends within mainstream media. In this module, we’ll explore the historical development and varied applications of the term ‘cult’, while also addressing theories of quality, taste, and cultural capital in a media context. We’ll look at how cult media articulates and explores alternative conceptions of cultural identity (in terms of sexuality, gender, youth cultures and fan cultures). You'll consider how discourses such as text, industry and audience contribute to the formation of cult genres, with case studies that may include horror, sci-fi, fantasy, anime and comic book media. Throughout the module, you'll engage with theoretical concepts such as genre, media convergence, fan studies, taste, cultural capital and camp.
View the full module definitionKnowledge of a foreign language can be a major asset both in your academic and professional life. The Anglia Language Programme offers you the opportunity to study a foreign language as part of your course.
This module provides the opportunity for you to focus on a specialist direction within fashion communication and branding, with a view to producing a creative and industry-focused final outcome that draws on your own individual skills, experience, and interests. This module is a culmination of your studies up to this point and allows you to explore and develop your personal ideas, taking full advantage of the skills that you have acquired to date in the field of fashion communication, branding, and marketing. You'll develop these skills in the final outcomes, by displaying initiative, creative thinking, organisational skills and academic resilience. Project briefs may include opportunities to engage with industry-based projects such as individually commissioned work, national competitions and live projects. The outcomes of this module will enhance your employability and enterprise skills through the application of your independent practice. At the start of this module, you'll prepare a proposal for an independent project to be approved by your module tutor, which you'll then develop throughout the trimester through independent project management and professional practice. You'll demonstrate your understanding of the professional commercial context of a fashion communication and branding project for a target market and for industry. You'll also be encouraged to solve challenging problems using an advanced awareness of contemporary practice, sustainability in the creative industries, innovative approaches, as well as specialist software resources. Throughout this module, you'll focus on the practicalities of your coursework, professional visual, written and oral communication, as well as self-promotion within the fashion industry in preparation for employment or personal enterprise after graduation. Lectures, presentations, crits, and seminars will examine creative innovation and solutions within the contemporary fashion industry. Workshops and seminars on professional practice and portfolio developed are designed to provide appropriate preparation for the world of work and to explore opportunities for employment, networking, industry roles and self-employment within the fashion industry. This module also supports you in developing the skills to market both yourself and a CSA course to a public audience, in order to think about your career after graduation. An element of this module will be to work collaboratively with a CSA course throughout the module, in order to market, promote, communicate, brand, and develop both your own and your fellow students’ final degree outcomes through artefacts, events, publications (both digital and print), as well as a variety of other media and methods. Throughout this module, the varied teaching activities include one-to-one tutorials, critiques and presentations. You'll also take advantage of the various talks, seminars, lectures, events and exhibitions in London, Cambridge and elsewhere, which will inform your final project. Youll plan, initiate and manage your ongoing practice, working toward a range of final outcomes, with in-depth research and development focusing on the specific context within which you are working, with a high level of professional engagement and time management.
View the full module definitionThis module provides you with the tools to develop powerful ways to enact fashion for change. You'll understand how to engage with fashion to create change in the world. Through work-related experiences you will have the opportunity to partner with industry, hear from specialist speakers, as well as engage with activists, organisers and professional organisations, and as a result you'll develop an enhanced understanding of how to integrate your own specialist skills for changing the social, cultural, and political environments within which fashion operates. The module will be delivered through a series of lectures, workshops and tutorials, which will enhance and deepen your understanding and appreciation of the multiple ways in which fashion can be used within professional environments to enact change. During the module, you'll research, identify and partner with a collaborator, according to your own specialist interests, to develop a project around fashion for change. This could be with an independent or government organisation, a charity, an industry, an individual business owner, a museum, gallery or archive, an NGO, a social enterprise, an entrepreneur, or a commercial industry, to gain real-world experience of how to create fashion for change. This module is driven by you as students. You'll take a pro-active, collaborative role in the way this module is taught and delivered, and you;ll be able to inform the type of content according to your interests, experiences, and ambitions, with consultation with the module tutor. By the end of this module you'll be able to understand an independent, critically-engaged project that analyses the ways in which fashion can produce change. You'll have developed industry links and networks, and produced a substantial piece of work that can be developed in your Major Project and as you move forward in your chosen career after graduation.
View the full module definitionGaining work experience enhances employability, and work based learning offers you the chance to key gain industry knowledge, skills, contacts and networking opportunities. This module will give you the opportunity to explore a working environment in the industry that you have identified as relevant to your future career. The module will encourage self-managed learning, and serves to enhance your employability by developing communication, personal organisation, team-working, and networking skills and providing opportunities to apply those skills to real-world experiences thereby increasing self-reliance and confidence. The experience can be used as a basis for directing and focusing your career plans and can influence your final year projects. Lectures, group tutorials and seminars will explore skills analysis and reflective writing. You are required to identify, negotiate and agree with an employer (or employers) the terms of the placement or freelance work in association with a module tutor, to ensure that the module learning outcomes can be achieved. You will be given guidance and will be required to submit a placement/freelance registration form and risk assessments for approval by the module tutor. The work may be carried out in a variety of settings depending upon your requirements, areas of interest and availability of opportunities. The minimum period will be a minimum of 100 hours, and you can undertake more than one placement/freelance work for the module. You will also create a workplace diary that logs activity and supports an analysis of the learning achieved during your experience alongside evidence to support your application process. You are also asked to create a reflective report on your work experience. The report will include market and background information on the employer, market sector analysis, an outline your role(s) on the placement(s); academic and vocational analysis; transferable/employability and specialist skills analysis, knowledge and experience analysis; a final evaluation (impact on your final year and career aspirations); and will include copies of the submitted registration and risk assessments and other supporting appendices. Alongside contributing to module sessions and briefings, additional module support will be provided by the Anglia Ruskin University Employability Services through drop-in support and CV Surgery sessions and the Anglia Ruskin Enterprise Academy (AREA). You will also have access to a range of online employability information via the Careers and Employability Portal and AREA network.
View the full module definitionThe Research Project is intended to foster your independent study with the individual guidance of a supervisor. For this module, you will devise your own clearly defined project through independent research, with the support of supervisions, lectures, workshops, and field tips. Your project may reflect on, analyse, expand upon, or enhance, your own studio work and interests. Your project will be agreed upon in consultation with academic staff and your supervisor, to ensure suitability and sufficient academic rigour. Your Research Project is an extended piece of work which is intended to strengthen and build upon the work undertaken in your previous years of study. Your project will demonstrate a contribution to knowledge of your field, and show you are able to undertake prolonged and in-depth research that investigates, critically analyses and evaluates your area of study. Throughout the Trimester, you will develop an individual research topic with the support of your supervisor. You are encouraged to take a creative, critical approach to your subject, and there is support for a wide range of topics and approaches. Your project should build upon the links between theory and practice, and engage with critical issues that are relevant to your chosen topic. Throughout the module, you will draw on a range of sources appropriate to your research, that might include: primary and secondary sources; art and design work; archives; databases; visual and material culture; critical literature; multimedia output; your own studio practice; and industry-specific publication. There may be overlaps with your studio-based practice. However, the practice-based work included in the Research Project must academically contribute to the final Research Project in terms of the theoretical and methodological framework contextualising it. At the end of the year, you will have the opportunity to present your work as part of the CSA graduate showcase.
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