The essay question is "Can Durkheim’s analysis of religious ritual contribute to the understanding of the social significance of contemporary media? If yes how?" and it’s a 5,000 word essay.

I attach two doc files;
one is for the basic essay plan with key concepts and reference lists and the other one is for further sources with some extra points. They need to be addressed in the essay as they are the key elements for this topic.

The main issue is obviously to answer to the question, so it needs to explain Durkheim’s approaches on Ritual and then focus on explaining how they help us to understand media process. It should not be only Durkheim addressed in this essay but also Turner and other theorists (specified in the doc files).

This is quite a theoretical essay but it still needs some examples to explain/support how it helps us. And direct quotes are slightly better than full of indirect quotes. A tip from the tutor was that it needs to show some level of comparison between the theorists’ concepts.