Cultural Studies - MSc

We will encourage and enable your investigations into the city as a site of cultural production and contestation, places of memory and cultures of forgetting, questions of identity and representation and urban cultural and semiotic landscapes.

Transdisciplinary and critical comparative approaches are key and we invite students from varied academic backgrounds and cultural traditions. Our approach is research-led and exploratory and we provide studio-style learning and critical reviews.

You will gain critical, analytical, interpretative and representational skills that are transferable to both academic and other professional settings. You will have the chance to critically engage with current cultural debates that frame the understanding of visual and spatial practices, design and everyday cultures, and the relationships between text and image, place and representation.

Throughout the programme, your learning will be supported by guest seminars and critical reviews, film screenings, exhibitions, workshops, field trips and events and directed towards events hosted by the University and other cultural institutions within the city.

• Innovative learning in which theoretically grounded courses are taught through studio-style learning and critical reviews.
• Distinctive focus on the city and visuality, visual knowledges and critical attention to modalities and strategies of representation and display. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we look at contemporary visual and spatial phenomena and forms of cultural production and critique.
• Curatorial projects and creative, collaborative experimentation with forms of critical writing and modes of presentation of research. We support exhibition projects and innovative events that involve non-academic participants and audiences.
• Fieldwork is centred on exhibitions and art projects and a one week-long themed urban field trip that explores techniques of site investigation and research methodologies and experiments with modes of documentation, writing and presentation of research material.
• Publishing as both a subject of critique and a mode of research dissemination. You will be encouraged to actively contribute to research culture and cultural criticism and seek ways of transforming your academic work into publications: collaborative book-projects, articles in academic and professional journals, exhibition reviews and magazine articles, online journals and blogs.