Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Drama and Theatre Arts

at Goldsmiths, University of London United Kingdom

This unique international laboratory programme brings diverse individuals into collaborative research, acknowledging the challenges of creating original, performer-driven theatre in today's complex, globalised culture.

Why study MA Performance Making at Goldsmiths?

• Studying at Goldsmiths gives you access to all the cultural stimulus that London offers, allowing you to enhance your practice and develop compositional, critical, technical and management skills and strategies for forging independent and self-motivated careers. Our graduates work as practitioners, teachers and cultural leaders worldwide.
• The Masters will help you conceive, research, construct and deliver your ideas, and articulate what motivates them. You will study with distinguished international artists and scholars. The emphasis throughout will be on encouraging collaboration across disciplines and cultures, and on contextualising practice within its social, political and architectural environment.
• You’ll undertake physical training, scenographic/environmental exploration, and hands-on introduction to technologies (lighting, video and sound), to support your composition and artistic experimentation. You will identify your own practice within the historical and contemporary field, and write critically and creatively.

This unique programme introduces you to the variety of ways in which brands are developed and used, and helps you to understand how the growth of branding – in business, but also in politics, government, sport and culture – has changed the societies we live in.

Why study MA Brands, Communication and Culture at Goldsmiths?

• This MA is not a conventional branding or marketing degree – it offers a unique, theory-based approach to the study of brands, reflected in topics taught on our compulsory modules such as gender, colonial history and branding, social media and open source cultures, and geodemographics and new forms of social classification.
• You’ll gain a comprehensive understanding of the history and development of brands and branding, and their relationship to contemporary forms of communication and culture. You'll also ask what happens when the state uses branding techniques to communicate with its citizens.
• You’ll also gain in-depth knowledge of the social, political and economic backdrop against which branding has become so important, and an understanding of the key themes and debates surrounding its development and use, including the relationship between brands and intellectual property, and the extent to which branding promotes or inhibits openness and transparency within organisations.
• You’ll improve your ability to think critically and creatively about contemporary communications and cultural practices. When you have completed the programme you will be able to analyse contemporary communications, make judgments about their significance, and be able to thoughtfully contribute to contemporary communications.

On this International Relations degree, you will engage with a variety of approaches essential to understanding contemporary world politics. You will learn the foundations of classic International Relations, and will also be challenged with a wealth of critical and unorthodox approaches.

You will learn to move beyond the standard canon of textbook theories, and to study International Relations using an interdisciplinary approach, paying particular attention to the complex relationship between power, culture, and identity.

Instead of replicating state-centred and Eurocentric caricatures of international politics, the programme also offers a broad view of 'the international', which explores alternative ways of experiencing the world. This will help you develop your own critical analysis of crucial questions of power, conflict, and justice.

Computation consists of all the changes brought about by digital technology. Art is an open set of ways of acting inventively in culture. Mixing the two together in a systematic way gives us computational art. This is a very open field, and one that is set to expand enormously in the coming years. It is where the most exciting developments in technology and in culture can already be found. This degree will place you in the middle of this fast-evolving context.

What will I learn?

• This degree develops your arts practice through the expressive world of creative computation. Over a year (full-time) or two years (part-time) you will develop your artistic work and thinking through the challenge of developing a series of projects for public exhibition which will explore the technological and cultural ramifications of computation.
• You will learn the fundamentals of programming and how to apply this knowledge expressively. You will work with popular open source programming environments such as Processing, OpenFrameworks, P5.js and Arduino, and will learn how to program in languages such as Java, Javascript and C++.
• Since computational artworks don’t necessarily involve computers and screens, we also encourage students to produce works across a diverse range of media. Supported by studio technicians in state-of-the-art facilities, our students are producing works using tools such as 3D printers, laser cutters, robotics, wearable technologies, paint, sculpture and textiles.

Working from a materially diverse basis, this programme engages with a range of empirical, aesthetic, conceptual and material issues that traverse and exceed both 'art' and ‘politics’ to speak with our current contemporaneity.

Why study MA Art and Politics at Goldsmiths?

• Explore practices and issues related to our current contemporaneity in terms of public space, democracy, equality, participation, states of exception, collectivity, performance and justice.
• Examine a range of material practices and strategies which, in the encounter between art and politics, play out in numerous forms and very different kinds of social spaces.
• Develop frameworks and spaces that are mixed and mobile, and which can operate in trans-disciplinary settings. You'll join students from a range of backgrounds and disciplines, meaning that the political character of both theory and material practice take on renewed vigour and urgency.
• Investigate the potential of art, material practice and trans-disciplinarity in times of political and cultural crisis. You will have the opportunity to interrogate the relationship between material practices and theoretical work, to work within constraints but also within the interstices of artistic, cultural, social and political practices.
• Choose from a range of option modules that encourage you to work across areas of particular interest to you including practice-based Individual and Group project work, the politics of space, gender politics and human rights.

There is a growth in the number of entrepreneurs starting businesses with social and environmental purposes. This exciting MA will enable you to develop a critical understanding of and practical insights into modes of social enterprise.

There is an urgent need for talented individuals who can design novel solutions to our most profound societal challenges.

This international MA provides practical and sociological tools to individuals motivated to develop alternative economic practices and frameworks to meet such challenges. These might include (but are not limited to) social enterprises, collaborative innovation networks, hubs, digital platforms, support intermediaries and/or policy proposals.

Benefitting from the MA’s timely educational content as well as from its firm roots in London’s rich networks, our students go on to become thought leaders in the burgeoning social innovation field, advancing it in a creative fashion from their chosen angle. Past graduates have gone on to create their own social enterprises or to work for prestigious organisations such as the Yunus Institute and Social Enterprise UK, while some have elected to carry out advanced research into social innovation.

This programme is an innovative and interdisciplinary exploration into how social, cultural, and political institutions, decisions, and events have shaped societies and nations around the world.

There is much cross-over to explore between the disciplines of History and Politics. The BA History with Politics at Goldsmiths combines and synthesises methods and concepts from both disciplines to inform and stimulate study. Many History modules, such as those dealing with revolutions, ideas, and social movements, are, of course, centrally connected to politics. Meanwhile, Politics modules on feminism and anarchism are strongly informed by the historical precedents of modern movements and ideologies.

Combine the study of History and Politics

• Rather than focusing on chronology or strict historical periods, combining History and Politics encourages and facilitates explorations and analyses of key issues, controversies, themes, and debates. The study, analysis, and understanding of the past are as important today as they have ever been. Understanding past societies fosters emotional intelligence and allows us to appreciate the diversity and adaptability of human life. Understanding our pasts can help us to shape our futures in more intelligent, insightful, and compassionate ways.
• By combining the two disciplines, you will be able to peel back the formal veneer of political parties and institutions to reveal the major ideological, economic, social, and cultural conflicts which must be investigated to understand our world. This programme crosses boundaries between the traditional and the more radical understandings of political phenomena. Politics is much more than simply what happens in parliaments, it pervades the whole of society, domestically and internationally.

Our MA Culture Industry will allow you to explore the interface between contemporary economics and culture, from the scale of a start-up or artwork, to that of governmental policy, a city, or the global marketplace. It will also provide the approaches in critical and theoretical analysis that will enable you to conduct further academic research in areas ranging from art history, to urban studies and critical theory.

In distinction from postgraduate programmes in the Cultural and Creative Industries, this Master’s programme focuses on the paradoxes and potentials of the relationship between culture and capitalism evoked by the term ‘culture industry’.

Taking full advantage of the UK’s leading role in the creative industries, and London’s status as a world city, this course creates opportunities for you to:

• Make projects
• Go on field trips
• Do placements
• Carry out academic learning and research
• Meet diverse creative practitioners and theorists

This will give you first-hand experience of the fast moving creative economy, as well as giving you indispensable skills in understanding that economy from a cultural, philosophical and political standpoint. By combining theoretical and practical approaches to study, the course will not only help you to prepare for a career in the cultural sector, but also to engage with it imaginatively, critically and tactically.

Our English degree gives you the opportunity to develop the critical and verbal skills needed for confident, effective reading of literary texts and criticism.

It develops your core skills in analytical and imaginative reading and writing and places a strong emphasis on social and cultural diversity. The flexible programme allows you to choose topics related to American literature and culture, comparisons of literature across different cultures and art forms (also known as Comparative Literature), and study all aspects of language use in linguistics modules. Throughout, your literary studies will be complemented by a series of lectures and activity-based seminars which will help you develop and consolidate your practical academic skills and research techniques.  

Why study BA English at Goldsmiths?

• We’re not just focused on the classics. You’ll leave us with a solid understanding of key literary texts, but you’ll also have the chance to look at less traditional subjects including surrealism, Hollywood cinema, fairy tales, and writing by migrants and refugees.
• We’re inclusive. We embrace literature from a variety of cultures, giving you the chance to study writing from America, Europe and the Caribbean.
• We also offer modules on the study of authentic language use in a range of everyday, professional and media communication, exploring topics such as language and gender, raciolinguistics, digital media discourse, language learning and teaching, attitudes to (non)standard language use, political correctness and the linguistic construction of identities. Watch a short discussion between our linguists.
• Our option modules offer a historical view of writing and also let you specialise in areas of interest, including thematic and genre-based approaches to literature, comparative analysis, and literary theory.

This pioneering Masters offers interdisciplinary perspectives on international performance, and aims to understand performance in relation to the culture to which it contributes.

Why study MA Performance and Culture at Goldsmiths?

• The programme takes in diverse forms of theatre, including multicultural and street theatre, and practices such as:
  • Performance art
  • Dance
  • Ritual
  • Site-specific performance
  • A wide range of hybrid forms
• You will explore performance as a sociocultural process, using analytical principles from sociology, cultural theory, anthropology, history, philosophy, politics and theatre and performance.
• We have numerous links, locally and internationally, with a wide variety of theatres, companies and performers, all of which enhance your research possibilities.
• The programme will provide you with the appropriate categories of thought and methodological procedures for analysing, understanding and explaining performance processes as sociocultural practices: how and why they emerge from specific sociocultural and historical time place and space.