Master of Arts in Cultural Policy, Relations and Diplomacy

at Goldsmiths, University of London United Kingdom

This MA draws on urban sociology to explore the meaning of cities, urban life and culture.

The programme covers topics including the politics of gentrification, urban community, infrastructure and the intricacies of urban culture, alongside lectures on urban policy, food politics, poverty and migration.
You will also zoom out to consider the broader meaning of urban sociology and its ongoing contribution to social science. With over two-thirds of the global population destined to live in cities by 2050, there has never been a more important time to research and understand urban life.

Why study MA Sociology (Urban Studies) at Goldsmiths?
Critically engage with urban work

• The degree brings together social analysis, activism, and inventive research methods to critically engage with various dimensions of urban work – from policy-making, research and cultural interventions, to the management of social programmes and institutions.

Take a multi-disciplinary approach

• The MA is distinguished by a focus on experimental empirical research and covers the following disciplines: sociology, geography, anthropology, architecture, cultural studies, history, fine arts, media and communications.

Experience research-led teaching

• We use research-led teaching to explore the importance of sociological knowledge in understanding cities, urban economies, culture, politics and social justice.

Analyse and explore spaces and places

• You’ll analyse the organisation of contemporary cities, including the built environment, commerce, housing, culture, political and social infrastructures. You'll also explore how distributions of wealth, power and culture in spaces and places are constituted through political, material and social processes.

The MMus Popular Music builds upon our international reputation in the popular music field established by our ground-breaking undergraduate degree.

The Popular Music pathway is designed for music artists who are seeking to deepen their creative practice. We are songwriters and composers, producers and performers, engaged in making work that has relevance to real music scenes.

The programme centres the creative artist in a stimulating and supportive environment where critical enquiry, testing of songs/compositions/performance and experimentation in practice lead to a portfolio of new work.

The development of industry-relevant skills and key cultural-theoretical understandings is led by the needs of our own projects and foundational knowledge. Typically, students make records, explore performance and production methodologies, present shows, write and release new sets of songs/works. The programme offers the opportunity to extend the boundaries of artistry and critically reflect upon our own creativity in music.

You’ll also be able to extend your own practice through options in sonic and studio art, advanced music technology, exploration in audiovisual media, and ethnomusicology.

You’ll acquire graduate-level training in creative practice and subject-specific skills that could set you up for a career as a composer-performer or studio practitioner/producer, as well as other jobs in the popular music sector.

The MA Contemporary Art Theory is for those with a special interest in contemporary art, and an aptitude for theoretical work in the subject.

Why study MA Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths?

• This degree explores a range of theoretical perspectives that shape art and visual culture, and attitudes towards them in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
• You’ll be encouraged to conceptually and creatively explore the ways in which contemporary artistic practice and urgent theoretical and political matters intersect.
• You’ll expand your knowledge of contemporary artistic developments and deepen your understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of academic discourses on visual culture.
• The programme draws on the shifting fields of performance studies, art history, continental philosophy, ecology, feminist theory, queer theory, postcolonial/decolonial studies, and cultural studies in addressing the critical challenges posed by artistic practice, and you’ll be able to focus on an aspect that particularly interests you.
• You’ll take part in an assessed symposium, which provides you with a chance to present your dissertation topic at an early stage in order to define and progress your final project.

The MA Anthropology, Ecology and Global Justice is an exciting interdisciplinary programme that explores the contemporary crises of global inequality, climate change, and ecological breakdown, and equips you with the tools to respond.

Why study MA Anthropology, Ecology and Global Justice at Goldsmiths?

• Identify and grapple with the structural drivers of global inequality, climate change and ecological breakdown.
• Develop your understanding of these crises in historical perspective, with reference to patterns of colonial power and the formation of the capitalist world-system over 500 years.
• Work with insights from dependency theory; anti-colonial movements; degrowth; ecological economics; and post-development thought.
• Engage with classic texts in critical theory and ecological anthropology, with a focus on thinkers from the global South and Indigenous political ontology.
• Learn about concrete policy alternatives for the 21st century, drawing on the Department of Anthropology’s commitment to building a public anthropology.

This course will teach you how to use game design to develop aesthetic awareness, and create meaningful experiences. Students learn how to build compelling mechanics, craft innovative narratives, and develop immersive playable environments. Together, we will push games into new territories and intellectual domains.

As technologies have integrated into our everyday lives, elements from games have been woven into everything, from the way museums educate the public, to how scientists do cancer research. With the rise of mobile games, console creators no longer hold a monopoly on gaming platforms. This new-found freedom has resulted in an explosion of independent games – from putting players in immersive augmented worlds, to telling transformational personal narratives, these new experiences are redefining the rules of play.

Games are now part of everyday life. As a result, markets previously dominated by traditional media have begun to leverage the ability of games to tell stories, generate knowledge, and educate the public. An explosion of games and apps has created a new breed of entrepreneur, who uses small teams to create projects accessible to millions.

Why Study MA Independent Games Design at Goldsmiths?

• This MA has several informal focus areas students can choose from:
  • Independent games design and development
  • Mixed reality (XR), playful experiences, and installation design
  • Games for change
  • Machine learning and game user experiences
  • Using Creative Coding and Physical Computing
• You can build skills to start your own game design studio.
• You will be mentored on how to grow in your creative career.
• When you graduate, you can use game design in a wide range of fields both inside and outside the game industry, including independent games, XR studios, interactive film, advertising and media outlets, journalism, non-profits, education, design, and fine arts.
• You will be part of a supportive community of games creators who actively release titles, and have access to a large library of video games and board games.

The MA Promotional Media explores the impact of digital platformisation and automation on promotional professions, skills and techniques

You will explore the convergence between public relations, advertising, and marketing roles, as well as hybridised fields such as digital marketing, social media management and UX/UI design. This MA isn’t about studying ads or press coverage, but about becoming a professional who can cross-examine and critique the power dynamics between promotional professions, their client-organisations and today’s platformised media landscape.

At its core, this masters looks at how you can better serve society by improving communications across the promotional disciplines, and how public relations (PR), advertising, and marketing professionals can best develop within a challenging digital world. You’ll learn how to reflect on contemporary intellectual theories – including digital media studies, sociology, feminist theory and algorithmic culture – and apply them to workplace realities so you plan the next decade of your career.

Anthropology and sociology deal with human behaviours in their social context. This degree gives you a comprehensive grounding in these converging subjects, so you'll develop an understanding of their shared traditions and differences in perspective.

Why study BA Anthropology and Sociology at Goldsmiths?

• The degree is divided evenly between anthropology and sociology, so you'll get a solid grounding in both subjects.
• The dynamic nature of the degree means you’ll be able to bring an interdisciplinary angle to any problem, whether that’s arguing your perspective in an essay or coming up with novel solutions in your future career. Our graduates have gone on to work for the UN, World Bank, as well as various NGOs, law companies and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) consultancies.
• In your third year, you’ll be able to choose from a range of option modules, tailoring your learning in a way that suits your interests and aspirations. You might choose to explore topics like gender theory, environmental anthropology, or borders and migration.
• Our academics are responsible for actively shaping disciplines – they are pioneers in their fields, playing key roles in developing awareness of society and culture.

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 has never been a more exciting time to study media and communications. The digital age has transformed our experiences from shopping, to chatting to friends, to searching out information, to political activism. Our mediated worlds impact upon the rhythms and rituals of our daily lives changing the way we think about things, the way we create things, even the way we conceive of ourselves.

We encourage you to look at issues holistically. Alongside lectures and seminars we run workshops, screenings and cultural trips to encourage you to explore the role of the media in our lives as widely as possible – from the individual and organisational level to corporations, the state, and the market across both the public and private sectors.

This is a theory-driven MA, but you also have the opportunity to do a practice option in a range of areas including Journalism, Campaigns and Design, and the Screen School. Plus you get the chance to apply your knowledge to a subject that ignites your interest and do your own independent research as part of your dissertation. From how people mediate the self through body piercing to how we form intimate relationships through social media, your dissertation topic is entirely up to you.

If this degree were a film we’d be watching the beginning and the end. We think, like Walter Benjamin, that it’s in these moments – in their inception and their obsolescence  – that you see the utopian possibilities of a form or social movement.

Are we in the midst of a beginning? What can we learn now from visual culture’s past? What’s happening to our bodies when we play a video game? What are the gestures involved in everyday life? How do our bodies relate to technology?

These are the kinds of topics we analyse on this MA. We want to go beyond the borders of a traditional film studies degree so we go back to the beginning of film history to explore what it meant to fashion yourself in an image, or for a society to see itself in an image. Then we explore how images gain meaning now, and where they’re going next.