Master of Arts in Media and Cultural Studies

at Birmingham City University - City Centre Campus United Kingdom

Looking for a business marketing course in Birmingham? Our BA (Hons) Business with Marketing degree offers the opportunity to take a year-long sandwich placement in industry.

The course upholds the values of the principles for responsible management education (PRME) defined by the United Nation. It aims to educate future business leaders for a sustainable future.

Our course will equip you with the practical skills and enterprising attributes, enabling you to make an immediate impact on business organisations. You will be able to develop a wide range of cognitive and intellectual skills, together with competencies specific to business and enterprise.

You will be working with academics with specialist knowledge and industry practitioners while studying with us. Our supportive and empowering learning environment will further facilitate your learning journey by providing additional through learning mentors and study buddies. The course will provide you with the opportunity to develop specialist marketing and business skills, and key transferable skills, all of which will help you stand out when it comes to securing employment.

Do you want to learn how to transform spaces? This innovative Interior Architecture and Design degree course covers a broad range of design possibilities, ranging from reordering to transforming space. Situated within Birmingham School of Architecture and Design, our course will provide you with the facilities and education that you’ll need to succeed within the industry, as well as offering excellent opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and networking with industry partners.

What's covered in this course?

Our BA (Hons) Interior Architecture and Design course provides you with the skills to transform or give new life to spaces, as well as teaching you how to plan and design creative interiors.

You will look at hierarchies and relationships between different spaces, describing these relationships in new ways. This industry-aligned degree course offers you the opportunity to study and practise the adaption and re-use of space within new and existing building stock, while also addressing aesthetics, human needs, materiality and more, as well as the ephemeral qualities of atmosphere, character, colour, light and shade.

Alongside the regeneration of existing space, you will discover new interior environments, in a broad range of industry sectors, such as hospitality, retail, leisure and residential, using an experimental approach to design to develop the refined techniques required for effective space planning, conceptual design, development, visualisation and the refurbishment of space.

If you want to study experimental performance in the UK, with or without a focus on sound, then these are the ideal courses for you.

Designed for emerging arts practitioners, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire’s brand new MMus courses in Experimental Performance provide you with a unique opportunity to undertake independent artistic projects in a fully supportive environment.

Available for the first time in September 2019, they enable practitioners from a variety of disciplines (including, but not limited to, instrumental/vocal performance, composition, dance, choreography, theatre, visual and performance art, creative writing) to come together with likeminded people.  This course doesn’t ask you to justify yourself against the background of tradition, but gives you agency. People from every discipline are treated equally with emphasis placed on rigorous conceptual thought and idea-development. By focusing on these non-discipline-specific aspects of performance you will contribute to a collaborative, discursive and interdisciplinary working environment.

The core of your study will be formed by your own artistic ideas, which are developed, through research and dialogue, into professional practical projects.

You will be allocated a mentoring team comprising a personal tutor who has experience in collaborative and conceptual approaches alongside additional specialist support according to your individual needs. Your mentoring team is there to help you realise your ideas into fully developed performances in the best possible way.

Black Studies is ground-breaking because it puts the experiences, perspectives and contributions of African and the African diaspora at the very heart of university education.

More importantly the aim of the subject is to break down traditional barriers and apply the work we do on campus to improving the conditions facing those who live off campus. In creating the BA (Hons) Black Studies (Criminal Justice) routeway we have taken the strengths of the Black Studies program and directly applied them to one of the most significant problems facing Black communities.

In Britain, Black people are more likely to be subject to stop and search, arrested, charged, given a prison sentence and even to die in suspicious circumstances after police contact. The situation is particularly bad for young people, where ethnic minorities represent half of all those held in young offenders institutions. None of this is new and there have been decades of campaigns and protests around the injustices in the system. The aim of this degree is to provide the context to understand the issues as well as the tools and experience to work to remedy these major social problems.

You will take Black Studies modules, which explore the history, politics and experience of Black communities as well as examining the issues in society that produce such stark inequalities. Alongside these modules, you will study Criminology-specific modules that explore the basis of, and issues with, the criminal justice system.

You will gain experience of the criminal justice system in the second-year placement. You will be encouraged and supported to find your own placement, however the course team is committed to ensuring all students have an appropriate placement. You will also be encouraged to draw on your learning and experiences to create a final year project that is applied to the real-world context.

Digital Transformation is an innovative MSc degree course designed for those who want to pursue careers as managers and leaders in implementing technology-based information systems solutions and managing technological transformation within organisations.

What's covered in this course?

Digital Transformation Specialists must understand the complex relationships between people, information, processes and technology in order to support business with digital development. The course will equip you with the requisite multi-dimensional skillset necessary to help organisations unleash their potential to thrive in an inclusive digital society aligned with the innovative application of digital technology to transform organisations, industries and societies.

You will learn:

• Strategic IS Planning: How to develop a strategic IS/IT plan that is aligned to the strategic information needs of the business.
• Enterprise Systems: How to manage the business processes to support the organisation to gain competitive advantage, improve performance, reduce operational cost, implement efficient business processes, and improve real-time decision-making capabilities via Enterprise Systems (ES), which incorporates ERP, CRM, SCM, and so forth.
• Technology Optimisation and Integration: How to analyse the current business IT status, plan technology solutions and develop a roadmap for legacy systems migration.
• Digital Change Management: How to address the socio-technology challenges of leveraging value from the IS/IT in the digital society using agile methods. This involves making sense of the business requirements in order to ensure the end products will solve the business problem.
• Business Intelligence and Technology Entrepreneurship: How to manage and apply a range of visualisation tools to analyse and make business sense of data lakes, and to exploit data to construct informed business decisions.
• Principles of Project Management: How to deliver strategic value within an organisation and ensure the project (or business solution) is completed on time, within budget, within scope and at the desired performance level.
• Individual Master’s Project: A practice-based module working in collaboration with an organization or research-based project within the Socio-Technical Systems Research group to apply multi-disciplinary skills to design innovative solutions to the challenges of digital transformation.

Our postgraduate courses in Music Technology provide an opportunity for composers and composer-performers to experiment with and develop expertise in the creative application of established and new music technologies.

Royal Birmingham Conservatoire is an internationally important centre for performance and composition with technology, especially live electronics. An example of its work is the highly acclaimed Integra Live project, an application that makes it easy to use interactive audio processing to create new music.

As you might expect, in this context, our postgraduate courses in Music Technology provide an exciting opportunity for composers and composer-performers to experiment with and develop expertise in the creative application of established and new music technologies.

Our Master's program gives you the tools and techniques necessary to undertake research at the forefront of your chosen gemmological area.

Based in custom-designed facilities within Birmingham’s Assay Office, in the historic Jewellery Quarter, you will have access to equipment more commonly seen in research laboratories, and, through our network of contacts, potential access to a greater range of tools.

What's covered in this course?

This course encourages you to investigate gemmological questions and theories, by way of literature-based peer-reviewed research and practical testing.

You'll be supported throughout your studies by our experienced tutors, with a wealth of knowledge and experience between them - all recognised industry professionals.

As well as learning important skills for your future career development from our practical modules, you’ll learn valuable research techniques and analytical skills, which will stand you in good stead with future potential employers.

You will also benefit from the extensive network of gemmologists through our contacts in various organisations across the globe, including laboratories, museum, auction houses and various other related sectors.

Shoot into the film industry with the world's first Master’s degree in film distribution and marketing. Available as a one-year intensive full-time course,  our MA Film Distribution and Marketing has been designed with industry to reflect the growing need for entrepreneurial producers, marketers and distribution experts.

Graduates from this course have secured roles with companies such as Koch Media (Germany), Kaleidoscope Films (UK), GFM Films (UK) and Red Arrow Media (Europe). You will have an opportunity to experience work placements during the course with previous placements including major industry players such as FilmNation (US) and Sony Picture Classics (US).

Our diverse and exciting BA Graphic Communication degree course is a must for anyone passionate about graphic design and looking to pursue a career in the creative industries.

Thanks to established links with major advertising agencies, publishing houses and interactive design groups, the course is structured to provide you with industry-relevant skills in the fields of communication, branding, strategy, creative advertising and design, in still and moving images, both in print and online.

Lecturers are well placed to give commercially relevant guidance based on current trends and historical contexts.

Collaboration with other disciplines is encouraged, developing new ideas and connections with subjects such as illustration, photography and film and animation.

Our BA (Hons) Garment Technology degree course nurtures and encourages you to develop a professional and enquiring attitude within technical aspects of clothing production, and an ability to become confident and self-motivated in your chosen practice.

This course has excellent links to international fashion brands, including Burberry, Karen Millen and George at Asda.

The staff team have industry experience within computer-aided design (CAD), pattern cutting, fashion history and design, and have worked alongside many internationally recognised brands. You will learn to work with the Gerber pattern cutting and design system, widely used in the industry alongside supportive staff who are well placed to inspire and shape your future careers.