Master of Arts in Anthropology and Museum Practice

at Goldsmiths, University of London United Kingdom

This distinctive degree supports your individual concerns and development and enables you to navigate your way through theory and practice, various fine art media, and thematic strands within the study of art history and visual cultures.

Why study BA Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths?

• You’ll gain the expertise that will help you develop independent thought and confidence in your practice, as well as transferable skills suitable for employment in the creative industries.
• Studying both the theory and practice of fine art means you’ll be able to take a critical approach to your work and think about it in the wider context of art history.
• We're renowned for our strengths in the creative and visual arts, as well as humanities subjects, so you'll be able to benefit from this wide-ranging expertise.
• We're ranked 15th in the world for art and design (QS World University Rankings by Subject 2021).
• Staff on the programme are practising artists, curators, academics and writers, here to help you develop your practice, focus your research and respond to the work that you make.
• Our teaching takes advantage of the many galleries, art spaces, museums, cultural facilities and specialist libraries in London and on campus you'll have access to a studio space and excellent facilities including specialist art practice areas, as well as the newly opened Goldsmiths Centre of Contemporary Art.
• Invited artists, curators, gallerists, administrators and funders will provide you with specialist advice and further information to complement your studies and prepare you for professional life after graduation.

This MA examines contemporary issues concerning justice. You will learn how to conceptualise and study the possibilities of human rights, going beyond legal formulations to look at the conditions in which human rights claims are made.

Human rights mobilise millions of supporters across borders, inspiring passion and hope. And they operate at and between all the scales involved in globalisation: local, national, international, transnational. They are moral claims to justice. Although often associated with law, human rights are not the same as legal rights – human rights can be claimed where no legal rights are codified, even if changes in the law are invariably called for as part of attempts to realise human rights in practice.

Human rights are carried by different actors:

• Grassroots social movements, small Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and huge International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs)
• Lawyers and judges
• Bureaucrats and experts in Inter-Governmental Organisations (IGOs) even, sometimes, national politicians
• Journalists, novelists, translators, artists, filmmakers

These different actors are often at odds with each other in defining and defending particular justifications of what human rights are and should be.

In this Masters you will learn about how human rights are constructed, exploring framings of human rights through case studies; and you will begin to practice some of the methodologies and methods that are currently used in NGOs and grassroots activist networks trying to remedy global injustices.

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 degree provides a grounding in some of the major aspects of politics and international relations. You'll learn about international systems and global governance political theory, UK, European and US politics, international political economy and undertake area-based studies of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Why study BA Politics with International Relations at Goldsmiths?

• We offer a distinctive approach that combines the study of politics and international relations, giving you the opportunity to gain broad knowledge and experience of both disciplines.
• The Department of Politics and International Relations provides a lively interdisciplinary environment, specialising in the study of institutions and conflicts in a way that crosses boundaries between traditional understandings of political phenomena.
• You’ll be able to choose from an unusually wide range of module options which explore the aesthetics of terrorism, critical approaches to security, the politics of development, US politics and foreign policy, the geopolitics of the Middle East, and contemporary movements from the Arab Spring to ISIS. We offer a range of area-based modules covering the Middle East, China and East Asia, Africa and Latin America.
• We have a lively events programme that attracts renowned speakers, meaning that you'll have the opportunity to hear the latest political arguments, theories and ideas.
• Our unique work placement module gives you the opportunity to gain work experience relevant to the degree and we also give you the opportunity to study abroad.

The MA Cultural Policy, Relations and Diplomacy is a trans-disciplinary programme that addresses the theory and practice of cultural policy, cultural relations, and cultural and public diplomacy.

This broad area of study and the terminology applied to it is fluid and expanding. Having culture as the underlying thread, the programme explores areas such as:

• Arts policy and management
• Globalisation
• Cultural relations
• Public diplomacy
• Cultural and arts diplomacy
• External communications
• Place branding

This will provide a unique perspective into this field of study, and will examine topics such as mobility of cultural practitioners, cultural identity, intercultural dialogue, mutuality, propaganda, soft power, hegemony, influence and perceptions.

Goldsmiths' location provides you with a unique experience of living in a multicultural world city, which is of great relevance to the study of cultural policy, relations and diplomacy.

The MA Art & Ecology is a fifteen-month studio-based post-graduate programme for emerging artists who want to engage in meaningful and transformative ways with the most pressing ecological questions of our time.

This is a unique programme located in the urban environment of South East London that seeks to develop new ways in which contemporary art practice can make interventions in a wide range of ecological contexts and extend the ways in which ecology is understood. During this MA we support artists to develop art practices in diverse sites and scales dedicated to imagining and shaping liveable futures.

The MA invites artists to develop innovative art projects grounded in rigorous artistic research and a profound understanding of how ecological challenges such as climate breakdown, pollution, and biodiversity loss are inseparable from questions of social justice. Alongside media including painting, sculpture, printmaking, installation, performance, art writing, textiles, digital media and video, this course supports artists who engage with forms of practice such as food production, sustainable data, citizen and expert science, re-wilding, inter-species care and co-dependence, somatic work, and ritual.

You will also have access to workshops on how to develop your artistic practice after graduation, including on topics such as the ethical and legal dimensions of working in particular situations and environments, which will give you real-world insights into the kinds of negotiations and realisations that are part of having an expanded practice.

Investigate the world of anthropology from a new angle. The BA Anthropology programme offers a challenging and contemporary syllabus, exploring key anthropological debates, and using them to help you understand contemporary societal and cultural issues.

Why study BA Anthropology at Goldsmiths?

• We offer a fresher approach to the subject than other institutions – from the impact of austerity economics to investigating how the creative arts can tackle inequality, you’ll learn much more than just ‘traditional’ anthropology. You’ll look at the subject from a contemporary perspective, and be able to apply what you learn in lectures to your everyday life.
• In the first two years, you’ll concentrate on basic anthropological concepts, such as kinship, ritual, world systems, and development. You'll also learn to analyse these concepts using video, film and written texts, and you’ll get to study two regions of the world in depth.
• In your final year, you’ll be able to specialise by choosing a selection of option modules, tailoring your degree to your own interests and aspirations. You'll have the opportunity to investigate anthropology in relation to politics, religion, philosophy, psychology, and history in order to develop an interdisciplinary perspective of the subject.
• You'll explore links between theoretical issues and ethnographic studies, enabling you to think critically about culture and society in Britain, and around the world. Our graduates have gone on to work for the UN, World Bank, NGOs, law companies and corporate social responsibility (CSR) consultancies.

It’s really important for us that you graduate with a set of core digital journalism skills so half of the degree focuses on the computing side of the discipline and half on media and communications. This means you get a holistic MA, where you study the foundations of digital journalism and practise it in its most current forms.

You’ll have the chance to study multimedia and interactive journalism, look at interactive documentaries, digital reporting, and video journalism. You’ll also learn coding, so you can get to grips with using algorithms and data sets, and do social network analysis to monitor what’s going on behind the screens.

Through our partnerships with BBC news labs and The Times’ development team, we make sure we’re keeping up with industry but also working with it.

We want you to reimagine the medium while you’re here, so you get the chance to specialise in your own area of interest for your final project. This could be anything from an interactive website to a video production using interactive story telling and text.  We offer a lot of support when it comes to the coding side of the course. A boot camp before the start of the programme gives you an introduction to some of the techniques and languages.

What you go away with are the core skills for news writing, video, and computational techniques and some amazing industry contacts.

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.

This degree develops your arts practice through the expressive world of creative computation. Over a two years (full-time) or four 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.

You will also study contextual modules on computational art and the socio-political effects of technology. Modules provide students with the historical foundations, frameworks, critical skills and confidence to express their ideas effectively. You will have the opportunity to learn the cultural histories of technology, to reflect on computation in terms of its wider cultural effects, and to understand the way in which art provides rigorous ways of thinking.

The MA will take a distinctively interdisciplinary and critical perspective. It will highlight the concept of “ecology” in an expanded sense and encompass the complex web of interconnections that bind people, animals, bodies, soils, ideas, technologies, practices, institutions, cultures, and histories with their changing environments. Drawing on perspectives from the humanities and the social sciences, this programme explores the many shifting relationships between natures and cultures around the world. It introduces critical new approaches to the connections between humans and animals in more-than-human worlds, and it will enable you to develop a critical understanding of the ways in which ecological issues are intertwined with the question of social justice, cultural difference, and decolonisation.

You will be encouraged to explore the philosophical, cultural, political, and social dimensions that shape our understanding of contemporary socio-ecological issues and to explore imaginative responses to them. You will also learn to develop and apply ecological perspectives on various forms of social, political, and cultural analysis.

This programme will give you a critical understanding of our times and will help you develop key interdisciplinary skills for critical socio-ecological scholarship, creativity, communication, and activism. It will equip you with the insights, concepts, and skills needed to understand and engage with the tangled relationships between nature and culture, and the ethics and politics of our relationships with animals. You will also acquire knowledge and understanding of key concepts such as Anthropocene, anthropocentrism, value, difference, domestication, human exceptionalism, extractivism, decolonisation, radical pluralism, and the arts of living.