Master of Arts in Global Media and Politics

at Goldsmiths, University of London United Kingdom

Explore the creative interplay between urban theory and the visual representation of urban cultures and places.

Why study MA Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths?

• Developed by the Centre for Urban and Community Research, the degree encourages creative interplay between practice and theory – you’ll develop your practical photography skills and examine key ideas and debates in the representation and evocation of contemporary city life.
• You'll have the chance to consider cutting-edge debates in cultural and social theory in a research setting that actively encourages the development of photographic practice.
• If you are already a working photographer, visual artist or media practitioner, this programme gives you space to reflect critically on your practice.
• For those with a background in sociology, urban and cultural geography, cultural studies or anthropology, the degree provides an opportunity to combine visual forms of representation with standard forms of research techniques in investigating urban life and the physical environments of the city.
• The programme aims to link directly to professional research outcomes, and many graduates have secured employment within urban research, ethnography, teaching, curatorial and arts practice, human rights, and architectural research.

Occupational Psychology, both as a professional and academic field, seeks to address questions of critical importance in business and enterprise.

• How can we select the best employees?
• How can we enhance health and performance?
• What does effective leadership look like?
• What impact does coaching really have?

The MSc Occupational Psychology, run by the Institute of Management Studies, will equip you with the knowledge and skills to begin considering these questions. The programme has been designed in line with British Psychological Society (BPS) and Division of Occupational Psychology (DOP) requirements and has been accredited since 1995. We recently updated our programme content in line with the 2014 changes to the DOP Occupational Psychology curriculum and, as of September 2014, we are teaching in line with the new curriculum.

The MSc Occupational Psychology aims to equip you with a thorough grounding in the application of psychological theory to work settings, to provide you with the skills necessary to conduct cutting-edge research in applied research projects to a high level of competence, and to impart core practitioner techniques and awareness.

The MA Global Political Economy explores the dynamics of our changing world. You will work in small groups with world class experts at the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC), as well as across a number of other Goldsmiths departments, and learn how to hold the world up to scrutiny.

Why study MA Global Political Economy at Goldsmiths?

• Learn about the political economy of ecological break down, the challenge of building a sustainable world, and how to make these issues central to the analysis of politics and economics.
• Learn about the relationship between global financialised capitalism, global inequality, and the possibility of a sustainable future.
• Work closely with academic experts in small-group workshops and seminars.
• Learn in a truly interdisciplinary programme that allows you to see the global political economy from a variety of perspectives.
• Choose from a wide variety of options to build the bespoke degree programme that best suits your interests and ambitions.
• Join the series of job talks from insiders at policy Think Tanks, NGOs and the private sector.

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.

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.

Economists study how markets function. Marketing is about how to operate in markets. The Goldsmiths BA Economics with Marketing will help you develop crucial skills in both disciplines.

Why study BA Economics with Marketing at Goldsmiths?

• This unique course combines a rigorous training in economic theory and applications with cutting-edge insights and techniques from marketing practice.
• Our economics teaching is pluralist and interdisciplinary, so you'll be able to understand which tools are useful when tackling different problems in the real world. Our marketing teaching uses perspectives from psychology, sociology and management to keep you at the frontier of marketing practice.
• This degree will give you great flexibility in today’s competitive labour market: you can work in traditional economics jobs and in a range of management and marketing jobs that are looking for this unique set of skills. For example, you will be uniquely positioned for marketing jobs with a quantitative angle.
• To prepare for your future career, you'll have the opportunity to apply for a limited number of competitive placements. Placements take place at the end of your second year; they count as a 15-credit option towards your degree. Placements enhance your CV, bring theory and practical experience together, and help you develop industry contacts.
• Through the Erasmus programme, you can spend half of your third year at a university in Europe. You'll attend modules, experience a different culture and academic environment, and you'll have the option of learning or improving a foreign language.

This MA is designed for students interested in new ways of exploring and understanding the social world through the use of visual, sensory, and other experimental approaches. You’ll study sociological issues alongside innovative methods and gain the tools needed to examine, represent and intervene in the social world.

Why study MA Sociology (Visual Sociology) at Goldsmiths?

• You’ll join students from a wide variety of backgrounds, including art, design, anthropology, media and communications, cultural studies, geography, and sociology.
• You’ll develop the ability to carry out empirical research and present it publicly in a variety of media and materials. You’ll engage with sociology as an inventive research practice, using creative research methods to address classic and changing sociological problems.
• You’ll be introduced to the range of debates in visual research and encouraged to build on these by using visual, sensory and inventive methodological practices to carry out critical social research in your areas of interest, whether this is science and technology, contemporary capitalism, gender and sexual cultures, race, human rights, globalisation, or other aspects of social life.
• Combining lectures and seminars with practical sessions and workshop-based projects, this MA will help you develop a hands-on approach to sociological research. You’ll gain a skills base in methods which could be used in public sector contexts, art or media research, design or commercial application.
• As well as presenting your ideas through writing, you’ll have the opportunity to produce different outputs, including film/video, photography, sound and multimedia pieces. You’ll also have the opportunity to organise and curate some of this work in an exhibition.

Do you want to advance your knowledge of contemporary art and pursue a professional career in the field of curatorial practice?

Curating refers to a wide range of activities including the care of collections and the development of exhibitions, festivals, screenings, digital platforms and more. Curators engage with historical knowledge and respond to urgent social issues, staging culture as a way of bringing together multiple publics.
Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths has been at the forefront of curatorial research for well over a decade, helping to redefine the profession. Drawing from this research, taught by leading curators and researchers, BA Curating combines a strong grounding in art history and contemporary cultural theory with the development of practical know-how and industry experience.

Why study BA Curating at Goldsmiths?

• Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths is internationally renowned for its research on Curatorial Practice and you will be learning from leading theorists and practitioners.
• You will study compulsory modules on curatorial history, theory and practice alongside option modules in art history and visual culture that allow you to focus on your particular interests.
• You will be mentored to develop the know-how and practical skills necessary to practice as a contemporary art curator through a number of practical assignments as well as an industry placement in your second year.
• You will develop your ability to work collaboratively and will work with your peers in your third year towards your degree show.
• You will be supported to develop student-led projects and will have access to our dedicated Curating Room to host your events.
• You will benefit from the rich programme of events at Goldsmiths as well from world-class exhibitions at the newly opened Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art.
• Our London location means you’ll never run out of galleries, events, museums and visual culture to explore in the capital.

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.

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.