Master of Arts in Global Political Economy

at Goldsmiths, University of London United Kingdom

The BA Anthropology & Media programme combines anthropological and communications theories to provide you with a better understanding of cultural diversity, and a critical knowledge of communication processes.

Why study BA Anthropology and Media at Goldsmiths?

• You'll be taught by some of the leading names in anthropology, media, communications and cultural studies. And you'll have access to industry-standard practice facilities.
• You'll receive a solid grounding in anthropological methodology and practice, and in key media debates including representation, and symbolism. Most importantly, you'll learn how to apply these insights to the contemporary world.
• You'll develop the practical and transferable skills to help you find a career in media or anthropology – our recent graduates are now working as news readers, editors, journalists, producers, and photographers.
• You’ll be able to specialise and design your own learning experience in third year, choosing four Anthropology modules, and two Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies (MCCS) modules.
• We regularly host industry debates and talks by international figures; recent guests have included Danny Boyle, Gurinder Chadha and Noel Clark.

The BA in Drama and Theatre Arts is designed to foster creative, radical theatre-makers and thinkers. It is adventurous in form, international in scope and hands-on in practice.

The Complete Theatre Maker

• This degree supports you to become the complete theatre maker. At the heart of the programme is a balanced integration of theory and practice. Knowledge gained through making and doing adds to your conceptual understanding, while the insights gained in writing about theatre and society inform the choices you make in your practice-based work.
• Tutored by our diverse and talented team, you will develop technical skills in acting, directing, writing, sound, lighting, scenography, and costume. Bringing these skills together, you will learn how to collaborate and operate in companies, ready to take your own show on the road.
• You will be introduced to a wide range of theatre thinkers, and explore the history and cultural diversity of performance. You will develop a complex understanding of what it means to make theatre in an increasingly global 21st-century society. And with London’s rich theatre culture on your doorstep, you can draw on an exciting range of contemporary practice to inform your thinking and making.

The BA Drama and Theatre Arts is a radical and innovative degree. The curriculum is responsive to the global reach of our teaching staff, including expertise in African, American, Francophone, Japanese, and South Asian performance, as well as British, European, and Russian theatre traditions. We prepare theatre-makers who are socially, culturally, and politically engaged.

The degree explores what it means to perform in contemporary culture, mobilising a range of theatre and performance practices from the interpretation of play texts to devised ensemble work and the possibilities opened up by political protest, live art, and the avant-garde.

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.

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.

The MA Filmmaking (Producing) will provide you with a thorough training in all aspects of producing – from the conception of an initial idea through to development, financing, production and release.

This Masters, a pathway of the MA Filmmaking, provides excellent training for a successful career as a producer. As part of the programme you'll have the opportunity to specialise in either development, where you will work with writers and directors to develop new ideas, or line producing, where you will focus more on how to run a production and a crew, and how to also take a production manager or assistant director role.

What we offer

• The programme is housed in a new purpose-built media facility equipped with state-of-the art teaching spaces including film and photography studios equipped with Arri lighting and Greenscreen, Avid Media Composer, Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Film Editing, Animation, Digital Special Effects, Pro Tools Audio Postproduction and Foley suites.
• Our studio spaces, and extensive production facilities and informal rehearsal and meeting spaces create an environment where you can discuss and collaborate with scriptwriters, actors, directors, other producers and your shoot team. We also have established relations with casting directors, agents, production designers and other professionals who will both advise you and provide their skills to enhance your productions.
• You work on at least one film per term in your specialist role, culminating in a major production towards the end of the degree. In addition to your specialist area, you attend classes in related disciplines such as Film Directing and Editing and collaborate with students across specialisations on film projects. This framework is designed to stimulate collaborative practice by providing you with a breadth of filmmaking knowledge combined with a high level of expertise in your chosen filmmaking discipline.

Taught jointly by the Departments of Anthropology and Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies, this MA offers a stimulating synthesis of theory and practice. In short, it is at the heart of what Goldsmiths is all about.

This MA, launched in 2015, is the third of three related pathways. The first, the MA Applied Anthropology and Community and Youth Work, was started in 1992 and is aimed at students who wish to pursue a career in youth and community work and who need a professional qualification.

A second pathway, the MA Applied Anthropology and Community Development, was launched in 2012 as an option for international or home students who do not need an NYA qualification and for those who want to specialise in community development.

This third pathway has been created in response to a growing number of applicants with an arts background and arts interests, and is aimed at students who wish to work in community arts. The three pathways entail different placements but are taught together, providing many opportunities for exchange of ideas and collaboration amongst students.

The best journalism is based on a sound understanding of the history that has shaped the world we inhabit today.

There is a strong and growing tradition of deeper journalistic investigation into issues and events in the recent and more distant past (however that might be defined). This might be to unearth new knowledge, to investigate and reinterpret existing thinking, or to revise and update past ideas and understandings.

This innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary programme, jointly delivered by the Department of History and the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, emphasises that the causes and results of events in the past are fiercely contested by historians.

Why study BA History and Journalism at Goldsmiths?

• History - the study, analysis and understanding of the past - is as important today as it has ever been, and it continues to make vital contributions to how we comprehend and interact with the world around us. It is a relevant, dynamic, fascinating and important field of study which, at Goldsmiths, is approached in creative, innovative and exciting ways.
• 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 and, crucially, help us shape those futures intelligently, insightfully, fairly, and with compassion.
• The essential skills of researching, interviewing, and writing in a number of different long-form and short-form styles and formats are delivered alongside tuition for a range of digital tools including video reporting, the use of social media for research and dissemination, and how to work in the world of online, multimedia journalism.
• An international body of staff research and deliver modules covering a wide geographical range including Asia, Africa, the Americas, the British Isles, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Middle East. Academic staff in both departments are nationally and internationally recognized award-winning experts in their fields who are at the forefront of research excellence and research-led teaching.

History is a relevant, dynamic, fascinating, and important field of study which, at Goldsmiths, is approached in creative, innovative, and exciting ways.

History - the study, analysis and understanding of the past - is as important today as it has ever been and it continues to make vital contributions to how we comprehend and interact with the world around us.

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 and, crucially, help us shape those futures intelligently, insightfully, fairly, and with compassion. History is here and now as well as being there and then.

Students studying History at Goldsmiths have a great deal of choice over what to study, beginning with options in Year One. Our geographic scope covers Europe (including significant British expertise), the Americas, Asia and Africa. Chronologically, we have a strong focus on early modern and modern history, while also covering earlier periods.

Why study BA History at Goldsmiths?

• We are exciting and challenging: our innovative interdisciplinary approaches to the subject encourage our students to approach and explore the past thematically rather than chronologically and we venture into issues, areas and topics that are often overlooked.
• We are global: our international body of staff research and deliver modules covering a wide geographical range including Asia, Africa, the Americas, the British Isles, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Middle East.
• We excel in what we do: our academic staff are nationally and internationally recognised award-winning experts in their fields, they are at the forefront of research excellence and research-led teaching.
• We put you first: our students are always our top priority and our staff are excellent educators who foster independent and progressive thinking in challenging but supportive environments.
• We broaden minds: history stimulates critical and analytical thinking and, at Goldsmiths, we also encourage creative and imaginative thinking that takes our students beyond the traditional boundaries of the subject.
• We think about your future: alongside intellectual and personal development we equip our students with the skills and experience they need to progress into a rewarding career. This might be through our History in Practice work-placement module or through other career-orientated opportunities and forms of assessment.

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.

This MA unpacks the nitty-gritty of global transformations where media and politics, culture and society converge. Its cutting-edge approach to study provides you with the analytical skills and hands-on experience to grasp these shifts in theory and practice.

The programme addresses key questions central to the relationship between global media and politics, culture and society, such as:

• What is the relationship between ‘everyday life’ – our own and that of others – online and offline?
• Can political institutions ensure that the online environment is safe for all, or should this be left to internet service providers?
• How do we protect fundamental rights and freedoms online such as freedom of expression in the wake of terrorist attacks?
• What are the differences between how public and private broadcasters, activists, artists, and communities make use of social media?

Studying on this MA, you will focus on critical themes like the ‘Digital Divide’, privacy and surveillance, freedom of expression, and the climate crisis. You will also explore the role and impact of governments, international organisations, broadcasters, activists, artists, and communities.