Master of Arts in Radio

at Goldsmiths, University of London United Kingdom

This pioneering Masters offers interdisciplinary perspectives on international performance, and aims to understand performance in relation to the culture to which it contributes.

Why study MA Performance and Culture at Goldsmiths?

• The programme takes in diverse forms of theatre, including multicultural and street theatre, and practices such as:
  • Performance art
  • Dance
  • Ritual
  • Site-specific performance
  • A wide range of hybrid forms
• You will explore performance as a sociocultural process, using analytical principles from sociology, cultural theory, anthropology, history, philosophy, politics and theatre and performance.
• We have numerous links, locally and internationally, with a wide variety of theatres, companies and performers, all of which enhance your research possibilities.
• The programme will provide you with the appropriate categories of thought and methodological procedures for analysing, understanding and explaining performance processes as sociocultural practices: how and why they emerge from specific sociocultural and historical time place and space.

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 Social Work is an academic and professional qualification which also provides a gateway to more specialist therapeutic qualifications and research degree programmes. Social work education at Goldsmiths has a long and distinguished record – we have one of the most respected social work units in the UK, and you'll be taught by established social work academics and associate lecturers who have considerable research and/or practice experience in their fields.

You will learn the values, skills, and knowledge needed to practise as a reflective and ethical social worker, and be well equipped for the challenges of contemporary social work practice. You also will be encouraged to make links between anti-oppressive practice, the social work values, the legal framework, theories, methods and skills of intervention, and social work practice throughout the programme. You will cover some of the following areas:

• Human growth and development
• Community needs and services
• Social work methods and skills
• Assessment in social work
• Law and organisational contexts of social work
• Research methods
• Children and families pathway
• Adults pathway
• Mental health and disability

There is a growth in the number of entrepreneurs starting businesses with social and environmental purposes. This exciting MA will enable you to develop a critical understanding of and practical insights into modes of social enterprise.

There is an urgent need for talented individuals who can design novel solutions to our most profound societal challenges.

This international MA provides practical and sociological tools to individuals motivated to develop alternative economic practices and frameworks to meet such challenges. These might include (but are not limited to) social enterprises, collaborative innovation networks, hubs, digital platforms, support intermediaries and/or policy proposals.

Benefitting from the MA’s timely educational content as well as from its firm roots in London’s rich networks, our students go on to become thought leaders in the burgeoning social innovation field, advancing it in a creative fashion from their chosen angle. Past graduates have gone on to create their own social enterprises or to work for prestigious organisations such as the Yunus Institute and Social Enterprise UK, while some have elected to carry out advanced research into social innovation.

This unique programme combines music psychology with neuroscience, focusing on both the biological and cognitive aspects of musical behaviour.

The MSc Music, Mind and Brain (MMB) is highly interdisciplinary and draws on expertise from leading figures in the field, in areas ranging from music cognition, cognitive neuroscience, computational modelling, music education and music therapy.

As a student on the MSc, you will learn about topics in music psychology (from perception to cognition) and the cognitive neuroscience of music, and will acquire all the necessary skills to pursue your own high-quality research.

The programme benefits from good links with institutions such as the Institute of Education, the Royal College of Music, and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery.

This programme is an innovative and interdisciplinary exploration into how social, cultural, and political institutions, decisions, and events have shaped societies and nations around the world.

There is much cross-over to explore between the disciplines of History and Politics. The BA History with Politics at Goldsmiths combines and synthesises methods and concepts from both disciplines to inform and stimulate study. Many History modules, such as those dealing with revolutions, ideas, and social movements, are, of course, centrally connected to politics. Meanwhile, Politics modules on feminism and anarchism are strongly informed by the historical precedents of modern movements and ideologies.

Combine the study of History and Politics

• Rather than focusing on chronology or strict historical periods, combining History and Politics encourages and facilitates explorations and analyses of key issues, controversies, themes, and debates. The study, analysis, and understanding of the past are as important today as they have ever been. 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 in more intelligent, insightful, and compassionate ways.
• By combining the two disciplines, you will be able to peel back the formal veneer of political parties and institutions to reveal the major ideological, economic, social, and cultural conflicts which must be investigated to understand our world. This programme crosses boundaries between the traditional and the more radical understandings of political phenomena. Politics is much more than simply what happens in parliaments, it pervades the whole of society, domestically and internationally.

Interrogate the status quo with leading academics who don’t just talk and write about politics, but actively campaign to create change in the world

All around us governments are in crisis, protests are on the increase, dissent and mobilisation is widespread and relayed across the world instantaneously on a screen. Communication is at the very heart of the structures, institutions and actors that give meaning to politics in governments, in parties and on the street.

The programme’s core curriculum will address a range of contemporary issues, debates and theory in political communication, including work on:

• Comparative media systems
• Theories of communication and democratisation
• Global media, international governance and transnational communication
• Economic, financial and industrial policy
• Digital media and online politics
• Media sociology and news production
• Political parties, party ideologies and party-member dynamics
• Public relations, political marketing and spin
• Government communication systems and media management
• Media audiences, effects and agenda-setting
• Public opinion and public sphere debates
• Interest groups, social movements and alternative media
• Advocacy, civil society and public affairs
• New technologies and the information society
• Citizenship and public engagement
• The policy process and government decision-making
• Politics and culture
• Social theories of power, culture and communications

Theory is usually applied to a number of case study areas on, for example: conflict and war; elections; social and environmental debates; foreign affairs; the economy, finance and business; crime and disorder. Theory and discussion is always related to current events and debates.

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.

Are you interested in a career in anthropology, but haven’t studied the subject before? Have you studied anthropology in the past, but need to consolidate this experience before moving into anthropological research?

Why study MA Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths?

• Whatever your disciplinary background, you’ll have the opportunity to build a solid base in social anthropology, its theoretical foundations, methodology and ethnographic diversity.
• You’ll be able to choose from a variety of option modules, which means you can tailor the degree to your own theoretical or regional interests.
• You can choose to study topics including gender, sexuality and the body, religion and symbolism, political economy, psychological perspectives in anthropology, the anthropology of rights, and visual anthropology.
• You’ll join a diverse group of students with a range of educational backgrounds and interests, so you’ll be exposed to many different perspectives.

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.