Postgraduate Activity

One of the distinctive features of the department is the lively and multicultural PhD programme. Students are attracted to the department from across the world, many supported by grants from their own governments as well as the British Council and the Commonwealth Scholarships Commission. The department also continued to award a postgraduate scholarship funded by the Swires Foundation (Cathay Pacific). International students contribute substantially to the energetic, intellectual debates which take place in the department and there is good cross-fertilisation with home and EU students, a number of whom are supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Board and the Economic & Social Research Council.

Our first year students participate in a College-organised research programme and two departmentally-run methods courses. The department (in collaboration with Westminster and the LSE) runs termly two-day workshops at which students present recent work and receive feedback from staff and other students. We encourage student input to the programme through the Departmental Postgraduate Committee.

In addition to individual supervision, supervisor and students form a research group, meeting for the discussion of student papers or common research topics, sometimes with a guest speaker. A good example of the possibilities of a research group was the extensive participation of Professor Colin Leys in Professor James Curran's group and a striking example of collective work by such a group was the publication of Media Organisations in Society (Arnold, 2000), a collection of essays by staff and students from that group who participated in the editing process. Other research groups focus on transnationalism and cultural identity (Morley and Robins), postcolonialism (Schwarz) and on new media technologies (Kember).

The department encourages students to gain recognition for their own work and has financed students to present papers at conferences in Europe, Australia, Canada and US as well as in Britain at, for example, Media Communications & Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA), Screen, British Sociological Association and Political Studies Association conferences. They also have the opportunity to give papers at conferences organised in the College. The Pacific Asia Cultural Studies Forum, set up by students with the support of Professor David Morley in conjunction with Professor Kuan-Hsing Chen (National Tsing-Hua University of Taiwan) brings together Goldsmiths' students studying in this area and others from universities in London and the South East. Two PACSF conferences have been held featuring speakers from universities in Australia, China, Taiwan, Korea and North America including Professor Ien Ang (Sydney), Professor Hae-joang Cho (Korea), Professor Rey Chow (California) and Professor Kuan-Hsing Chen (Taiwan), together with departmental associates, Professor Stuart Hall and Professor Paul Gilroy. This innovative group, a key forum for work on race, ethnicity and post-colonialism, runs a highly effective web site and data base and is negotiating to produce a publication based on its conferences.

Our successful postgraduates are now making a contribution to the discipline through teaching and research and have gained academic posts on a worldwide basis. Appointments in Britain include City, Essex, London School of Economics, Middlesex, Open University, South Bank, and University of East London. Overseas appointments include: University of Bahia, Brazil; the Centre for Critical Psychology, Sydney; Chinese University of Hong Kong; Galatasaray University, Turkey; NYU; Yuan-Ze University, Taiwan; University of Windsor, Canada. Work by postgraduate students has appeared in: Screen, Popular Music, Media, Culture and Society and Feminism and Psychology; in edited collections and as single authored monographs.