This programme is designed for students who are interested in critical approaches to the impact of globalisation, migration and international circulation on Visual Culture. It explores how art exhibitions respond to issues of globalisation, how activism and critical practices intervene in these issues through the arts and their institutions, and how post-colonial experience and theory have moved from geographical margins to cultural centres.

Our arena of study is positioned in the aftermath of anti-colonial struggles for liberation and of their concurrent processes of self constitution on the one hand. On the other it considers the demands of the market to produce references that signify clearly across the globe. In dialogue with these tensions, this programme begins the work of mapping out how, in the twenty-first century, creative practices are constituting new realities within globalisation.

What you study

The programme begins with an assessed introductory Global Arts Core Course which is specially formulated for Global Arts students only. This is followed by a further four assessed components: one compulsory Special Subject (‘Geographies’) and one other choice of Special Subject, the MA Symposium and the MA Dissertation. The Special Subject courses are also open to MA students studying on our other programmes. Students also attend the guest lecture programme. You have the option of auditing another special subject should you wish to do so, subject to availability and in agreement with the course tutor.

The taught part of the programme runs from the end of September to the end of March, with additional lectures and workshops in May and June. It offers a framework to help you focus and develop your own understanding of this field. Engagement with the diverse critical, theoretical and methodological approaches on offer will enable you to identify and prepare the area of independent research you will carry out in your dissertation project.

Preparatory Reading
During the summer, once you have confirmed your place on the MA, you will be sent information concerning a preparatory reading project comprising about six texts. These texts will reflect the range and diversity of the theoretical trajectories you will encounter during your studies. You should come to the MA prepared to discuss this material within a group setting.

Global Arts Core Course (Weeks 1-5)
Core Course A (5 x 2 hour lecture/discussion sessions)
Core Course B (5 x 2 hour lecture/discussion sessions)

This course is divided into two complementary strands. Strand A addresses post-colonial theory and introduces students to the writings of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, bel hooks, Trinh T Minh-Ha and others. Strand B strengthens your understanding of the critical framework of the course by considering major international exhibitions that have shifted the terms of the debate: ‘Primitivism in 20th Century Art’, ‘Documenta XI’, ‘Migration Project Cologne’ and the ‘Istanbul Biennale 2009’. By analysing theoretical texts together with case studies you gain an understanding of the important role the arts play in the dynamics of globalisation. Full-time students will take both strands in the first five weeks of study. Part-time students will take strand A in their first year and strand B in their second year. Assessment: one Archive Project.

Special Subjects (Weeks 6-20)
Special subjects are in-depth taught courses based on the current research interests of staff. They enable you to focus on an aspect of contemporary art, cultural theory or contemporary thought that particularly interests you.

Compulsory Special Subject: Geographies
This course engages with an expanded notion of the geographic, specifically the shift from classical post-colonial geography to issues of cartography. Drawing on key theoretical texts and the works of spatial practitioners (contemporary artists, architects, curators, activists and others in the fields of the humanities), it explores such issues as urbanity, globalisation, mobility, conflict, migration and human rights. In addition, it asks how, within the heterogeneous geographic discourses and practices in circulation today, not only knowledge and cultural production but also identities and new forms of subjectivity, are ‘spatialised’. Assessment: one 4,000-word essay and one collaborative creative project.

Special Subject Option Courses: please note that the options available in any given year may alter due to staff research commitments and timetabling. Likewise, the content of a given course may be subject to some alteration from year to year.

Affiliations: Contemporary African Philosophy & Culture
Who are we? How do we affiliate ourselves? How are art, space and time conceived in this respect? By drawing on selected examples of Sub-Saharan African philosophy, art and culture, this course radically challenges dominant western universalist responses to these questions. The choice to focus on work from such a vast and yet limited geographical area also has a further, distinctive aim: to depart from the usual globalising narratives of post-colonial discourses and to invite more personal journeys into selective ideas and practices taken from carefully chosen regions in this subcontinent. Authors studied include Emmanuel Eze, Valentin Mudimbe, Kwasi Wiredu, Paulin Hountondji, Mogobe Ramose, and Patrick Chamoiseau. The material explored on this course also includes films, artworks, and poetry from Sub-Saharan Africa. Assessment: one 8,000-word essay.

Conflict and Negotiations as Spatial Practices
The course offers readings of contemporary political issues as relations in space. Political and social conflicts will be shown to play themselves out within a constructed, real or imaginary architecture and through the representation, organisation, transformation, erasure and subversion of space. We discuss social and political conflicts as they register themselves in the transformation of the built urban environment, shifting the scale of our investigation from the architectural to the urban and the territorial, dealing with the spatial dimension of geopolitical conflicts. From the micro scale of architectural details to the macro scale of borders and global flows, space will be analysed as an elastic medium constantly reshaped by political forces.

We will engage with a number of thinkers including Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Achille Mbembe, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Ranciere, Chantal Mouffe, Bruno Latour, Manuel Delanda, and develop spatial conceptions alongside their theoretical and political positions. Key concepts explored include ‘space/event’, flows, bio-politics, crisis, resistance, the figure of the refugee and its emergent geography of extra-territoriality. Assessment: one 8,000-word essay/project or one 8,000-word combination of essay/portfolio.

Transforming Critical Practices (Laboratory course)
This course offers an experimental environment to explore different ways of integrating and critically transforming the experience of the MA programme into one’s own practice of research, writing, curating, artistic and cultural work. We work in small groups and develop a variety of projects that allow us to engage with a wider audience and to communicate our concerns in a dialogic process of working with peers. These projects range from spatial interventions and installations, dialogues and debates to performances and publications, archives, films, websites, actions… Each year our investigations focus on a particular set of questions addressing eg the dynamics of networked cultures, shared knowledge production or global resource politics. Rather than understanding resources as fixed or externally given, the course conceives of them as collectively produced and able to mobilise and interrelate diverse areas with one another: geographically, historically, economically, and culturally. Assessment: one Final Presentation of the group-based research project, supported by group statements and the evaluation of the collaborative work process.

Transcultural Memory
This course focuses on the encounter of different memories and histories between and across cultures. Here, memory is no longer regarded as a document of the past, but as an activity performed in the present, contingent on present contexts that are continuously modifying the past. Likewise, the concept of ‘cultural memory’ is used to describe the reciprocal relationship between individual and collective memory and the cultural frameworks in which their mediation takes place. Drawing on a variety of art works, exhibitions, films, literary texts and theoretical models (eg Halbwachs, Levinas, Du Bois, Caruth, Hirsch and Rothberg) the course explores spaces in which memories neither compete with nor erase each other, but interact in productive and unforeseen ways. Assessment: one 6,000-word essay and one creative project.

Independent Research – The MA Symposium and MA Dissertation
From the end of March, you will start independent research on a subject of your own choosing. At the end of the spring term, you will submit your dissertation proposal and be assigned a dissertation tutor who will support your independent dissertation research and writing activities in an advisory capacity.

Two-day MA Symposium (Oral Presentation on Dissertation Topic)
The MA Symposium provides you with the opportunity, fairly early on in the research/writing process, to present a worked up and focused investigation of your dissertation topic or some aspect of it. Your presentation will be formally assessed. Presenting on your dissertation research at this stage is invaluable for enabling you to define your project and, through verbal feedback and discussion, to progress your thinking. Assessment: one oral presentation in early June (20 minutes, plus 10 minute discussion).

MA Dissertation
Having already produced an assessed oral presentation on your topic (see above) you work on your dissertation over the summer and submit your completed project for assessment early in September. Assessment: one 12-15,000-word dissertation.

Register your interest

If you register your interest in this programme we will keep you informed about open days and send you relevant further information. If you subsequently decide to apply for this programme you will be able to use the same login details to apply.