Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Study Details: MA 2 years part-time
Practice based inquiry between spaces, places, and disciplines.
This is an MA by project. Study on the course prioritises making, action research and intercultural dialogue. The unit structure builds from your context and experiences to lead you in the development of your own personal project with potential extensions that might bring about change.
Global themes are best understood and acted on from multiple cultural and disciplinary perspectives. This course encourages the sharing of these perspectives to develop your agency as an artist and cultural producer.
The opportunity to engage with transcultural activities means that you will be able to access a broader network of academic interest and practice, from beyond the course community, offering transnational experiences and intercultural conversations.
UNESCO supports interculturalism as a practice and approach that leads to a deeper understanding of the other’s global perception. As interconnection across and between societies grows, and cultural diversity is increasingly recognized as an inescapable reality of modern life, it is essential that practitioners are equipped with the capacities and knowledge to positively respond to difference and pluralism. This course prepares the next generation of creative practitioners for future careers where intercultural co-operation and the sharing of knowledge through practice is essential. The course proposes a reflexive consideration. of our relationship with both site and history and generates co-operative learning and an exploration of collective memory, evolving new traditions and relational politics. Study on the MA engages with transnational, intercultural and co-operative learning, giving you individual agency within your chosen field while engaging fully with emerging global priorities affecting you and your wider context.
This is a part-time two year course delivered through a mix of online and in person residentials blending teaching, intensive workshops, international teaching exchange, and independent projects. The intensive residentials will primarily focus on critical discourse and habits of reflective practice.
The anticipated student community will have a broad international reach. The course encourages you to draw from your communities of practice and interests and engage with wider transnational networks.
We are committed to developing ethical intercultural practices. To achieve this, we are working to embed UAL's Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice into the course.
The course should be of primary interest to practitioners with experience. It is intended to meet the needs of candidates from diverse cultural, economic, and social backgrounds. We welcome mature students.
Applicants are likely to come from a disparate range of academic disciplines and vocational fields that include: performance, theatre, installation art, film, design practice, the humanities, social practices, social practice, community development, or from other areas of interdisciplinary and creative practice.
AP(E)L – Accreditation of Prior (Experiential) Learning
Applicants who do not meet these course entry requirements may still be considered. The course team will consider each application that demonstrates additional strengths and alternative evidence. This might, for example, be demonstrated by:
Each application will be considered on its own merit.
For fees and funding information, please see website
MA Intercultural Practices will support you in becoming a creative agent who operates across multiple and often contrasting cultures.
Some alumni will explore culture as an explicit concern and contextualize their work in the ecology of art, design, curating, performance and their education and organisation.
Other alumni will operate further afield to create new cultures. Contexts include grassroots and other civic sector activities; business, government and industry; research and innovation. There is a desperate need for better ideas, customs and behaviours – in a word, cultures – to grapple with complex scenarios. The curriculum of MA Intercultural Practices takes up this challenge through teaching and learning UNESCO’s Sustainable Development Competencies. The care, curiosity and courage that mark this curriculum prepares graduates to join the avant-garde of contemporary cultural production.
The intersectional sensibility you will develop through MA Intercultural Practices weaves together diverse types of understanding: personal, professional, practical, political, theoretical, technical, sensuous and more. This builds on the knowledge and life experience you bring to the course. MA Intercultural Practices will support you in recognising and resourcing this expertise as you embrace lifelong and lifewide learning as the lifeblood of your practice.
Growing complexity and uncertainty have made ‘learning how to learn’ a meta-skill for future proofing your practice and career. You will develop this through fieldwork, lectures, tutorials, workshops and other formal aspects of your post-graduate study. You will test this sensibility through your research-led project, collaborative activity and dissemation of practice via exhibitions, events, publications and other public forms of public presentation. As you build your capacity for learning how to learn, you will critically reflect on what this means to you as a practitioner and the work you do. The value system you hone through MA Intercultural Practices will support your intersectional sensibility as you negotiate diverse and yet-to-be imagined contexts and create new opportunities for both yourself and others.
Unit 1: Curiosity and Place
This first unit explores place and context through active searching and sharing, or foraging. Foraging is a branch of behavioural ecology that references searching and discovery specific to time and place; it frames an individual's association to the time of an event with the place of an event. It is the starting point for making beyond the studio. This unit is primarily taught through seminars and workshops supporting student led and centred enquiry.
Unit 2: Stuff of Cultures
Progressing from Unit 1, Stuff of Cultures asks you to appraise your own situation as a creative practitioner, maker, and producer. It begins with an exchange of material. Using shared materials, and without relying on a workshop or studio, the unit invites you to deconstruct context and its relevance. This unit promotes a sense of mutual understanding and empathy; sharing the co-ordinates of one’s own cultural environment provides triggers and promotes curiosity in others.
Unit 3: Consideration
The initial focus for this unit is the consideration of ethical practices and intention. The premise is thoughtfulness, care, reflection, and analysis; and thinking relating to ethics. The purpose is that you generate theory for testing through applied methods and lay the foundations for further exploration and experiment.
The unit is introduced through a series of interactive lectures, seminars, and reading groups. Practices formed here will prepare you for the final units of the course.
Unit 3 includes an intensive in-person residential workshop; normally 2 weeks duration.
Unit 4: REBEL (Options: Unit 4A, Co-operative Practices; 4B, Analysis and Insights and 4C, Making and Production)
Through reflective practice and self-analysis, you will start to determine your own future learning. You will select one of three options for qualities and outcomes against which you wish to be assessed. The unit supports you in building a portfolio of experience drawn from personal projects, intensive workshops, and intercultural learning exchange. Core teaching is shared across all of the options and encourages you in gathering experience and evidence of learning from independent enquiry (practice) and from engagement with transnational sharing.
Unit 5: Collective Memory
Teaching on this unit is focused on group work, new explorations, and storytelling in rich media. Considerations of collective memory extend over much of the course. This unit frames the relevance of collective memory in relation to storytelling and the authentication of knowledge through inter-relational aesthetics.
Exploration refers to experiment with unfamiliar tactics and practices of making. The activity is student-centred and individually focused. You will be supported through group tutorials and workshops. The theme for the unit is experimentation rather than completion and success; the focus is on process not product. As such, your brief is to initiate and expand your practices into unfamiliar and untested areas. Failure is a welcome reality of process and helps you to build resistance into your practice.
The final Master's component is principally concerned with processes and strategies of making, dissemination, and impact.
Unit 6: Putting it into the World.
This unit supports you in presenting your practice or study and making your content public. Experiences from all the other units contribute to this moment of production and making culminating in sharing your practice publicly. Students will consider means of locating a new audience beyond the place of encounter. You will explore methods of feedback and interaction with your audiences.
Unit 7: Strategy and Dynamics
In this unit, you may be pursuing independent projects but will still be working closely with your peers, through collective discussion and review. The final major project is forward looking and propositional, consolidating the intercultural base of the course. As a cohort, you will build and maintain networks and connections developed through your time on the course.
The early stages of this unit includes the in-person intensive residential, focussing on habits of reflective practices and future practices.
Important note concerning academic progression through your course: If you are required to retake a unit you will need to cease further study on the course until you have passed the unit concerned. Once you have successfully passed this unit, you will be able to proceed onto the next unit. Retaking a unit might require you to take time out of study, which could affect other things such as student loans or the visa status for international students.
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