Course summary
Arts University Plymouth is an arts university for the 21st century, preparing students who are uniquely placed to provide creative solutions to the complex global challenges of a changing world. Formerly known as Plymouth College of Art, we were granted full university title in Spring 2022. We are now the city of Plymouth’s first and only specialist arts university, allowing us to offer our students a dynamic and unique learning experience. MA Museum Studies at Arts University Plymouth offers a unique opportunity to reimagine the role of the museum within contemporary socio-political debates, working with The Box, Plymouth's award-winning museum, art collection, gallery and archive (also home to the South West Film & Television Archive), and a range of regional and national museums and collections including Tate St Ives, Tate Britain Archives, and RAMM Exeter. The museum as a cultural form will be reimagined and explored through debates around decolonisation, the repatriation of objects, distributed digital archives and the educational role of museums, and diversifying collections and audiences. Through this programme you will propose a project that engages ideas of the contemporary museum using methods including socially engaged practice, community building and and creative education as a productive and mobilising force that is now vital in a rapidly transforming museum sector. Your work will be situated in a city and region with a pervasive colonial and military heritage. MA Museum Studies at Arts University Plymouth builds on the context of Plymouth as a centre for contemporary art and culture, in light of recent events such Mayflower 400 (2020), Another Crossing: Artists Revisit the Mayflower Voyage (2022) and British Art Show 9 (2022-23). You’ll have support to pursue your own research directions through the university’s interdisciplinary art, design and media facilities and our specialist library: examining the complex process of design, museum curatorship and interpretation; interrogating theories of exhibition and display, audiences and museology; and initiating research projects focused on the practical, pedagogical and theoretical questions underpinning museum education and audience outreach. Through your investigation of the components and conventions of exhibition display, community and audience outreach and museum education, you will be prepared to enter the workplace in a wide range of roles in museums, curation, heritage and arts management, as well as for further postgraduate research. Offered within the context of a specialist arts university, this programme is focused on the future of the museum. Through your investigation of the components and conventions of exhibition display, community and audience outreach and museum education, you will be prepared to enter the workplace in a wide range of roles. Graduates become museum educators, curators, cultural programme managers, art critics, museum outreach coordinators, heritage and public arts professionals, or alternatively specialise further in postgraduate research.
Modules
The comprehensive Masters structure, which is shared across our specialist subjects, enables our postgraduate students to focus on creative strategies and processes through three sequential units which support you in investigating, testing and developing your ideas. The core tuition focuses on training, research methodology, critical thinking, design, practice-led research methods and professional and conceptual frameworks. All of our programmes have access to outstanding workshop facilities in the university. A unique component of our postgraduate curriculum is a programme of Research Intensives which invites all MA students into small periods of deep learning in areas of creative expertise led by the university’s research-active staff and external specialists. These Research Intensives enrich subject-specific study with adjacent practices, cultural theories, and creative methodologies that will challenge historical assumptions of your subject and inspire innovative, cross-disciplinary approaches, giving you the opportunity to lead your discipline with original insights. You will be supported in your MA study by a Subject Tutor who is a specialist in your chosen discipline, to provide a consistent touchstone for the critical development and formal progression of your creative or theoretical work. In addition to your Subject Tutor, you will have ongoing tutorials, critiques, and discipline-specific seminars taught by other members of the postgraduate faculty who lead the curriculum units. By combining learning units with specialist assignments and personal project proposals, you will be able to achieve depth and specialisation within your subject area, while at the same time develop a critical methodology through techniques that can be applied across the commercial, social and public sectors. All students are asked to submit an initial statement on application to the course. This sets out your ideas for the MA programme you have selected. Creative practice is about change and development, and this statement will form the starting point for a dialogue about your work and your study journey.
Assessment method
The final module of each programme may be submitted as a dissertation or as practice, depending on which pathway best suits your concerns as a creative practitioner.
Entry requirements
BA 2.2; equivalent professional experience or portfolio; exceptional project proposal.
Fees and funding
Tuition fees
No fee information has been provided for this course
Tuition fee status depends on a number of criteria and varies according to where in the UK you will study. For further guidance on the criteria for home or overseas tuition fees, please refer to the UKCISA website .
Additional fee information
No additional fees or cost information has been supplied for this course, please contact the provider directly.
Provider information
Arts University Plymouth
Tavistock Place
Plymouth
PL4 8AT