Course summary

This innovative, interdisciplinary culture, diaspora and ethnicity postgraduate course stretches across the arts, humanities and social sciences to allow you to examine connections between colonial histories and our ordinary, local, everyday life. Why choose this course?

• Birkbeck is a global centre for research and teaching on ‘race’ and racism, so you will join a multidisciplinary community of scholars and students, and research centres committed to the study of this subject area.

• This course offers you the opportunity to explore important topics including histories of ‘race’ and racism, multiculture and postcoloniality, and connections between transcontinental histories of colonisation, contemporary social formations and inequalities.

• You will also be able to evaluate how local debates on inequality are shaped by the global geopolitics of the twenty-first century as well as different postcolonial political communities, social identities and cultures.

• modern colonial statecraft and histories of ‘race’ and other systems of categorisation

• colonial cultures and nationalisms

• histories of anticolonial, antifascist and antiracist resistance

• criminalisation and histories of state and corporate negligence and violence

• theorising community and postcolonial belonging

• contemporary racial nationalisms and religious authoritarian movements

• race, gender, sexuality and desire.

• This course consistently achieves high levels of satisfaction from Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey respondents. In 2019 and 2020, the student satisfaction rate was 100%; in 2021, 95%; in 2022, 85%; and in 2023, 100%.

• Birkbeck is the first higher education institution in London to receive the title University of Sanctuary.

• On studying this course you will join a vibrant, stimulating and highly diverse intellectual environment and gain access to affiliated groups and research centres such as the Race Forum at Birkbeck, the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the Birkbeck Institute on Gender and Sexuality.

• You will also be able to join specialist student reading groups that focus on particular subject areas such as medicine, ‘race’ and empire and psychoanalysis and colonialism.

• You may be eligible for a Bonnart Trust Master’s Studentship, Birkbeck Access to Postgraduate Study Scholarship or Aziz Foundation Scholarship.

• analysis, argumentation, reasoning and writing skills

• the capacity to apply knowledge to a range of contexts and phenomena

• how to communicate complex ideas to a range of audiences.

• film

• journalism

• teaching or academic research

• curatorship

• architecture

• fiction writing or poetry

• music

• postcolonial, cultural or urban studies

• psychosocial studies and sociology

• psychoanalysis and psychotherapy

• law and political activism.