Aesthetics of Kinship and Community (MA) - 2012/2013 entry

This programme will be of interest to those already involved in the arts and humanities, who have developed an interest in the question of kinship/community representation and who want to develop theoretical tools and a broader basis of understanding to strengthen and enrich this interest. It will also appeal to people studying or working in the social sciences, community areas or psychology, who want to extend their understanding to the arts and how they deal with the same issues in a non-empirical manner.

It is ideal for students wishing to foster or maintain an interdisciplinarity that many Master’s degrees do not allow for, and also for people currently outside academia, working in the field of community- or family-orientated issues, who wish to gain a fresh perspective.

• Unique opportunity to study the question of social and familial formation from a specifically arts and humanities perspective.
• The only Master’s programme of its kind in the country.

You will take a core module, Modern Kinships and Communities: Theories and Representations, and three option modules, which may include: 

• Representations of the Friend from Aristotle to Facebook
• Reinventing the Family in Contemporary French Cinema
• Anticapitalism in Contemporary Literary and Visual Cultures
• Fantastical Kinship and Community in Postmodern Literature and Film
• Film Melodrama and the Family
• Sex and Sexualities in French Literature and Cinema
• Death, Disease and the Early Modern City
• Mapping Utopias: From Early Modern to Postmodern
• Algeria: Colony to Post-Colony
• Comparative Decolonizations: The End of the European Colonial Empires
• Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Japanese Fiction 
• Of Japanese Descent
• Men and Masculinities in East Asia
• Narrating the Nation: The Modern Novel in Japan
• Exhibiting the Pain of Others: Museums, Violence and Memory 
• Museums, Memory and National Identity
• Urban Spaces in Modern Cultures
• Queer Histories, Queer Cultures
• Childhood Cultures in Modern Spain
• Representations of ‘Race’ and Racism in French and Francophone Culture
• Negotiating Gender.

You will also take a module in Research Skills and complete a 15,000-word dissertation.

Connection to Birkbeck Research in Representations of Kinship and Community, with regular seminars, speakers and lectures, and a research culture.

If you are interested in further research, the programme provides an ideal grounding for a kinship/community-based arts PhD.

Graduates go on to careers in international business, translation, education administration, intercultural consultancy, publishing, government, and tourism/hospitality.

• You should apply as early as possible.