Culture, Diaspora, Ethnicity (MA / Postgraduate Diploma / Postgraduate Certificate) - 2013/2014 entry

The programme stretches across the social sciences and arts and humanities, drawing together core historical and theoretical perspectives in the broad multidisciplinary areas of 'race' and ethnicity, multiculture and postcoloniality. It explores connections between histories of empire and contemporary social formations and inequalities in the UK, considering how local debates on 'race' and racism are shaped by the global geopolitics of the twenty-first century.

The programme focuses on subjects including: empire and the formation of modern Britain; histories of enslavement, colonisations and the concept of 'race'; colonial cultures; anti-racist political resistance; religion, class and postcolonial multiculture; 'the war on terror'; histories of criminalisation; and nationalism and human rights. It further explores debates on: place and belonging; contemporary political communities, social identities and urban cultures; 'race' and 'beauty'; racialisation; 'race' and psychoanalysis; 'hybridity' and 'mixedness'; 'whiteness' and 'race', gender, sexuality and desire. It aims to draw connections between intersecting colonial histories across the globe and our ordinary local, everyday, cultural, intimate and psychic life. The programme offers you the opportunity to study a wide range of different subjects in this broad multidisciplinary area.

The MA is convened by academics who are currently researching and working on: racialisation, psychoanalysis and postcoloniality; elites and transnational urban cultures; imprisonment and housing, local and global 'development' and displacement. You can also choose from a range of option modules convened by other academics in other departments across Birkbeck.

This innovative, interdisciplinary postgraduate programme will be of interest to those who want to develop careers in the arts and cultural industries, education, health and social care, mental health, housing, conflict resolution and mediation, social research, urban planning, journalism, and in a range of other areas. It will also be of interest to those who wish to pursue an academic career in sociology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies or psychosocial studies or in the social sciences or humanities more generally and to those who simply wish to develop an advanced understanding of ‘race’ and racism, multiculture and postcoloniality.

• The programme introduces you to different historical and political debates and theoretical perspectives in the broad multidisciplinary area of 'race' and racism, multiculture and postcoloniality.
• You will participate in a vibrant, stimulating and diverse intellectual environment. There is a ‘Race Forum' and several other research institutes at Birkbeck that focus on relevant subject areas.
• The programme is flexibly designed for students from all backgrounds to pursue their own particular research and professional interests.
• The MA draws from sociology, cultural studies, history, anthropology, law, literary studies, psychosocial studies and urban studies.

The programme combines taught core and option modules and provides the opportunity for independent research supervised by an academic. The core modules introduce you to significant historical and political debates and theoretical perspectives. The option modules are specialist subject courses which focus on a specific area, such as human rights, Lacanian psychoanalysis, migration and refugees, and Latin American cinema.

MA

Students complete 180 credits composed of two 30-credit core modules; two 30-credit special subject option modules and a 60-credit dissertation/independent research project.

Postgraduate Diploma

Students complete 120 credits: two 30-credit core modules and two 30-credit option modules.

Postgraduate Certificate

Students complete 60 credits: two core modules, or one core module and an option module. 

Full-time study

• ‘Race’, Racism, Postcoloniality (autumn term- core module one: 30 credits)
• Culture, Community, Identity (spring term- core module two: 30 credits)
• two option modules (30 credits each – see list below)
• A Postcolonial Imagination: Researching ‘Race’ and Contemporary Culture (spring term) 
• Dissertation Workshop (summer term)
• Dissertation (60 credits).

Part-time study

Year 1:

• ‘Race,’ Racism, Postcoloniality (autumn term- core module one: 30 credits)
• option module (30 credits – see list below)
• A Postcolonial Imagination: Researching ‘Race’ and Contemporary Culture (spring term)
• Dissertation Workshop (summer term)

Year 2:

• Culture, Community, Identity (spring term- core module two: 30 credits)
• option module (see list below)
• 10,000–12,000-word dissertation.

Option modules vary from year to year. In 2012–2013, they include:

• The Arab-Israeli Question
• After the Ottoman Empire
• A Confusion of Tongues: Illness, Language, Writing
• Cultural History of War in Britain and America between the First World War and the Conflict in Vietnam
• Cultures of Human Rights
• Education, Globalisation and Social Change
• Education, Power and Resistances
• Empires in Modern East Asia
• Environment and Policy
• Futures: The Globalization of Human Rights
• Gender and Development
• Gender and Sexuality in Japanese Fiction
• Gender and Society
• International Asylum and Refugee Law
• International Political Economy of Childhood  
• Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Practice
• Latin American Cinemas
• Material and Visual Cultures of Development
• Men and Masculinities in East Asia
• Migration and Refugees
• Museums, Memory and National Identity
• Perspectives on Japanese Cinema
• Post-Apartheid Jurisprudence
• Religion in Society and Politics: Britain and Ireland 1801-2001
• Roads to Genocide 1914-45
• Shared Traumas: France and Algeria since 1830
• Technology, Modernity and the Nation: Britain and Germany 1880 to 1930
• Theorising Gender
• Visual Culture: Power and the Image
• Voluntary and Community Sectors in the U.K
• War, Conflict and Development
• Western Images of Japan 1868-1912.
  

In Year 1, you will take the core module ‘Race’, Racism, Postcoloniality` in the autumn term. Option modules can be taken in the autumn, spring or summer terms depending on individual workloads but we recommend that you take your option module in the spring term in order to balance your work evenly through the year. The Research Methods module ‘A Postcolonial Imagination: Researching ‘Race’ and Contemporary Culture’ will be held across four Saturdays during the spring term and a series of dissertation workshops will be held in the summer term.

In Year 2, option modules can be taken in the autumn, spring or summer terms depending on individual workloads but we advise that you take an option module in the autumn term to balance your work evenly through the year. The core module ‘Culture, Community, Identity’ is held in the spring term and the dissertation is submitted at the beginning of September at the end of the second academic year.

Dissertation

The dissertation is 10,000–12,000 words. Full-time students submit this at the end of the academic year in September. Part-time students submit at the end of Year 2 in September. You will work closely with a dissertation supervisor. Below are some of the dissertation topics chosen by students in previous years:

• Camberwell New Church Street: 'race', faith and gentrification in South East London. A study of a campaign against a black majority church in Camberwell, London.
• Fear, crime and racial segregation in a local neighbourhood in a small town in contemporary Italy
• Multi-agency approaches to victims of race hate crime
• ‘Mixed-race’ identities in contemporary London
• Representations of blackness in contemporary R&B and hip-hop
• ‘Honour killings’ and anti-Muslim racism in contemporary Britain
• Zionism and Rastafarianism
• The (re)criminalisation of black youth in Britain
• Representations of multiculturalism in contemporary children’s literature
• Contemporary asylum legislation in the U.K and the criminalisation of refugees
• Discourses in government policy and media representations of forced marriage and South Asian Muslim communities in the U.K
• Hindu nationalisms in contemporary India.

You will join a flourishing and diverse postgraduate student community and a growing research culture. Birkbeck Library has an extensive teaching collection of books, journals and learning resources in sociology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and related disciplines. You will also be able to use the rich research resources nearby including Senate House Library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science (the LSE Library), the SOAS Library and the British Library. There is a ‘Race Forum’ which hosts talks from visiting speakers and organises workshops, seminars and symposia. There are also research institutes which focus on relevant subject areas such as the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities; Birkbeck Law School Centre for Law and the Humanities; The Centre for Media, Culture and Creative Practice and reading groups such as the Postcolonial Studies Reading Group.

If you are interested in further research, we offer a PhD/MPhil in Psychosocial Studies.

Find out more about our postgraduate courses. 

Graduates include youth and community workers and workers for charities and organisations whose concerns range from ‘race relations’ and policing to domestic violence, refugees and asylum, human rights, imprisonment and rehabilitation. They also include barristers and solicitors, psychotherapists, lecturers and social researchers in the areas of sociology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and social policy, teachers, film-makers, curators, architects, novelists, journalists and those working in the arts and cultural industries. There are currently several graduates undertaking doctoral research in this subject area.

There is no closing date, but we encourage you to apply as early as possible.