Heritage (Contemporary Practice) MA

This course is ideal if you are interested in exploring:

• heritage studies in an international context; and
• contemporary heritage practices in a creative and stimulating environment.

Heritage studies is a complex, multi-layered and inherently inter-disciplinary field of academic inquiry and professional practice. Our MA is therefore sits within a critical and reflexive interdisciplinary framework. Heritage is understood as a fluid and contested concept in which creative, sustainable practices are debated and developed. In this environment you have the freedom to develop your own approaches to creative practice, navigating your own way through the field.

This course is designed to accommodate students from a wide range of academic backgrounds and research interests, those with existing professional experience or students considering a new career. For example, some may already be in employment within the heritage sector and are looking for the space and time to think critically about their practice, some may be interested in pursuing doctoral research after the MA, and others will be either working within or towards other, related areas of the museums and cultural sector and creative economies.

You will study a series of taught modules concerned with issues of critical theory and analysis, research methodologies and creative practice.

You will be expected to conduct research around the broad themes and subjects addressed by each module. This research will allow you to tailor your own path of study according to your particular interests and future aspirations.

Module collaborations

The modules on this course have been developed in collaboration with several institutions:

The Material Thinking and Creative Practice module has been developed and is co-delivered in collaboration with the National Maritime Museum.

The Collaboration and Craft module has been developed in consultation with Kingston Museum and Heritage Service.

The Performing Heritage module has been developed and is co-delivered in collaboration with Historic Royal Palaces.

Find out more about the modules on this course.

Creative practice

The Heritage (Contemporary Practice) MA is a critical and creative practice-based postgraduate programme of academic study. It is ambitious in its aim to:

• re-imagine the relationships between academy and profession; and
• explore the implications and applications of this approach to accepted ideas of academic heritage studies and heritage practice.

Ideas of, and approaches to, practice are therefore central to the course, as are opportunities for engaging directly in experimental and creative practice-based research in both institutional and more-than-institutional contexts.

Located within the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, the MA programme of study engages across artistic, urban planning, architectural and design practices as offering alternative creative approaches to heritage study and practice. Our genuinely interdisciplinary approach to creative practice is one of the unique features of our curriculum.

A place-based approach

The programme develops through a strongly place-based approach to heritage. The broad aim is to offer a more sustainable, place-sensitive approach to our understandings of heritage and heritage practices, and their academic study.

Our place-based approach also draws on our location in London as a world city. Place, locality, ecology and community are essential to ideas and practices of heritage, whichever country our students might come from. The course aspires to be international in its scope and vision while always grounded in a sympathetic and progressive approach to place.

Please note that this is an indicative list of modules and is not intended as a definitive list.

Available modules

• Interrogating Heritage

• Interrogating Heritage

  This module establishes a progressive interdisciplinary framework for critically and creatively interrogating heritage as idea, process, resource, and as a field of academic inquiry. International in scope, it explores key issues in contemporary heritage including:

  • tangible and intangible heritage;
  • non-western traditions and practices;
  • dissonant heritage;
  • community and participation;
  • tourism and development;
  • memory and forgetting;
  • authenticity; and
  • significance and value(s).

  Download full module guide (PDF).

  
   
• Collaboration and Craft

• Collaboration and Craft

  Museums and heritage are more than physical landmarks in the landscape. They are on-going, place-based processes crafted from and with diverse and sometimes dissonant human and non-human materials, actors and communities. This module explores museum and heritage futures using progressive approaches to critical ecologies of place, planning and sustainability. It draws on collaborative and relational approaches to planning and place, including non-western approaches, as positive and necessary for imagining, and planning for, the sustainable futures of museums and heritage in the 21st century.

  Download full module guide (PDF).

  
   
• Performing Heritage

• Performing Heritage

  This module provides an opportunity for you to explore the role of creative practices in the performance of heritage.

  It explores performance, communication and interpretation through site, building, the interior, biography, landscape, the tangible and intangible elements of cultural and natural heritage. It does so by drawing on expertise across creative artistic, design and performance practices.

  Creative practices and approaches discussed include landscape design, contemporary art practices interrogating institutional space, site specific and land art, objects and materiality, archaeology, film, storytelling and new media.

  Assessment is by developing a creative response to a brief for a heritage resource.

  Download full module guide (PDF).

  
   
• Material Thinking and Creative Practice

• Material Thinking and Creative Practice

  Research and practice are at the heart of museums, galleries and heritage. Although claims have been made for the multi- and inter-disciplinary natures of these related fields, the promise of genuine interdisciplinarity is hampered by an ongoing distinction made between 'academic' practice and 'professional' practice. This module attempts to bridge this divide using a toolbox of interdisciplinary approaches to doing creative research – creative research being proposed as the main activity of all practitioners in the fields of museums, galleries and heritage, regardless of where they may be positioned or situated within institutional or academic contexts.

  Download full module guide (PDF).

  
   
• Dissertation

• Dissertation

  The dissertation can be pursued in two ways:

  • a 12–15,000 written essay, or
  • the creative project option – under this option you write a 5,000 critical-reflective essay supporting a piece of creative practice of your choosing.
  
   
• International Study Visit (non-credit module)

• International Study Visit (non-credit module)

  Each year our MA students have the opportunity to participate in a week-long not-for-credit international study visit. In 2011/12 we are visiting Berlin; a wonderful opportunity to visit a range of museums, galleries and sites in a fascinating European city. The intinerary is developed collaboratively between staff and students with plenty of time for personal exploration. Places that might be visited include the Neues Museum, Jewish Museum, Topographie des Terrors, Hamburger Bahnhof, Altes Museum, Deutches Historisches Museum, Reichstag, and Neue Nationalgalerie.
  
  Download the module guide (PDF).

  
   

The Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture teaches this course. Find out more...

You will have access to the on-site galleries, as well as other facilities.

Find out more...