Arts Policy and Management MA

Birkbeck, University of London

Arts management plays a vital role in designing, shaping and supporting the arts, helping to ensure that access, freedom and equality are achieved across all aspects of the cultural sector. Our flexible MA Arts Policy and Management is ideal if you are an arts manager and wish to develop your practice and deepen your understanding of the background, theories and principles of arts and cultural management. Alternatively, if you are contemplating a career in arts policy and management and aim to understand current trends and debates that inform the day-to-day running of arts organisations, it provides a comprehensive overview of the sector.

The MA gives you a chance to explore the requirements and benefits of strategic management, leadership, power relations and policy and to analyse evaluations within art production. The programme balances theory and practice within the context of the current social, political, economic and technological environments. We invite you to develop and expand your key critical thinking skills in smaller discursive seminar groups focusing on public and voluntary sector arts organisations, but also address key commercial sector issues.

Making the most of our central London location, you can take advantage of one of the largest concentrations of art spaces, cultural organisations and festivals, with the British Museum, Wellcome Gallery, Bloomsbury Festival and West End theatres, and a wealth of other museums and galleries within walking distance. For those who want to deepen their sector experience, we offer a placement module that encourages students to work on their own research interests within an arts organisation. Past students have had valuable experiences in organisations ranging from the Greater London Authority to the Hackney Museum, and from the Big Dance Project to the Wallace Collection.

You start with a core module that introduces overarching topics such as cultural identity, creative labour and management structures, cultural diversity and leadership, cultural evaluation and big data applications in arts management. You then specialise through your own tailored pathway, selecting two modules, that combine knowledge and experience related to art subfields (e.g. performing, visual arts) or specific groups and stakeholders (e.g. artists, audiences, pro-sumer or cultural organisations) via a chosen contextual approach such as power, identity, memory, digitalisation or learning. With a further option module choice you can complement your degree with, for example, legal knowledge, marketing and comparative cultural policies to fit your interests. You finish your degree with a piece of individual research (dissertation) of your choice in consultation with a supervisor.

CAREERS AND EMPLOYABILITY

Graduates can pursue careers in the creative arts, education and museums/galleries. Possible professions include higher education lecturer, museum/gallery curator, or arts administrator. This degree may also be useful in becoming a community arts worker or multimedia specialist.