Culture and change: critical studies in the humanities is a two-year master’s programme aimed at students interested in better understanding various cultural phenomena, both past and present. The programme will encourage you to think expansively and creatively about how culture is produced and reproduced, and why it is still contested terrain. We explore and ask questions about issues of power, representation, memory, silence, and place. The programme will help you to bridge theory and practice, and to develop research interests in collaboration with external stakeholders. If you have ever considered working in the arts, policy-making, cultural administration, or even pursuing a PhD, this might be the ideal programme for you.
Culture is not just a set of texts, images, artefacts, and compositions that we experience or analyse. It is also a living medium through which we interact with the world and each other, as well as understand ourselves and the societies that we inhabit. Culture is constantly shifting and affects the way power is negotiated. In the post-truth, post-memory 21st century, it is still not clear how different perspectives and expressions of culture will continue to coexist. Questions that we need to face and tackle are: Who gets to speak and act, and who listens? Why do we produce knowledge, and what is it used for? And how can we ethically engage and participate in the work of making/doing “culture”?