MA Museum Studies

Arts University Plymouth

Masters programmes offer you an intensive personal programme of creative and stimulating study within a supportive critical and practical framework that enables you to examine, interrogate and reflect upon the nature and role of your chosen practice.

MA Museum Studies at Arts University Plymouth offers a unique opportunity to reimagine the role of the museum within contemporary socio-political debates, working with The Box, Plymouth's award-winning museum, art collection, gallery and archive (also home to the South West Film & Television Archive), and a range of regional and national museums and collections including Tate St Ives, Tate Britain Archives, and RAMM Exeter.

The museum as a cultural form will be reimagined and explored through debates around decolonisation, the repatriation of objects, distributed digital archives and the educational role of museums, and diversifying collections and audiences. Through this programme you will propose a project that engages ideas of the contemporary museum using methods including socially engaged practice, community building and and creative education as a productive and mobilising force that is now vital in a rapidly transforming museum sector. Your work will be situated in a city and region with a pervasive colonial and military heritage.

You’ll have support to pursue your own research directions through the university’s interdisciplinary art, design and media facilities and our specialist library: examining the complex process of design, museum curatorship and interpretation interrogating theories of exhibition and display, audiences and museology and initiating research projects focused on the practical, pedagogical and theoretical questions underpinning museum education and audience outreach.

Through your investigation of the components and conventions of exhibition display, community and audience outreach and museum education, you will be prepared to enter the workplace in a wide range of roles in museums, curation, heritage and arts management, as well as for further postgraduate research.