MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise

The college is at the centre of a global network of alumni, educator-practitioners, and collaborating organisations and institutions. MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise works with knowledgeable practitioners to create an inspiring learning experience, within a wide-ranging professional network.

The intensive face-to-face teaching takes place at Central Saint Martins’ King’s Cross campus for the students enrolled in the London-based cohort, and at HKU SPACE’s Hong Kong campus for the Hong Kong-based students. Both cities are contemporary hubs for the cultural industries in their regions, and also rich sources of historical innovation across a wide range of cultural sectors, including museums, galleries, performance, festivals, and educational institutions.

MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise acknowledges that we are living in a fast-changing, globalised world, which presents a great number of opportunities and challenges for cultural innovation. This Masters Programme takes these changing conditions as a starting point to engage you in developing new knowledge and skills in order to manage cultural projects in the UK and around the world. It has been developed specifically in response to an increasing need for multi-skilled individuals who can both generate the ideas for original arts and cultural events, as well as provide leadership for the teams that realise them. These individuals will be dynamic, responsive, and fluent in public and private sectors, and have the ability to collaborate and develop networks.

The course addresses a contemporary shift within the cultural economy towards experiences and events, and away from the artefact. It is a response to multiple new forms of artistic and creative practice (interdisciplinary, time-based, socially-engaged, etc.), which demand new, hybrid forms of cultural management and organisation, and in turn, a new pedagogical approach from higher education institutions.

MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise takes as a starting point a definition of enterprise as engaging with projects that are new, challenging and complex, in order to create a valuable difference to specific stakeholders. It aims to enable you to gain a unique skill and knowledge set to become active creators in cultural management and production, be it as entrepreneurs, or within larger existing cultural organisations, anywhere in the world. For this reason, the course values rich cultural diversity, and benefits from the broad range of cultural backgrounds of its students, staff, and the college generally. Cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue are the essential point-of-departure for cultural and creative innovation, which generates cultural capital, and in turn fosters economic capital formation.

The course is aimed at graduates with some years of work experience who wish to challenge themselves by gaining a critical understanding of our world today as well as skills in the design, planning and production of creative events in the broadest sense. Focusing on the core capabilities of CSM, and its central role in the future of arts and other creative industries, it will offer you insights into aspects of cultural policy and governance, an introduction to business skills and processes, and strategic planning, which will equip you to shape creative futures. It will encourage radical thinking, based on creative research, analysis, and a deep understanding of the value of the cultural economy, and its role in creating cultural capital, to the wider economic, political and social environment in which it is located.

The course operates through a blended-learning delivery model, by means of face-to-face and online teaching, in either a two-year part-time, or up to five-year flexible mode. This mode of learning supports those of you who are already established in your careers, and who may be travelling from afar to join the course. Peer and collaborative learning is fundamental to this model, and is achieved through a series of lectures, webinars, group tasks and workshops, as well as practice-based project developments in the realm of cultural production, enabling you to create networks that we hope will last well beyond your studies.

The course comprises six multidisciplinary, 20-credit, Level 7 units that can be combined to achieve a PG Cert or PG Dip, followed by a 60-credit unit (dissertation/major project), to achieve an MA. Each of the six 20-credit units sets out to equip you with specific skills, knowledge and insights relevant to cultural innovation; as such, the content, teaching and learning activities, and assessment evidence for each one, is distinctive and uses the lexicon and discourses relevant to the specific range of disciplines that it covers. The final 60-credit unit offers the opportunity to bring together and demonstrate your assimilation of the skills and knowledge gained.

We are committed to developing ethical arts and cultural practices. To achieve this, we are working to embed UAL's Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice into the course.