MSc Culture and Society

About the MSc programme

This programme offers the following benefits:

• Teaching by research active staff, who are renowned in their fields, across a wide range of cultural research, and located across a range of departments and institutes linked with the programme (including Media and Communications, Geography and Environment, the Cities Programme, Social Psychology, Anthropology, Gender and Information Systems).
• Core courses and optional courses involve teaching by LSE staff renowned for their expertise in the field of cultural research, including Don Slater (programme director), Ayona Datta (co-director), Nigel Dodd, Sonia Livingstone, Andy Pratt, and Edgar Whitley. Together the research interests of these staff reflect an interdisciplinary range of approaches to the connections between culture, society, economy, and media within a broad social sciences framework.
• The chance to consolidate or extend your knowledge of cultural analysis through the programme's two term compulsory course in cultural theory and cultural forms, supplemented by a one term course in either social theory or media theory (to fit your specific interests).
• The opportunity to do empirical work in your dissertation into an aspect of cultural practice (whether cultural production or cultural consumption) or cultural theory.
• The chance to progress to a research degree (MPhil/PhD) following completion of your MSc, building particularly on the work of your dissertation.
• A higher degree in cultural research within a social science framework will provide you with a knowledge of how the 'cultural turn' has affected the social sciences, and skills in critical social understanding and techniques of social enquiry, that will enable you to develop insights into contemporary cultural forms and processes that have a solid basis in sociological analysis.

This programme covers the most significant recent developments in cultural theory and cultural research within a broad social sciences framework. It enables you to develop an interdisciplinary theoretical awareness, and then specialise in particular areas, leading to an original piece of research about a chosen aspect of the contemporary cultural field.

You take compulsory courses plus methods training. You also write a dissertation of 10,000 words on an aspect of cultural practice or theory. You will be advised on your choice of dissertation topic by your academic adviser, and that topic may be empirical or theoretical in its approach. You will be appointed an individual adviser with a related research interest whom you can meet with regularly during term times.

Compulsory courses

(* half unit)

• Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms
• Classical Social Thought* or Theories and Concepts in Media and Communications (Processes of Mediation, Identity and Change)*
• Qualitative Methods for Cultural Research*
• Dissertation

Options

Choose to the full value of one full unit from the following:

• Gender, Knowledge and Research Practice*
• Globalising Sexualities*
• Cultural Constructions of the Body* 
• Contemporary Urbanism  
• The Audience in Media and Communications* 
• Theories and Concepts in Media and Communications (Media and Power)*
• Identity, Transnationalism and the Media*
• Global Media Industries* 
• Social Representations*
• Current Communication Research*
• Representations, Institutions and Communities*
• Science, Technology and Resistance*
• Cognition and Culture*
• Regulation, Risk, and Economic Life
• New Media, Development and Globalisation*
• Topics in Race, Ethnicity and Post Colonial Studies
• Racial Formations of Modernity*
• Contemporary Social Thought
• Race, Ethnicity and Migration in Britain (post 1945)*
• Race and Biopolitics*
• Cities, Politics and Citizenship*
• Qualitative Research With Non-Traditional Data*
• The Urban Revolution* 
• Any other MSc level course with permission from your academic adviser. 

Please note that not every course is necessarily available each year.