Arts and Cultural Enterprise

Course Structure

1. Option 1: 90 weeks over 2 years
2. Option 2: Up to 5 years
3. The course starts with Unit 1: Researching Arts and Cultural Enterprise, in which you are introduced to key concepts of cultural production as well as the research, writing, analysis and evaluation skills essential for postgraduate study. You begin to work together as a group, learning to negotiate, agree ground rules, communicate and share ideas and, importantly, learn how to approach and resolve difficulty and conflict.
4. Unit 2: Practice, Policy and Markets engages you in the macro analysis of the realm of cultural and artistic production and dissemination. It enables you to develop an understanding of cultural production in both the commercial and the public realms.
5. Unit 3: Contexts \x96 Local and Global Challenges looks at the impact of contemporary values and discourses on the future. It interrogates globalisation as a challenge as well as an opportunity, and facilitates an understanding of enterprise in uncertain contexts.
6. Unit 4: Arts Entrepreneurship explores the ways in which creativity, innovation, problem solving and entrepreneurship intersect. It employs real-world examples to enable you to think about business model innovation, new markets, new experiences and services, new ways of communication and new organisational models.
7. Unit 5: Business Models and Finance is the core business unit of the course. It introduces you to the basics of general business processes and developing strategies around short and longer-term challenges. Teaching includes theoretical approaches, and case-study-based learning.
8. Unit 6: Focus: Social Impact and Innovation engages with the overarching principles of social responsibility, ethical behaviours, social innovation and theories of socially-engaged practices, and challenges you to form an understanding of how cultural events and activities can support engagement with innovation and innovative practices.
9. Unit 7: Dissertation or live personal project is the final, Masters-specific 60-credit unit, which enables you to reflect critically on theories and critical skills encountered previously in the course, while proposing new approaches to cultural production, in a self-directed dissertation or major personal project. The dissertation is an individual academic study, based on models and theories discussed throughout the course; the live project puts strategies of cultural production into practice. This unit culminates in you working together to organise an online exhibition of your work.