Postgraduate programmes

MPhil/PhD
MA Cultural Studies
MA Culture Industry
MA Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice
MA Postcolonial Studies

Centre for
Cultural Studies
 Contents

2 Goldsmiths introduction
5 About the Centre for Cultural Studies
6 Introducing the Degrees
8 MPhil/PhD in Cultural Studies
13 MA in Cultural Studies
19 MA in Culture Industry
24 MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory and Practice
31 MA in Postcolonial Studies
36 Option courses for MA programmes
46 Key academic staff
51 Contact us
52 Disclaimer

This booklet gives information about postgraduate

programmes at the Centre for Cultural Studies,
Goldsmiths, University of London. Please read it
in conjunction with the Postgraduate Prospectus.

We can supply information in

alternative formats for people with a
visual impairment. Please contact the
Admissions Office, tel 020 7919 7060,
e-mail admissions@gold.ac.uk, or visit
www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/disability.

Goldsmiths
introduction
Unique, unconventional, creative
Whoever you are, and however you’ve made
your way here, Goldsmiths will transform the
way you look at yourself and the world around
you. Goldsmiths is all about the freedom
to experiment, to think differently, to be an
individual. That’s why our list of former students
includes names like Antony Gormley, Julian
Clary, Damien Hirst, Mary Quant, Bridget Riley,
Vivienne Westwood, Graham Coxon, Malcolm
McLaren. We bring creative and unconventional
approaches to all of our subjects, but everything
we do is based on the highest academic
standards of teaching and research.
Tradition and quality
Goldsmiths has been part of the University of
London, a federation of institutions which make
up one of the world’s largest universities, for
more than a century. This means that you will
benefit from the broad range of University of
London facilities, including the Union (ULU),
the Library and The Careers Group. For more
information, visit www.london.ac.uk.
Research culture
Goldsmiths successfully combines the resources
and facilities of a major international institution,
the University of London, with all the advantages
of a small, campus-based College. Add our
membership of the prestigious 1994 Group
of research universities and our outstanding
performances in the official Research
Assessment Exercise (RAE), and you have a
uniquely radical and stimulating environment
for your research.

As a postgraduate student you’ll have access
to our newly established Graduate School,
which provides facilities and training for all
postgraduates. You’ll be stretched academically,
and encouraged to look beyond preconceptions
and boundaries to gain insights from other
disciplines. Ultimately, you should benefit from
better career prospects and life skills as well as
from a better understanding of how your subject
relates to the wider intellectual world. Find out
more at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/graduate-school/.
London with a difference
Goldsmiths is in New Cross, South East
London. Vibrant, urban and with great travel
connections to Central London, it’s an ideal
low-cost base for experiencing and enjoying the
Capital. Goldsmiths is in Travel card Zone 2,
and has plenty of public transport links (bus,
train, underground and Dockland Light Railway
[DLR]); Central London is just 15 minutes away.
New Cross has a good network of reliable night
buses – especially useful if you’re planning an
evening out!
An International community
With students from 120 countries, Goldsmiths
provides a welcoming environment for
international (non-EU) students. As part of the
University of London, our quality of our degrees
is internationally recognised – a real advantage
for your future studies or career. London is one
of the most exciting cities in the world, and
living here will open up lots of new experiences
to you. To apply, please contact the International
Office or download an application form from
www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/apply.
Beyond the lecture theatre
The Goldsmiths Students’ Union is a vibrant
and award-winning organisation, providing a
range of services including representation, clubs,
societies, volunteering opportunities, student
media, advice, meeting rooms, sports facilities,
and entertainment. The Students’ Union at
Goldsmiths plays a big part in life here, providing
opportunities for exciting extracurricular
experiences whatever your interests.
State of the art
If you come to Goldsmiths, you’ll probably spend
a lot of your time in the Rutherford Information
Services Building (RISB), with its striking glazed
facade and aluminium fins. The RISB gives
you access on one site to library books, journals,
computer workstations, language-learning
resources, extensive multimedia and audio-visual
materials, and computer-based teaching rooms.
Goldsmiths’ stunning new Ben Pimlott Building
– with its signature ‘scribble in the sky’ – houses
our visual arts, design, computing, media and
cultural theory facilities.
Living space
With almost 1,000 places in Goldsmiths
accommodation within walking distance of the
campus (most less than five minutes away), you
won’t have to travel long distances and pay extra
transport costs. Goldsmiths offers a choice of
good quality, reasonably priced accommodation,
with rents comparable to similar universities
in London.
Awards and scholarships
You may be able to fund your postgraduate studies
through public organisations or via Goldsmiths-
run schemes. Research Councils provide public
funding in the form of studentships, and you
may also be able to apply for funding from one
of the many charities, foundations and trusts that
offer postgraduate scholarships and bursaries.
Goldsmiths runs several schemes that offer the
possibility of financial support.
We’re here to help
At Goldsmiths we have an integrated support
system for our students, whose personal well-
being and happiness is extremely important
to us. This is made up of a number of service
providers including the Student Funding and
Information Office (tel 020 7919 7757,
e-mail student-supp@gold.ac.uk), the Chaplaincy,
Medical Centre, Counselling Service, Nursery
and Careers Facilities.
See for yourself
If you’re thinking of studying at Goldsmiths,
we recommend you come and visit us to
have a look around. Our Open Days are ideal
opportunities to meet tutors and current
students, explore the campus, and find out
more about what Goldsmiths can offer you.
If you’d like further information please call
020 7717 2997, e-mail open-day@gold.ac.uk,
or visit www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/opendays.
Further information
Find out more about Goldsmiths in the
Postgraduate Prospectus, available from the
contact details at the end of this booklet or visit
our website at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk.

About the
Centre for Cultural
Studies (CCS)
Goldsmiths’ Centre for Cultural Studies
incorporates theoretical and practical explorations
in technological media and cultural difference in
the geo-political context of global capitalism.
Our commitment to theory involves enquiries
into the most advanced paradigms of cultural
thought. Our practical commitment involves us
in cultural production and critical engagement
with the culture industries. CCS research and
graduate study is dedicated to such theoretical
and practical investigation.
The Centre for Cultural Studies was launched in
1998. We now comprise some 120 postgraduate
students and 10 dedicated staff. We are in receipt
of nearly £1m of research contracts. The Centre’s
dedicated and associated staff are from 5, 5* and
6 rated RAE units. The Centre is a global leader
in cultural theory. We specialise in practice related
MA and PhD work and projects with practitioners
in media, arts, architecture and technology.
Key features
• We publish in cultural theory, global media,
cosmopolitanism, trans-national politics and
digital media.
• Our work reflects a global awareness
and encompasses a range of countries
and continents.
• We collaborate with industry, the arts
and government, with new media firms,
producers, art museums, film-makers
and artists, architects and digital
communication carriers.
• Our guest speakers, lecturers and research
colleagues include leading international
critical theorists, artists and cultural critics.
• Our range of innovative programmes brings
together social sciences, humanities and
visual arts.
• Our events, installations and talks cross the
traditional boundaries between academic
disciplines.
• We supervise MA and MPhil/PhD research
in all areas of Cultural Studies and focus
on the interaction and integration of theory
and practice. We support and encourage
students working in both text-based and
non-linear media.
• We are always at the leading edge of
contemporary thought.

Introducing
the degrees
We offer:
Research Degrees
MPhil and PhD
Taught Masters
MA in Cultural Studies
MA in Culture Industry
MA in Interactive Media: Critical Theory
and Practice
MA in Postcolonial Studies
Application and admission
Application forms are available from the
Admissions Office (home/EU students) or the
International Office (international [non EU]
students); downloadable forms are also available
on the Goldsmiths’ website. Please see page 51
for further details.
Although there is no closing date for receipt of
applications unless you intend to seek funding,
we advise you to submit your application early.
Admission is normally by interview and/or
submission of written work.
Entrance requirements
Please refer to individual programme entries
for specific entrance requirements.
English Language requirement
If English is not your first language, you must
obtain evidence of your English Language
competence. Tests considered appropriate include:
• International English Language Testing
System [IELTS) – pass with at least 7.0 overall
and a minimum of 6.5 in the written element

• TOEFL score of at least 600 including 5 in
the Test of Written English [TWE], or 250 in
the Computerised test [CT] including 5 in
the essay component, or 100 in the Internet-
based test [IBT]
• International GCSE (IGCSE) English as a
second language at Grade B
• Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency of
English [CPE] Level 5 at Grade B or above
• Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English
[CAE] Level 4 at Grade A or above
For further information, please see the
Postgraduate Prospectus. Alternatively, you may
wish to attend one of our pre-sessional English
Language courses. International candidates may
be accepted without an interview.
Open Days
College-wide Open days for all programmes
across the university are usually held three
times a year in Spring, Summer and Autumn.
For further information on these, please visit
the website at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk or
contact the Recruitments Events Manager, on
020 7717 2997. Research degree applicants
may visit the Department by appointment.
Fees
For information about fees, please see the
Postgraduate Prospectus or visit the web at
www.goldsmiths.ac.uk. Please note: fees are
quoted on a yearly basis.
Funding
Please also refer to the Financial information
section of the Postgraduate Prospectus.
Events
The Centre for Cultural Studies has a vibrant
events programme. Details of upcoming
colloquia are listed at http://www.goldsmiths.
ac.uk/cultural-studies/events.php. Among
speakers scheduled for academic year 2007-08
at the time of going to press is Professor Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak. Featured speakers in the past
have included Jeffrey Alexander, Fareed Armaly,
Paul Bachy-Rita, Ulrich Beck, Andrew Benjamin,
David Bennett, Marshall Berman, Homi Bhabha,
Henri Bortoft, Susan Buck-Morss, Rosi Braidotti,
Patricia Clough, Mike Davis, Manuel De Landa,
Diedrich Diedrichsen, Saurabh Dube, Olafur
Eliasson, Kodwo Eshun, Charlie Gere, Geof
Gilbert, Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman, Stuart Hall,
David Harvey, Bell Hooks, Charles Jencks, Karin
Knorr-Cetina, Rem Koolhaas, Donald McKenzie,
Scott McQuire, Erin Manning, WTJ Mitchell,
Stephen Muecke, Joseph Kosuth, Sarat Maharaj,
Brian Massumi, China Miéville, Paul Miller (DJ
Spooky), Chantal Mouffe, Reza Negarestani,
Marcos Novak, Chandrika Parmar, Mark Poster,
Ato Quayson, Paul Rabinow, Ziauddin Sardar,
Sumanyu Satpath, Richard Sennett, Steve
Shaviro, Felton Shortall, Barbara Maria Stafford,
Ed Soja, Luc Steels, Lucy Suchman, Michael
Taussig, Mackenzie Wark, and Harrison White.
External projects
The Centre for Cultural Studies is a research
centre. Current externally funded projects include
an ESRC funded project entitled Risk Cultures
in China: An Economic Sociology. The project
is funded by the ESRC between 2006 and
2009 with researchers working in Hong Kong,
Shanghai and London investigating the risk
involved in construction of markets in China.
The Centre is also currently researching and
designing new metadata-rich applications on
the internet in China, South Korea and the UK
through a Leverhulme-funded project as part of
Goldsmiths Media Research Programme. From
2003-2006 the Centre was the academic host
of a project titled Broadband: Interactive Media
Across Platforms, funded by the Department
of Trade and Industry (DTI), the Economic
and Social Research Council (ESRC), and
three industrial firms. The CCS’ role was to
investigate the emerging techno-culture of
second-generation broadband connections. The
Centre has also been involved in cultural policy
initiatives with the Institute of Contemporary
Arts (ICA), Channel 4, NESTA, Cap Gemini and
the Arts Council of England. We have worked
with the ICA, Tate Modern and the Architecture
Association in the UK, and the Musée de l’Art
Contemporain, France. We were home to a major
ESRC-funded project Silicon Alleys: Networks of
Virtual Objects, and in 2004 received an AHRC
Innovation Award for the Surfaces That See
project. More about the Centre’s research
projects can be found at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/
cultural-studies/research.php.
Accommodation
The Centre is housed in dedicated
accommodation provided in the converted
Laurie Grove Baths Building, a Grade II listed
building, and two converted Victorian houses
opposite, in Laurie Grove.

MPhil/PhD in
Cultural Studies
Introduction
We interrupt theory with practice and
practice with theory – we aim to engage you,
intellectually and critically, and with enthusiasm,
in a cultural studies project that questions
everything. The MPhil/PhD programme offers
an interdisciplinary approach to the study of
culture and will introduce you to a wide variety
of perspectives and traditions, animated through
a creative interface between disciplines. You
should develop a fundamental grounding in
social and cultural theory, cultural studies and
cultural research. You should also develop skills
in ethnography and cultural research more
generally and be able to deploy these to articulate
your appreciation of crucial debates in the public
domains of the media, the culture industries,
formal and informal institutions and in the wider
contemporary cultural scene. Many of you will
write text-based theses, but around one third of
our candidates produce theses that incorporate
practical work in media and/or arts. We welcome
applicants with a diversity of intellectual
backgrounds whose interests have come to
focus on cultural studies.
Entrance requirements
You should normally hold, or expect to hold,
a first degree of at least very high (top third)
upper second class standard in an appropriate
subject, and a Masters degree in Cultural
Studies or in a related field with good results,
especially in the dissertation. Applications from
EU and International students are welcomed.
If your home (native) language is not English,
please see page 6 in this booklet for the
language requirements.

Application and admission
Please see the Postgraduate Prospectus for
application details. Application forms are
available from, and should be returned to, either
the Admissions Office or the International
Office; you can also download copies from the
Goldsmiths’ website. Contact details are given
on page 51.
We recommend that you apply as early in
the academic year as possible; there are also
fixed deadlines for specific funding sources.
Admission normally requires face-to-face (or, in
exceptional circumstances, telephone) interview.
If you would like to come and discuss your
research with the Convenor of Postgraduate
Research and/or with a potential supervisor,
please contact the Centre Administrator to make
an appointment – see page 51 for contact details.
Your application should include a brief outline
of your proposed area of research, together with
two academic references. Your application form
is passed to the Centre. If we have a member
of staff willing and able to supervise the
research, you are usually called for an interview.
At interview you will have the opportunity to
find out more about the Centre and our
facilities, and to discuss the practicalities of
following a research degree and the viability
of your proposed research project.
Fees and funding
Please see the Postgraduate Prospectus for
up-to-date information on fees and funding
currently available at Goldsmiths. International
students can apply to the Overseas Research
Student Award Scheme. Your initial contact for
the ORSAS is the Goldsmiths Graduate School
Office: Diana Lockyer on 020 7919 7770
or Pádraig O’Connor on 020 7919 7774,
e-mail orsas@gold.ac.uk.
Registration and study
Initially, you register for a Master of Philosophy
(MPhil) programme to train you in the research
methods you will need to complete a PhD. You
can apply to upgrade to PhD registration when
you have satisfactorily completed an agreed part
of the research and training programme; this
usually happens before 18 months if you are
studying full-time, or before 36 months if part-
time. You should aim to complete and submit
your PhD thesis within an agreed period, usually
three to four years for full-time students, and
four to six years for part-time. If you decide not
to upgrade to PhD registration, you can submit
your thesis for an MPhil after two years if you are
studying full-time, or after three years if part-
time. With the agreement of your supervisor, you
can change your registration from full to part-
time or vice versa; the necessary form is available
from the Registry Programmes Office.
North American applicants especially should
note that the British system does not include
preparatory taught classes or examinations as
part of the MPhil/PhD programme, except for
an initial course in research methods.
Number of places
10
Research supervision
Research students are normally co-supervised
by one staff member from the Centre and a
staff member from the academic department
whose expertise is best suited to your needs.
Often one supervisor will see you for a term or
two and then the other co-supervisor will take
over for an extended period, depending on the
sort of work you are undertaking at the particular
point in time.
You will be able to draw on wide-ranging and
interdisciplinary supervisory teams and if
your thesis is partly by other media, specialist
supervision will be provided. For example, a
student of consumer culture might be supervised
by a media studies analyst of material culture
and a specialist in digital design; a student
investigating postcolonial cultural forms could
be supervised by an art/architectural historian
and an anthropologist versed in hybrid cultures
in Brazil or India; a student inquiring into
performativity may have one supervisor who is
an expert in theatre studies and another who is
an expert in the sociology of the body; an inquiry
into the sources of European identity could be
supervised by specialists in the history of English
and European literatures; a thesis presented
through multimedia installation could be co-
supervised by a practitioner from Visual Arts.

Research training programme Assessment
A College-wide programme is provided, Examination of the MPhil and PhD is by a
which involves an induction course (which longer thesis (60,000 words for an MPhil
all students should attend), introduction to and 100,000 words for a PhD) and a viva voce
information technologies and the use of library (oral examination).
and bibliographic resources, basic training in
qualitative and quantitative research methods, Find out more
and sessions on research planning, presentation If you have specific programme queries, once
skills and ethics. you’ve read this booklet and the Postgraduate
Prospectus, please contact the Centre’s
Postgraduate facilities Administrator on 020 7919 7983 or
Goldsmiths’ Graduate School is based in e-mail cultural-studies@gold.ac.uk.
Hatcham House, 19 St James, containing an
open-access computer room, a student
common room and seminar room for use by
postgraduate research students. The School
also hosts a series of seminars and other
activities during the year, which are open to all
postgraduate research students and staff in the
College. Also based in Hatcham House is the
Graduate School Office, whose staff oversee
research students’ progress and well-being and
co-ordinate the generic training courses for
postgraduate research students.

10
MA in
Cultural Studies
1 year full-time or 2 years part-time
Introduction
This MA is twelve-months of intensive study
in cultural theory and in substantive cultural
studies. It is in every sense a programme in
global cultural studies, both in its engagement
with cultural difference and in its encounter with
the geopolitics of twenty-first century Capitalism.
You study the most advanced theorists and
questions in the core course Cultural Theory.
This will be the ‘new’ cultural theory of Deleuze,
Negri and Agamben as well as classical British
cultural studies of the tradition established by
Stuart Hall. Your other core courses extend this
groundwork by familiarising you further with
both critical theory and methods of cultural
analysis. You do a range of options from the best
Goldsmiths has to offer. A number of courses
in this MA programme will give substantive
and material focus for this theory: in say digital
and genetic media, in urban space, in the
creative industries, in art and the visual culture
of everyday life. You write a Dissertation that
consolidates this learning and prepares you for
further study or engagement in the culture of
today’s global capitalism.
In 2005-06, more students on this MA are in
receipt of AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research
Council) studentships than on any comparable
British MA programme. About one-third of the
students currently on the programme are British,
the rest being fairly evenly divided between
Continental Europeans and international
students. By the end of the programme you will
have learnt a very considerable amount of quite
high-level cultural theory. Around half of those
completing the MA progress to PhD level. Others
go into practical work: in the creative industries
and in NGOs in a great number of countries.
Entrance requirements
We welcome applications from people with
diverse intellectual backgrounds but whose
interests focus on the general area of cultural
studies. You should normally hold, or expect
to hold, a first degree of at least upper second
standard in an appropriate subject. Applications
from EU and International students are
welcomed. If your home (native) language is not
English, please see page 6 in this booklet for the
language requirements.
Application and admission
Please see the Postgraduate Prospectus for
application details. Application forms can
be downloaded at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/
study-options/postgraduate-applications.php.
Number of places
30
13
What do you study?
The MA involves three core courses and a
choice of options. The core courses are Cultural
Theory, Text and Image and Methods of Cultural
Analysis. Each of these courses features the
merger of theory and practice. They comprise
lectures, seminars, multimedia support and
some ‘field trips’ to cultural sites in London
as global city. The MA has links with other
departments and centres at Goldsmiths, which
enables you to choose a selection of options
– from Anthropology, English and Comparative
Literature, Media and Communications, Politics,
and Sociology.
You choose options from courses originated in
disciplines such as visual art, philosophy, and art
theory. All the courses are specifically selected as
integral to the general theory/practice thematic
of the degree.
Overall, the MA aims to help you to
develop transferable skills within social and
critical theory, aesthetics and performance,
communication and multi-media. You
should also develop skills in ethnography and
cultural research more generally and a critical
appreciation of current debates in the media, the
culture industries and the wider contemporary
cultural environment.
14
Attendance
The taught programme is organised into two
terms. The autumn term runs from early
October to mid-December and the spring term
from mid-January to the end of March. The
two teaching terms are followed by a short
assessment term, which runs from early May
to mid-June, during which you are expected
to complete work for assessment and prepare
yourself for examination, as well as consult
supervisors on your dissertation. Full-time
students normally find they need to attend on
at least three days of the week.
Structure
The MA consists of:
• Three compulsory core courses:
Cultural Theory; Text and Image;
Methods of Cultural Analysis
• Three option courses
• 10-12,000-word Dissertation
You must successfully complete four full course-
units to complete the MA programme. Most
courses last one term and are valued at half
course-units. Occasionally, option courses may
be taught over two terms and be valued at one
course-unit.
Full-time students take the core course in
Cultural Theory in the autumn term, and the
core courses in Methods of Cultural Analysis
and Text and Image in the spring term. Option
courses can be taken in either autumn or spring
term, depending on when they are offered and
on your individual workload. The Dissertation is
submitted in September.
Part-time students have some flexibility. They
must however take core courses in Cultural
Theory and Text and Image, plus two option
courses, in their first year. Progression into the
second year depends upon successful completion
of these courses. The Dissertation is submitted in
September of the second year.
Core courses
Cultural Theory
This course adopts a unique approach; it enables
you to study post-structuralist or Continental
philosophical thought whenever possible as it
‘plays out’ among cultural practitioners – in art,
architecture and urbanism, in digital media, in
lifestyles, in design, in the press and televisual
communications, in cinema.
The course seeks to depart from a tradition
in cultural studies which understands culture
in terms of domination on the one hand and
resistance on the other; or commodification on
the one hand and authenticity (or ‘singularity’)
on the other. Here we aim to understand the
culture industries (for example, digital media,
architecture, art, design, new journalism), not just
in terms of domination through the commodity,
but as far more complex arenas in which a
complex texture of innovation, creativity, and
restructured power relationships are emerging.
Indicative reading
S Lash, Another Modernity, A Different
Rationality
G Deleuze and F Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
M McLuhan, Understanding Media
J Derrida, Archive Fever
S Zizek, Looking Awry
M Hardt and A Negri, Empire
T De Duve, The Definitively Unfinished
Marcel Duchamp
W Benjamin, Illuminations
F Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems
G Bataille, Visions of Excess
P Virilio, The Vision Machine
J Baudrillard, Seduction
J Lacan, Ecrits
Text and Image
This course traces lines of intersection and
divergence between theories of language or of
textual media and theories of the image. It aims
to familiarise students with the epistemological
as well as political and ideological problems
that contemporary cultural theory has inherited
from previous attempts to think the relations
among looking, seeing, knowing and writing,
description, or inscription. We will explore the
shifting investments of theories of text and
of image in disparate ontologies and publics
through readings in optics, aesthetics, and
literary theory, as well as through theories of race
and photography. Specific topics will include
mimesis; aura and fetishism; rhetoric and
sophistry; the effects of mass and technological
reproduction on the media of collective or
cultural memory; aestheticism and decadence;
movement and transience; capital, the society
of the spectacle, and other theses about an
increase in the significance of the image in
public space and life.
15
Indicative topics
Looking at/looking through (Ancient theories
of vision and the science(s) of optics)
Signifying matter (Hegel, Aesthetics; with
attention to form, matter, sign, and symbol)
Idealism, mimesis, and inversions (Plato and Marx;
on the relationships between ideas and power)
Interpreting difference (Freud and de Man;
theories of resemblance and its displacement)
Words and things (Saussure and Foucault)
Tracing light (Benjamin and the early
photographers on the invention of photography)
Discipline and bodies (Sekula, Fusco, Alloula
on regimes of gender, race, and colonialism)
More discipline, more bodies
(Didi-Huberman on photography, La Salpêtrière,
invention of hysteria)
Societies of the spectacle (Debord and after)
Flat death (Barthes, Camera lucida)
Methods of Cultural Analysis
This course looks at a range of ways of doing
cultural research. It considers the ways in which
anthropologists, students of English literature,
and sociologists investigate cultural phenomena.
The course aims to come to terms with such
units of cultural analysis. You will learn to
distinguish Method from Theory – Methods
being a question of how to put Theory to work.
16
We will ask in many cases: what is the unit
of cultural analysis that is at stake? The units
of cultural analysis are units of culture such
as customs, conventions, the symbol, myth
and representation. The course is organised
around three clusters: Language, Identity and
Technologies. You will read founding texts and
relevant case studies. You will learn to be aware
of the principles of reading and interpretation
governing these case studies.
Indicative reading
A Appadurai (ed), The Social Life of Things,
pages 1-30
R Barthes, The Semiotic Challenge
R Barthes, The Fashion System
J Butler, Bodies that Matter
L Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing
Medicine’s Visual Culture
J Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason
P du Gay, J Evans and P Redman (eds),
Identity: A Reader
A Gell, Art and Agency
S Hall and P du Gay (eds), Questions of
Cultural Identity
D Haraway, Modest Witness
T Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics
C Hine, Virtual Ethnography (Chapters 2 and 3)
L Jordanova, ‘Body Image and sex roles’ in
Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science
and Medicine between the Eighteenth and
Twentieth Centuries
Klaus Peter Keopping, Shattering Frames
C Lury and J Stacey (eds), Off-Centre:
Feminism and Cultural Studies
C Penley, Nasa/Trek
Options
Options can be taken in either the autumn
term or the spring term, depending on when
the courses are offered and on your individual
workload. Options offered vary from year to year,
depending on staff commitments and timetable
feasibility. You will chose from a list of options
at the beginning of the academic year. Please see
page 36 for an indicative list.
Dissertation
The Dissertation is compulsory and comprises
an ordered, critical and thorough exposition of
existing knowledge in an area relevant to the
field of study covered by the programme. It
must be 10-12,000-words in length and is
submitted in September. If you study part-time,
you submit the Dissertation at the end of your
second year. Depending on your specialist choice
and on staff availability, you will, in principle,
be able to work on your Dissertation with a
member of staff from the Centre or any of the
contributing departments.
Assessment
Assessment involves:
• One three-hour written paper for the core
course in Cultural Theory;
• Two 5-6,000-word essays, ie one essay each
for core courses in Cultural Studies and
Capitalism and Methods of Cultural Analysis;
• Three option course assessments
(option courses have various assessments,
typically a 5-6,000-word essay, sometimes
a practical project);
• One 12,000-word Dissertation.
Fees
Please see the website at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk
for up-to-date information on fees. Please note:
fees are quoted per year of study.
Funding
You may be able to apply for funding to the Arts
and Humanities Research Council. For further
information visit their website at www.ahrc.ac.uk
and contact the Centre’s Administrator (contact
details on page 51) as soon as possible. Please
note that if you wish to apply for funding, your
application on to the MA programme MUST
reach Goldsmiths’ Admissions Office by the
end of February, and your completed AHRC
funding application will need to reach the
Centre for Cultural Studies in March (we need
these forms for processing around 6 weeks
before the AHRC’s published deadline at the
beginning of May).
Find out more
If you have specific programme queries,
once you’ve read this booklet and the
Postgraduate Prospectus, please contact the
Centre’s Administrator on 020 7919 7983 or
e-mail cultural-studies@gold.ac.uk.
17
MA in
Culture Industry
1 year full-time or 2 years part-time
Introduction
The MA Culture Industry is a new programme
starting in September 2007. A collaboration
between the Department of Media and
Communication and the Centre for Cultural
Studies, the teaching team includes Professor
Scott Lash, Professor Angela McRobbie and
Dr Matthew Fuller.
Using an innovative mixture of advanced cultural
theory and practice-based elements including
placements and student led research and
experimental projects this course aims to put
debates about organisation and production at the
forefront of cultural thinking.
This new Masters programme is aimed at
graduates with an interest in researching,
working or intervening in the Cultural Industries.
You may come via the traditional academic route,
or have experience of working within the cultural
field in some way prior to undertaking the
programme. Candidates will normally have either
an undergraduate degree in the humanities or
social sciences or in practice-based fields such as
fine art, design, architecture or computing.
Entrance requirements
We welcome applications from people with
diverse intellectual backgrounds but whose
interests focus on the general area of cultural
studies. You should normally hold, or expect
to hold, a first degree of at least upper second
standard in an appropriate subject. Applications
from EU and international students are
welcomed. If your home (native) language is
not English, please see page 6 in this booklet
for the language requirements.
Application and admission
Please see the Postgraduate Prospectus for
application details. Application forms can be
downloaded at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/apply.
Number of places
30
What do you study?
Core courses
Theories of the Culture Industry: work,
creativity and precariousness
This course sets out the key theorisations of the
culture industry. Whilst incorporating classical
figurations of the culture industry, the course
is primarily concerned to assemble a clear
engagement with contemporary research such
as those spearheaded by leading researchers at
Goldsmiths. The organisation and substance of
work and of precarious labour, of the developing
debates and mechanisms of ‘intellectual property’
and cultural workers’ development of institutions
and networks as well as contemporary
configurations of the professional will be
discussed. You will learn to strategise cultural
production and intervention through exploration
of relevant material. The globalisation of the
culture industry will provide a persistent and
ambitious point of reference.
19
Practices of the Culture Industry
This module presents a series of lectures
and presentations by cultural practitioners. It
aims to introduce students to contemporary
debates in architecture, the legal framing and
development of culture, visual art, design,
fashion design, community art and media, and
interactive media. The course will map out the
tricky transitions between theory and practice
and include a rigorous discussion of the nature
and political, intellectual and cultural stakes
of interdisciplinarity. Driven by questions of
practice this core course is organised around
a series of more detailed analyses of specific
cultural dynamics, where the theoretical models
taught in the above module are brought to bear
on individual areas of practice and the ways that
they can and cannot be thought of in terms of
‘industry’. Cultural organisation has become
increasingly important as a cultural form in
itself. Whether this is seen in artists’ self-
organisation, or through the changing scope of
music distribution set in play by digital networks
and other ‘disruptive technologies’, what culture
means is increasingly seen as being critically
interwoven with how it is done.
This degree is designed to mix theory up with
practice and allow students to self-initiate
research, whether as an independent project
or as a participant in a larger organisation. In
consultation with staff, you can choose one
major (project or placement) and one minor
(project or placement):
20
Culture Industry: Projects
You will be able to undertake projects towards
your dissertation and/or as a minor. These
projects are self-initiated and are expected to
engage with practices of culture in significant
terms. Work on projects will be supported
by the provision of a Research Lab space.
Culture Industry: Projects will take the form
of independent study and can be undertaken
either on an individual or interdisciplinary
group basis. Indicative projects might include:
the development of urban interventions;
collaboration on software initiatives; establishing
media platforms; releasing and promoting
an MP3 publication; developing a campaign;
making an application for culture industry
funding, initiating an event or publication. In
this context the question of rigorous work within
an interdisciplinary context will be crucial.
You may also develop and define the scope of
Project work in relation with other students,
external organisations, events or practitioners.
Whilst such self-initiated work can be of a purely
experimental or speculative nature, you may
also wish to establish some kind of connection
with outside agencies, such as competitions,
exhibitions, NGOs, community groups etc.
Culture Industry: Placements
You will be able to take two kinds of placement:
Minor
One kind of placement available is short and
London-based. This course is intended to
make use of Goldsmiths’ location in London, a
global capital of cultural production. Through
the proximity of London’s cultural industries
– music, fashion, radio, new technologies – and
the input of practitioners and experts, you will be
encouraged to bring cultural theory and a critical
perspective to bear on London cultural industries
and the practice of London’s cultural workers.
Major
‘Major’ placements are more substantial, quite
possibly overseas and can provide the major
focus for your dissertation. All placements
take advantage of CCS’s significant network
within the relevant professional fields and
will be supervised by the course convener or
an appropriate tutor from within the Centre.
Placements result in an appropriately sized
report, essay or dissertation. The placement is
not focused on the delivery of training per se, but
on placing you in a context within the culture
industry in which you are able to make a study
of specific practices. The written components
provide a space for you to explore the connections
between the practical issues concerning your
placement and the theoretical issues addressed
in the other parts of the degree. Reports may
be submitted with a multimedia and/or visual
component alongside the written part.
Research Lab
A key part of the course is the Research Lab, a
platform for experimental research and practice
in culture. The Research lab is a weekly space by
which, through the use of a Learning Plan and
in discussion with teaching and support staff,
you customise your practical and theoretical
skills in Culture Industry research. The Research
Lab is a key aspect of the support for Projects
and Placements
Options
You will be able to take two additional modules
of their choice drawn from a range available
in Goldsmiths. Please see page 36 for a list
of options.
Assessment
Assessment is by essays, and by dissertation in
the form of project reports and documentation.
Attendance
The taught programme is organised into two
terms. The autumn term runs from early
October to mid-December and the spring term
from mid-January to the end of March. The
two teaching terms are followed by a short
assessment term, which runs from early May
to mid-June, during which you are expected
to complete work for assessment and prepare
yourself for examination, as well as consult
supervisors on your dissertation. Full-time
students normally find they need to attend on
at least three days of the week.
21
Structure
The MA consists of:
Two compulsory core courses:
• Theories of the Culture Industry
• Practices of the Culture Industry
Minor Project and/or Placement supported by
compulsory Research Lab
Two option courses
Dissertation: comprising a documented
Major Project or Major Placement and 6,000-
word essay, or a fully written dissertation of
10-12,000 words.
Full-time students take the core course in
Theories of the Culture Industry in the autumn
term and Practices of the Culture Industry in
the spring term. Option courses can be taken
in either autumn or spring term, depending on
when they are offered and on your individual
workload. The research laboratory runs
throughout all terms. In the spring term you
will complete a minor project or placement.
In the summer term you will focus on your
dissertation: this may take the form of a major
project or a major placement, assessed by
documentation and a 6,000-word essay, or could
be a fully written dissertation of 10-12,000 words.
The Dissertation is submitted in September.
22
Part-time students have some flexibility. You
will take the core course Theories of the Culture
Industry in the autumn term of your first year,
and the core course Practices of the Culture
Industry in the spring term of your first or
second year. A schedule for taking the two option
courses, and the placements and/or projects can
be negotiated with the programme convenor.
The Dissertation is submitted in September of
the second year.
Fees
Please see the website at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk
for up-to-date information on fees. Please note:
fees are quoted per year of study.
Funding
You may be able to apply for funding to the Arts
and Humanities Research Council. For further
information visit their website at www.ahrc.ac.uk
and contact the Centre’s Administrator (contact
details on page 51) as soon as possible. Please
note that if you wish to apply for funding, your
application on to the MA programme MUST
reach Goldsmiths’ Admissions Office by the end
of February, and your completed AHRC funding
application will need to reach the Centre for
Cultural Studies in March (we need these forms
for processing around 6 weeks before the AHRC’s
published deadline at the beginning of May).
Find out more
If you have specific programme queries, once
you’ve read this booklet and the Postgraduate
Prospectus, please contact the Centre’s
Administrator on 020 7919 7983 or
e-mail cultural-studies@gold.ac.uk.
MA in Interactive
Media: Critical
Theory and Practice
1 year full-time or 2 years part-time
Introduction
With the profusion and multiplication of
bio-electronic interfaces, standards, platforms,
applications, and networks of communication,
the media has become increasingly interactive
resulting in: the emergence of an innovative
body of critical theory in this new digital field;
a profusion of multimedia presentation and
performance in the arts, and the telescoping of
work opportunities in the new media sector.
This MA seeks to integrate theory and practice.
In the context of the Goldsmiths’ tradition in
the arts, the practical dimension of the MA is
taught by an artist/practitioner and emphasises
the dimension of digital and analogue, bio-
digital and transgenic art as well as commercial
and social interactive media applications. The
practical methods course focuses on the process
of conceptualisation and development of your
individual project, encouraging experimentation,
innovative research and practice. It offers you
the opportunity to critically review the potential
of current and emerging technologies in
contemporary communication and cultural
production, bringing together perspectives from
social sciences, life and information sciences,
fine arts and communication/media related
practices, according to your interests.
The programme equally focuses on the theory
dimension. You gain a grounding in the work
of non-linear and/or post-structural theory of
for example Serres, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari,
Massumi, the works of Spinoza, Bergson,
Bachelard and Whitehead, and an introduction
24
and overview to contemporary media theory,
such as Lev Manovich, Kittler, Virilio, McLuhan,
Weibel, and Levy, and contemporary life science
and information theory (cybernetics, theory of
communication, autopoiesis, chaos theory). You
engage with theoretical issues in terms of what in
today’s second (interactive) media age constitutes
memory and virtuality, perception and sensation,
space and time, politics and control.
Entrance requirements
We welcome applications from people from a
diversity of intellectual backgrounds. You should
normally hold, or expect to hold, a first degree of
at least upper second standard in an appropriate
subject. Applications from EU and international
students are welcomed. If your home (native)
language is not English, please see page 6 in this
booklet for the language requirements.
Application and admission
Please see the Postgraduate Prospectus for
application details. Application forms can be
downloaded at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/study-
options/postgraduate-applications.php.
Number of places
25
What do you study?
Three compulsory core courses:
• Interactive Media: Critical Theory
• Interactive Media: Practical Methods
• Media and Culture Industries
Two option courses
A Dissertation comprising an integrated major
practical project and 6,000-word essay
Please note: you need to complete successfully
four full course-units (eight half course-units) to
graduate from the programme.
Full-time
You take the core course in Interactive Media:
Critical Theory in the autumn term, and the core
course in Media and Culture Industries in the
spring term. Interactive Media: Practical
Methods is a laboratory course, intensively
taught over two terms, both in the autumn and
the spring terms. Option courses can be taken
in either autumn or spring term, depending on
when they are offered and on your individual
workload. There is a show in July and your
Dissertation is submitted in September.
Part-time
In the first year, you take at least two core
courses, which must include Interactive Media:
Critical Theory, taken in the autumn term, and
Interactive Media: Practical Methods, taken over
both Autumn and Spring terms. You must also
take at least one option course, usually in the
spring term. Progression into the second year
is dependent upon successful completion of
these courses.
In the second year, you take one option course
in the autumn term and Media and Culture
Industries in the spring term, (or a second
option Course if this was studied in the first
year). You participate in the show in July of your
second year, and submit your final Dissertation
in September
Core courses
Interactive Media: Critical Theory
This course looks at the intersection of
theories of communication, perception and
organisation for a re-thinking of the concept of
interactivity in the context of digital mediation
– from photography to sound, from generative
architecture to open source and viral networks.
It brings together philosophical, scientific, and
aesthetic concepts to develop a trans-disciplinary
discussion and approach to analyse the impact of
software machines on modes of interactivity.
This trans-disciplinary view implies a new
engagement with software media focussed not
exclusively on the analysis of new media within
the context of dominant and classical critical
approaches to media. The course rather poses
an emphasis on the trans-disciplinary process of
formation and production of key concepts in the
field of software media insofar as such emerging
field demands a novel design of thoughts.
The course draws on the transformations of
media theories, from semiotic to postsemiotics,
from psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis, from
radical media theories to new media theories.
These theories are studied according to recent
approaches developed in critical thought
through the works of Deleuze and Guattari,
Foucault, Serres, Stiegler, Badiou, Grosz, Irigaray,
Stengers, Massumi, Negri and in conjunction
with mathematical theories of information and
computing biological theories of self-organisation
and non-linear evolution, physical theories of
chaos and complexity.
25
Indicative reading
A-L Barabási, Linked: The New Science of
Networks
H Bergson, Matter and Memory
G Deleuze and F Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
Capitalism & Schizophrenia
T Druckrey with A Electronica (eds), Ars
Electronica: Facing the Future
F Guattari, ‘Machinic Heterogeneities’, in Reading
Digital Culture, D Trend (ed)
V Flusser, ‘On the Theory of Communication”,
Writings
M Fuller, Media Ecologies, Materialist Energies
in Art and Technoculture
F Kittler, Literature, Media, Information Systems:
Essays
P Levy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the
Digital Age
M McLuhan, Understanding Media, the
Extensions of Man
R H Maturana and J F Varela, The Tree of
Knowledge: the Biological Roots of Human
Understanding
B Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. Movement,
Affect, Sensation
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (eds),
The New Media Reader
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media
I Prigogine, The End of Certainty. Time, Chaos,
and the New Laws of Nature
M Serres, Hermes, Literature, Science, Philosophy
C E Shannon and W Weaver, The Mathematical
Theory of Communication
Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics
N Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings:
Cybernetics and Society
P Weibel et al, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image
Wars, in Science, Religion and Art.
26
Online Journals
CTheory
Fiberculture
CultureMachine
Multitude
Interactive Media: Practical Methods
This course is taught as a series of lectures
followed by seminars over ten weeks of each
term. It also offers tutorial lab sessions according
to the students needs. The lab offers electronic
and audio equipment as well as Mac, Windows
and Playstation2 Linux workstations with
software applications in image, sound, video,
animation, the web and interactive installations.
Term 1
Experimenting, information gathering,
research
Lectures and seminars will focus on diverse
topics of new media such as the confluence of
media and culture and their relationships within
social systems, different levels of perception
in cultural narratives, the production and
distribution of culture, etc. Lab sessions will be
dedicated to the development of small projects
and the teaching of technical skills. Visiting
tutors might occasionally collaborate with
lecturers or workshops.
Term 2
Concept and development
Lectures and seminars will focus on topics of
emerging interests, closely related to the students’
fields of research. Lab sessions and tutorials
will be dedicated to the conceptualisation and
development of your minor project. Visiting tutors
might occasionally collaborate with workshops,
according to your needs and interests.
Term 3
Final show and Dissertation
Lab sessions and tutorials will be dedicated to
the development of your final project, focusing
on the ability to bind together the different
contextual and technological levels involved in
the process. Visiting tutors might occasionally
collaborate with workshops, according to
your needs and interests. The planning and
implementation of the final show will also be
part of your activities.
Media Art and Culture Industries
This course draws on the expertise of
practitioners in media art and cultural institutions
such as television, digital arts, music, cinema
and software in museum and galleries. There
is an emphasis on creative elements in media
arts and industries. The convenor will organise a
series of practitioner-led sessions. In the sessions,
we will discuss in detail the nature of creative
production within various commercial and non-
commercial settings. A series of introductory
notes and practitioner-run workshops will be
held according to your needs. You will develop
a detailed empirical understanding of creative
production within different media industries
and within media art. You will bring together
28
critical theoretical perspectives with empirical,
‘hands-on’ knowledge of new media technologies.
This, in turn, will promote an understanding
of the complexity of contemporary culture at a
range of different levels, and will enhance the
practical skills and art-related knowledge needed
to become a cultural researcher or ‘speculative’
cultural practitioner in the field of media arts and
culture industries.
Indicative readings:
T Druckrey, Electronic Culture: Technology and
Visual Representation
T Druckrey, Ars Electronica. Facing the Future: a
Survey of two decades
O Grau, Virtual Art. From Illusion to Immersion
P Lunenfeld, The Digital Dialectic: New Essays
on New Media
A Scholder et al, Interaction: Artistic Practice in
The Network
C Sommerer and L Mignonneau, Art @ Science
P Weibel et al, Rhetorics of Surveillance from
Bentham to Big Brother
P Weibel et al, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image
Wars in Science, Religion, and Art
S Wilson, Information Arts: Intersection of Art,
Science, and Technology
Options
You choose two Options from a wide list
available in the Contemporary Cultural
Processes programme. Options which have
particular relevance for this degree are: Issues
in Contemporary Art, New Media and Society,
Cultural Theory, Methods of Cultural Analysis,
Politics and Culture and Visual Anthropology.
Please see page 36 for further details.
Dissertation
You produce an integrated, major practical
project and 6,000-word essay. This will
be a project that breaks new ground in an
area of applied work, with the Project Paper
documenting the work involved, placing it in
the context of theory and practice in the field
and explaining its originality.
Assessment
• 5-6,000-word essay for Interactive Media:
Critical Theory;
• A minor practical project for Interactive
Media: Practical Methods;
• 5-6,000-word essay, or a 2,500-3,000-word
essay plus a practical project, for Media and
Culture Industries;
• Two option course assessments (option
courses have various assessments, typically
4,000-6,000-word essays or sometimes
practical elements);
• A Dissertation including an integrated major
practical project and 6,000-word essay.
Fees
Please see the website at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk
for up-to-date information on fees. Please note:
fees are quoted per year of study.
Funding
You may be able to apply for funding to the Arts
and Humanities Research Council. For further
information visit their website at www.ahrc.ac.uk
and contact the Centre’s Administrator (contact
details on page 51) as soon as possible. Please
note that if you wish to apply for funding, your
application on to the MA programme MUST
reach Goldsmiths’ Admissions Office by the
end of February, and your completed AHRC
funding application will need to reach the
Centre for Cultural Studies in March (we need
these forms for processing around 6 weeks
before the AHRCs published deadline at the
beginning of May).
Find out more
If you have specific programme queries,
once you’ve read this booklet and the
Postgraduate Prospectus, please contact the
Centre’s Administrator on 020 7919 7983 or
e-mail cultural-studies@gold.ac.uk.
29
MA in
Postcolonial
Studies
1 year full-time or 2 years part-time
Introduction
Do you want to make sense of the US occupation
of Iraq? Are there hidden agendas behind the
so-called ‘war’ on terror? Is Globalisation a thinly
veiled metaphor for the aggrandisation of the
multinational corporations? We nostalgically
mourn the disappearance of the ‘local’, but
Bollywood has suddenly become so ‘cool’. Is there
a politics to this nostalgia? What exactly are the
stakes involved in promoting eco-tourism in the
third world rich in biocapital? Has the struggle,
then, shifted to ‘biopolitics’: control through
genetics, informatics, patents and exploitation of
‘immaterial labour’ and ‘affect’?
This degree gives you the theoretical tools to
comprehend contemporary issues in their
contextual detail. As we witness a remapping
of the world under the Neo-liberal Empire,
Postcolonial Studies articulates the clamour of
the multitude. The works of Fanon, Said, Spivak,
Bhabha, Chakrabarty, Mbembe and Gilroy
have deeply affected the ways in which global
cultural issues are approached, and concerns
emerging out of such theory – cultural difference,
translation, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism,
government of difference, hybridity and the
vernacular – have transformed the arts, literature,
anthropology and political philosophy irrevocably.
The programme:
• provides a grounding in critical, postcolonial
theory, in understanding forms of
globalism and the interconnected issues
of race, war, displacement, human rights,
migration, refugee, diaspora, translation
and representation;
• introduces a range of theoretical, literary,
visual filmic texts from non-European sources;
• gives you an analytic basis for research into
postcolonial socio-economic development;
• provides advanced training for labour
market-relevant skills in transnational
analysis of sovereignty, democracy,
governmentality, financialisation,
Intellectual Property Rights and the role
of non-governmental organisations;
• provides an interdisciplinary theoretical
framework for analysing the role of
international organisations (the UNO,
WTO, World Bank, IMF etc);
• gives you the opportunity to participate in an
exciting intellectual environment of theory
and practice of the visual arts.
Entrance requirements
We welcome applications from people from a
diversity of intellectual backgrounds. You should
normally hold, or expect to hold, a first degree of
at least upper second standard in an appropriate
subject. Applications from EU and international
students are welcomed. If your home (native)
language is not English, please see page 6 in
this booklet for the language requirements.
31
Application and admission
Please see the Postgraduate Prospectus for
application details. Application forms can be
downloaded at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/study-
options/postgraduate-applications.php.
What do you study?
Structure
The MA consists of:
Two compulsory core courses
• Postcolonial Theory
• The Politics of Culture
• Three option courses
12,000-word Dissertation
Core courses
Postcolonial Theory
This course is designed to rethink many of the
assumptions and discursive manoeuvres of
postcolonialism. Close reading of relevant texts
will be used to examine the critical apparatus and
central lines of enquiry of postcolonial studies.
We will address the following questions:
• What is the relevance of postcolonial theory
for discussion of representation, gender and
sexuality, studies of imperial and colonial
history, diasporas and transnationalism,
processes of creolization, cosmopolitanism,
alterity and hybridity?
• Is postcolonialism merely a temporal marker?
• How does it relate to other ‘posts’ such as
postmodernism, posthumanism and post-
feminism?
32
Throughout the course, we will look for a
theoretical basis to what is called ‘postcoloniality’,
explore the genealogies of postcoloniality, and
understand the period of empire and colonialism
as a field of interactions rather than simple
subjection. In turn, we will question the Western
paradigm of knowledge and the stability of
binaries, and propose that postcolonial criticism
is an ethical enterprise.
Indicative reading
H Arendt, The Human Condition
A Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the
Making of International Law
T Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity,
Islam, Modernity
S N Balagangadhara, The Heathen in His
Blindness: Asia, Europe and the Dynamics of
Religion
H Bhabha, The Location of Culture
S Buck-Morss, Hegel in Haiti
A Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
D Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe
P Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of
Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures
on Liberation
J Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness
F Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
MK Gandhi, Hind Swaraj
P Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness
A Gupta and J Ferguson, Beyond Culture: Space,
Identity and The Politics of Difference
M Hardt and A Negri, Empire
A Mbembe, On the Postcolony
N Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan
and Cultural Nationalism
E Said, Orientalism
G Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason
V Segalen, Essay on Exoticism
Journals
Interventions
Cultural Critique
Cultural Studies
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
Traces
The Politics of Culture
This course is intended to familiarise you with
the predicament of culture in the twenty first
century in the postcolonial world. The key issues
here are: the commodification of culture, culture
and government, global media and culture
industry, national cultures and the government
of cultural difference, information and culture,
biocapital, property right and commons,
democracy, human rights, displacement and
political culture. The idea is to arrive at an ethics
of culture in an entangled but heterogeneous
world where ‘culture’ is increasingly becoming
central to economic, political, governmental and
epistemological issues.
You read texts on ‘non-West’, keeping in mind
that it is a geopolitical and discursive construction.
Close critical reading of these texts will be
used to convey historical and theoretical ideas
about culture and politics as sites of tensions,
encounters, conflicts and power relations.
The course imparts knowledge about power,
domination and institutions: by denaturalising
geopolitical maps, by showing the complicity
between power and knowledge, by defamiliarising
identities and by opening up space for
imagination. You will be encouraged also to pay
attention to the multiplicity of forms of resistance
and to question hegemonic narratives.
Indicative reading
A Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural
Dimensions of Globalisation
A Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the
Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria
T Bennett, Putting Policy in Cultural Studies
P Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed
J Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism: First
Thoughts on a Second Coming
G Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies
A Escobar, Encountering Development: The
Making and Unmaking of the Third World
J Frow, Time and Commodity Culture
M Foucault, Security, Territory, Population
M Goswami, Producing India
S Hall, Encoding, Decoding
T B Hansen and F Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies:
Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial
World
D Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
W Hui, China’s New Order
F Julien, Detour and Access: Strategies of
Meaning in Greece and China
S Lash and C Lury, Global Culture Industry
A Mattelart, Advertising International: The
Privatisation of Public Space
T Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-
politics, Modernity
A Ong and S Collier, Global Assemblages
33
C Pinney, Photos of the Gods:
The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India
E Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition:
Indigenous Alterities and the Making of
Australian Multiculturalism
K S Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of
Postgenomic Life
A Rajagopal, Politics after Television
C Rose, The Comedy of the Commons
M Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect:
Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things
M Taussig, My Cocaine Museum
K S Tsai, Back-Alley Banking: Private
Entrepreneurs in China
A Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global
Connection
G Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture
Journals: Public Culture, Economy and Society,
Theory Culture Society.
Options
You choose three options from a wide list
available in the Contemporary Cultural Processes
programme. Further details of option courses are
on page 36.
Dissertation
There is an extended 12,000-word Dissertation.
34
Assessment
Assessment is by:
• two 5,000-word essays, ie one each for
core courses in Postcolonial Theory, and
The Politics of Culture;
• three option course assessments
option courses have various assessments,
typically a 5-6,000-word essay, sometimes
a practical project);
• one 12,000-word Dissertation.
Fees
Please see the website at www.goldsmiths.ac.uk
for up-to-date information on fees. Please note:
fees are quoted per year.
Funding
You may be able to apply for funding to the Arts
and Humanities Research Council. For further
information visit their website at www.ahrc.ac.uk
and contact the Centre’s Administrator (contact
details on page 51) as soon as possible. Please
note that if you wish to apply for funding, your
application on to the MA programme MUST
reach Goldsmiths’ Admissions Office by the end
of February, and your completed AHRC funding
application will need to reach the Centre for
Cultural Studies in March (we need these forms
for processing around 6 weeks before the AHRCs
published deadline at the beginning of May).
Find out more
If you have specific programme queries,
once you’ve read this booklet and the
Postgraduate Prospectus, please contact the
Centre’s Administrator on 020 7919 7983 or
e-mail cultural-studies@gold.ac.uk.
Options courses for
MA programmes
Options available from the Centre’s MAs include
(where they are not already a core course for your
programme of study):
Critical Theory
(from MA Interactive Media – see page 25);
Cultural Theory
(from MA Cultural Studies – see page 14)
Text and Image
(from MA Cultural Studies – see page 14);
Media and Culture Industries
(from MA Interactive Media – see page 28).
Postcolonial Theory
(from MA Postcolonial Studies – see page 32);
Practices of the Culture Industry
(from MA Culture Industry – see page 20)
Theories of the Culture Industry
(from MA Culture Industry – see page 19)
The Politics of Culture
(from MA Postcolonial Studies – see page 33);
A taster list of other courses offered follows.
Please note: this list can change from year to
year, and not all options may be available in any
one year. Also, not all courses can be timetabled
to suit your programme of study. You decide on
your option courses and enrol for them during
the first week of term.
36
An especially recommended course, offered to all
our MAs is:
Cultural Studies and Capitalism
Convenor: John Hutnyk,
Centre for Cultural Studies
This course offers a close reading of Karl Marx’s
Capital Volume One. The connections between
cultural studies and critiques of capitalism
are considered in an interdisciplinary context
(cinema studies, anthropology, musicology,
international relations, and philosophy), which
reaches from Marx through to Negri, from
ethnographic approaches to phenomenology,
from anarchism and surrealism to German
critical theory, poststructuralism and
postcolonialism. Topics covered include
alienation, commodification, production,
technology, education, subsumption, anti-
imperialism, anti-war movement and complicity.
Using a series of illustrative films and key
theoretical texts read in class, we examine
contemporary capitalism as it shifts, changes,
lurches through its very late 20th and 21st
century manifestations – we will look at how
cultural studies copes with (or does not cope
with) class struggle, anti-colonialism, new
subjectivities, cultural politics, and media,
virtual and corporate worlds.
Indicative reading:
T Adorno, The Culture Industry
A Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures
M Taussig, My Cocaine Museum
G Bataille, The Accursed Share
K Marx, Capital: Volume One
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
G Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason
S Zizek, Revolution at the Gates:
Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917
S Lotringer (ed), Hatred of Capitalism: A Reader
An Other China (subject to approval)
Convenor: Michael Dutton, Politics
This course aims to be a model for a more
theoretically and culturally nuanced approach
to the study of Contemporary China and
contemporary political questions. Using an
array of cultural and political artefacts Mao
badges, household registers, personnel files,
videoed interviews and legislation? The issue
of Chinese subjectivity is unpacked through a
series of questions posed in terms of authorship,
biography and governmentality. From sly civility
through to the question of abjection, Chinese
politics is looked at from the ground up revealing
a very different form of politics to that which
generally informs courses that claim to be about
Chinese politics.
Anthropology and Representation
Convenor: Roger Sansi-Roca,
Anthropology
This course aims to examine the interface
of anthropological representation and
contemporary media. It evaluates techniques
of symbolic anthropology, together with
the ethnography of cultural production and
consumption, in the analysis of contemporary
forms of communication. Other topics covered
include: visual anthropology; the image of the
primitive; ethnographic film; Third World
cinema; ‘indigenous’ media; traditions of orality
and literacy; modes of representation in the
industrial age (print, film, music); mass culture
on the periphery.
Chinese Cinemas
Convenor: Chris Berry,
Media and Communications
This MA option course provides an introduction
to the world of Chinese Cinemas and also an
investigation of cinema, and the ideas and
practices of the national and the transnational.
Filmmakers such as Tsui Hark, Tsai Ming-
liang, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou, Clara Law
and Wong Karwai have made Chinese films
the most popular of non-Western films on
the world cinema circuit over the last decade
and more. This class will include well-known
filmmakers such as these, but we will also move
beyond them to develop a deeper and broader
understanding of the cinematic context they
come from.
For many decades, the concept of “national
cinema” has framed work on film from different
countries. It assumes the cinema expresses
national identity. However, as the assumptions
about national identity have been questioned, so
the viability of the concept of “national cinema”
has come into question The existence of two
competing Chinese national projects in the
People’s Republic of China and the Republic of
China, together with the autonomous spaces of
Hong Kong and various points on the Chinese
diaspora, mean that Chinese cinemas are an
ideal site for the investigation of cinema and
the national as a problematic. This project will
structure the course.
37
Contemporary Cultural Practice
Convenor: Angela McRobbie,
Media and Communications
This course focuses on the ‘critical
connectedness’ between the work of six leading
cultural theorists and contemporary forms
of cultural practice. The early work of Stuart
Hall is re-examined with a view to considering
contemporary styles and modes of political
communications, (BBC Panorama) Paul Gilroy’s
work is analysed in regard to the musics of
the Black Atlantic, Judith Butler’s writing is
considered in regard to modes of gender re-
consolidation in contemporary popular culture,
Homi Bhabha allows a return to the question of
the racial stereotype, Fredric Jameson permits
consideration of postmodern spatiality in recent
films including Mulholland Drive and Pierre
Bourdieu offers the chance to reflect on lifestyle
magazines. The remaining lectures on the course
are more specifically topic-based including ‘Make
Over Television’, Post-feminism and Popular
Culture and Re-Conceptualising Youth Culture.
Contemporary Thought
Convenor: Howard Caygill, History
Each year the course is an intensive investigation
into one philosopher: such as Benjamin, Levinas,
Nietzsche and Bergson. The course is taught
in seminars, working through texts. Focus in
recent years has been on the notion of life: on
emergence, vitalism, intensity, the virtual and
becoming. Such monist and metaphysical
thought is understood in the contact also of
critical and aporetic thought. This ‘physiological’
perspective is also understood in contrast to the
‘physics’ perspective. The course is taught with
special reference to science and to art.
38
Continental Political Theory
Convenor: James Martin, Politics
This course surveys key texts in the history of
continental political theory, undertakes a close
reading of their arguments and considers their
meaning and value in relation to contemporary
debates over concepts such as freedom,
community, power and identity.
Data Made Flesh
Convenor: Marsha Rosengarten, Sociology
This course will examine contemporary debates
occurring in the social sciences/humanities
that are linked to developments in the fields
of biomedicine, biotechnology and science.
Observational technologies ranging from genetic
screening, ultrasound and magnetic imaging
to CCTV surveillance increasingly offer up
more intimate and more seemingly substantive
evidence (data/images) of who and what we
are, what we can and should (not) do. Yet, while
promising more certainty, these technologies
are also unsettling core concepts of human
identity and the bases on which human life is
organised. Within social theory, there are some
who see these new developments as generating
new modes of personhood and, with this, new
modes of activism; for others it has become
imperative to rethink biotechnologies as not
merely observing of or acting on an object, but
as embedded in the object and therefore ethically
implicated in its nature and function. Within
this theoretical undertaking the very notions of
data and flesh begin to bleed. In order to evaluate
these contributions and others, the course will
work through a series of case studies such as ‘the
body’ of molecular genetics, ‘the pharmaceutical
body’ of Viagra, ‘the foetus’ of ultrasound
scanning, and the new ‘bio-citizen’ of identity
cards. Theories covered through the course
will be drawn from social studies of science,
biotechnology, biomedicine, bio-power and
feminist work on questions of representation
and materiality.
Embodiment and Experience
Convenor: Lisa Blackman,
Media and Communications
This course will examine the place of the ‘body’
in contemporary social and cultural theory taking
a number of case studies as examples. In recent
years across a range of academic disciplines,
from sociology, anthropology, cultural studies
and psychology there has been a move away from
approaching the body as a pre-given biological
entity, to explore the ways in which cultural
signs and codes mediate our relationships to
our bodies. This work has emerged for example
in relation to debates about cyberspace, eating
disorders, transexuality, health and illness,
the emotions, and new forms of spirituality.
This course will review these debates, working
through the above examples, to explore to what
extent we need to talk about embodiment rather
than the body in any fixed way
European Avant-Garde
Convenor: Andreas Kramer,
English and Comparative Literature
This course focuses on the main European
avant-garde movements from the first three
decades of the 20th century. We will look at
Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism
through representative texts, including prose,
poetry, short dramas, and manifestos. We will
examine the main features of the avant-garde’s
radical aesthetics, investigate its relationship
with visual art, photography and film, and
consider the politics of the avant-garde. We will
also consider the implications of the avant-garde
for the debates about modernism and post-
modernism. We will read texts in translation by
G Apollinaire, G Benn, A Breton, B Cendrars, P
Eluard, F T Marinetti, K Schwitters, A Stramm,
T Tzara and others, and consider critics and
theorists such as Adorno, Benjamin, Habermas,
and Lyotard. A key text will be P Bürger’s Theory
of the Avantgarde (Manchester UP, 1984). A
useful introduction is P Nicholls, Modernisms:
A Literary Guide (Macmillan, 1995), chapters 5-7
and 10-12.
Explorations in World Cinema
Convenor: Gareth Stanton,
Media and Communications
This course will explore a range of issues
relating to world cinema. Film theorists have
come to constitute this category in opposition
to the historical production of Hollywood, but
the category itself is not a homogeneous one.
For this reason, the course will seek to explore
specific dimensions of world cinema in terms
of historical and social contexts of production.
To this end it will employ a variety of theoretical
tools in order to examine various national
and increasingly, ‘transnational’ forms of film
production. The course will debate and engage
with both theories of European cinema and
those traditions that came to be labelled ‘Third
Cinema’. The continuing appropriateness of such
labels will be further problematised through the
optic of postcolonial theory, which seeks to give
new insights into questions of world cinema.
39
Gender and Anthropology:
Sexuality and the Body
Convenor: tbc, Anthropology
This course aims to explore the inter-relationship
of gender, sexuality and the body within Western
culture and Western social theory, and to subject
that particular inter-relationship to cross-cultural
scrutiny: that is, to explore the ways in which the
body and gender have been produced/imagined
differently in different times and places. Issues
which will be raised include the status of the body
– biological or cultural; the distinction between sex
and gender; alternative gender systems; theories
of performance/practice; gender ideologies,
resistance and power politics. We will look at ‘third
genders’ worldwide, at procreation and the effects
of NRTs, at marriage and kinship, at initiation and
the marking of the body through ritual, and at
strategies of resistance and gender politics.
Geographies
Convenor: Eyal Weizman,
Centre for Research Architecture
This course will critically engage with
geographies in order to investigate contemporary
political and cultural transformations. The
course will be based on an expended, shifting
discourse of Geography, one that incorporates
issues of urbanity, globalisation, mobility, conflict
and migration, but further spatialises forms of
knowledge and cultural production, identities and
new forms of subjectivities. Through the reading
of key theoretical texts and the examination of
the works practitioners, the course will trace the
transformations that have positioned emerging
models of spatial research at a central position
within the contemporary cultural production of
artists, architects, curators, activists and others in
the fields of the humanities.
Global Political Cultures
(subject to approval)
Convenor: Politics
Covering an array of questions that take students
from the art of politics into the politics of art,
GPC takes the so-called ‘cultural turn’ into the
realm of politics. In the course of this cultural
turn, you will encounter new area studies,
postcolonialism and subaltern studies, as you
learn about the gift of the political and the politics
of race. Questions of other cultures lead into
other ways of seeing that, in turn, broaden the
concept of politics enabling it to engage with
questions of space, art and the cultures of terror
from new perspectives.
Issues in Contemporary Art
Convenor: Suhail Malik, Visual Arts
This course focuses on contemporary London
as a laboratory of art. We take themes from
art theory and cultural theory and follow them
as they play out in the arena of visual art. You
will study the role of the museum, shock and
art, disjuncture, art and concept, the place
of museum walls, art and the virtual, issues
of experience and perception and points in
conceptual art more generally. We will also
address phenomenological, deconstructive and
neo-Bergsonian themes in art. The structure of
the course is defined by Dr Malik from Visual
Arts who delivers some of the lectures. You will
also enjoy a series of guest lecturers: artists,
theorists, critics, curators, sociologists, media
theorists. The Centre for Cultural Studies teaches
the seminars, and sets and marks the essay
questions. This collaborative Option course
provides an excellent opportunity for you to
learn side by side with the next generation of
Goldsmiths’ artists.
41
Literature and Philosophy
Convenor: Josh Cohen,
English and Comparative Literature
Why is it that literature has held such insistent
fascination for modern philosophers? What is
at stake for philosophy in the fact that literature
exists? Is the strict Platonic separation of
literature from philosophy still tenable? By
focusing on a number of seminal modern
European philosophical texts on literature, this
course will seek to explore these questions from a
number of different perspectives. In particular, it
will show how this preoccupation with literature
is the consequence of modern philosophy’s
ongoing interrogation of its own limits.
The course studies a range of philosophers
including Walter Benjamin, T W Adorno, Martin
Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida,
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy.
Music as Communication and
Creative Practice
Convenor: Keith Negus,
Media and Communications
The course will engage with debates about
music as a cultural form, media as
communication and creative practice. It will
consider: the social and historical conditions
shaping music and how it is understood/
theorised; processes of production, circulation
and consumption; the relationship between
music and social identities; how sounds, lyrics,
voices, bodies convey meaning; the significance
of genre codes of value and aesthetic judgement.
42
Nature And Culture
Convenor: Monica Greco, Sociology
The opposition between nature and culture is
foundational in social thought. In this course we
interrogate this opposition through a reading
of contemporary social theory, philosophy
and the history of science. Each year we will
focus on the work of three or four writers (eg
Canguilhem, Strathem, Derrida, Deleuze). The
course will discuss the work of these writers
in relation to recent developments in science
and technology which have, according to
many writers, increasingly problematised the
distinctions between nature and culture, and
between humans and machines. Topics to be
discussed include, for example, the normal and
the pathological, ecology, artificial intelligence,
psychosomatics, reproductive technologies,
indigenous knowledge and corporeality.
Order and Disorder in the Post-Cold
War World
Convenor: Jasna Dragovic-Soso, Politics
This course examines issue areas that have
shaped the discipline of International Relations
since the end of the Cold War, including the
role of the United States as the sole superpower
and the challenges posed by rogue states’ and
international terrorism. The new ‘disorder
of in the international system and debates
surrounding concepts of ‘globalisation’, ‘global
governance’ and ‘global civil society’.
Postcolonial Life Writing
Convenor: Bart Moore-Gilbert,
English and Comparative Literature
This course aims to introduce students to a
variety of examples of `postcolonial’ life writing
from around the world in the contemporary
period. We will consider both fictional and
non-fictional biographical and autobiographical
examples of the genre. Each week we will
consider selective theoretical aspects of life
writing together with a chosen example of a
literary text for further analysis. One of the aims
of the course will be to see whether existing
critical discourse on autobiography needs to be
modified in respect of postcolonial life writing.
Please note: this is an experimental course and
it may be difficult to find substantial secondary
reading. Texts may include: Hanif Kureishi,
Intimacy; Isabelle Allende, Paula; Edward Said,
Out of Place; Sara Suleri, Meatless Days; J M
Coetzee, Boyhood: A Memoir; Jamaica Kincaid,
Autobiography of My Mother; M K Gandhi, An
Autobiography; C L R James, Beyond a Boundary;
Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures; Olaudah
Equiano, Interesting Narrative.
Reconceptualising the Media Audience
Convenor: David Morley,
Media and Communications
This course will review a range of
interdisciplinary perspectives on the study of
media audiences and on the role of the media
in constructing the post-modern geography of
the contemporary world. The first part of the
course will offer a review of both classical and
contemporary models and approaches to the
study of media audiences, media effects, media
powers and patterns of cultural consumption,
as well as a discussion of some of the recent
methodological debates surrounding the use
of qualitative, self-reflexive and ethnographic
methodologies in this field.
The second part addresses questions concerning
the specificity of different media and their
micro-contexts and conditions of consumption,
focusing on the domestic context of consumption
of broadcasting (with particular reference to
television) and on the significance of micro-
studies of specific instances of the uses of
communications and information technologies
in the home.
Theories of International Relations
Convenor: tba, Politics
This course is a higher-level survey of the main
theories of international relations, namely:
realism/neorealism, liberalism/neoliberalism,
the ‘English School’ and constructivism. These
approaches have dominated the theoretical
development of the discipline of International
Relations (IR) over the past half century and
are at the forefront of the main scholarly
debates on contemporary world affairs. We
approach these theories critically, examining
both their contribution to our understanding
of international politics and their shortcomings
and blind spots. We combine our examination
of theory with an application of the theories
discussed to a particular case study or debate:
the Iraq War for realism/neorealism; the ‘end of
history’ for liberalism/neoliberalism and human
rights for the English School and constructivism.
43
Through The Lens: Photographing City Life
Convenor: Paul Halliday,
Centre for Urban and Community Research
This course aims to introduce you to
contemporary examples of photographic practice
and city life. Much has been written about the
way the photographic lens operates to survey
and govern the definition of what is ‘real’. This
course will evaluate this perspective critically.
Does the lens only look one-way? This raises the
question posed most eloquently by John Berger,
namely, when a photograph is taken, who is
looking at who?
This course offers you a range of critical
perspectives on photographic practice from
within sociology, anthropology, cultural studies
and visual arts theory. It also includes discussions
of the work of contemporary media practitioners
and photographic artists and examines issues
in relation to visual ethnography, the place of
photography in news media and fine art practice.
You will be introduced to a number of theoretical
and practical approaches relating to urban
photography, and encouraged to develop a visual
ethnography about an aspect of urban culture or
space. During this course, you will also be set a
series of practice/ theoretical visual assignments
exploring aspects of urban or spatial culture.
You will be expected to complete the fortnightly
reading assignments each week, to participate
in class discussions. You will also be expected to
complete fortnightly visual assignments.
44
Urban Cultures
Convenor: Michael Keith,
Centre for Urban and Community Research
Urban Cultures explores the distinctiveness of
urban cultural forms and experience, through a
series o snap shots into the ways in which these
cultural forms are being analysed today. Themes
of the course include the relationships between
the local and the global, between the cultural and
the political, between the social and the spatial,
and between theory and everyday life. The course
is inter-disciplinary, drawing on social and
spatial theory, social science, cultural studies and
other perspectives. The Urban Cultures course
is constituted by contributions from a range of
lecturers. This will hopefully give you a flavour
of several different notions of urban cultural
theory and a sense of the diversity of approaches
associated with Goldsmiths and particularly with
‘Goldsmiths sociology’. However the course
has been designed so that there is a thematic
structure that holds the course together through
a discussion of key questions. What is the place
of class analysis in understanding city life? How
is the city both an arena of social control and
resistance? How can we understand forms of
cultural expression (music, writing, film and
visual arts) as urban phenomena? How does the
city provide a place in which gender and sexuality
is policed and transgressed? In what sense is the
city a psycho-spatial symbolic environment?
Key academic staff
The Centre’s Director is Professor Scott Lash,
author of Sociology of Postmodernism, Another
Modernity, A Different Rationality and Critique
of Information. He is co-author of Global Culture
Industry: The Mediation of Things, The End of
Organized Capitalism, Economies of Signs and
Spaces and Reflexive Modernization. His books
have been translated into eleven languages.
Lash has been Principal Investigator on three
major ESRC projects on global and technological
media. He is currently principal investigator on
Risk Cultures in China: An Economic Sociology.
This project forms part of the ESRC’s World
Economy and Finance programme. Lash is
currently working on a book on intensive culture.
He has been involved centrally with Theory,
Culture and Society (journal/books/events) for
the past fifteen years.
Professor John Hutnyk is Academic Director
of the Centre for Cultural Studies. Some of his
books include The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism,
Charity and the Politics of Representation;
Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the
Culture Industry; Bad Marxism: Cultural Studies
and Capitalism and, (with Virinder Kalra and
Raminder Kaur) Diaspora and Hybridity. He
has done research in three main areas: firstly,
Urban anthropology: his first work was on
representations of the city of Calcutta; secondly,
Film, Music and Politics: in the mid-1990s he
was listening to a lot of music in Manchester,
England. His most recent publications on
contemporary South Asian music, documentary
film, television and political activism stem from
ongoing implications of this research; thirdly, on
Institutions: he is currently following up work
begun in Australia and Malaysia on various
46
connections between state terror and racism,
detention camps, Marxist critique and post-
structuralist theory.
Dr Jennifer Bajorek, Lecturer in Cultural
Studies, has written and published on a
broad range of topics in the areas of literature
and philosophy, text and image, and critical
and social theory, with special emphasis on
questions at the intersection of aesthetics
and politics. Her essays on the technical and
political dimensions of capital, war photography,
and the concept of homeland security have
appeared in such journals as Critical Inquiry,
Diacritics, and Yale French Studies. She is the
author of Counterfeit Capital: Poetic Labor
and Revolutionary Irony (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, forthcoming). She is also the
co-editor and co-translator of a volume of the
theoretical writings of Jean Paulhan, spanning
questions of language and ‘résistance’ in Vichy
France and colonial Madagascar (Jean Paulhan
on Poetry and Politics, Urbana and Chicago: The
University of Illinois Press, forthcoming) and
the translator of several works of contemporary
French philosophy, including those by Sarah
Kofman, Bernard Stiegler, and Jacques Derrida.
Most recently, her research has focused on the
ethical and political dimensions of photographic
portraiture. She is currently working on a
series of essays rethinking the significance of
non-European photographic traditions for our
understanding of the disparate circuits (global,
intimate, public, embodied) traced by forms of
communal belonging such as nationalism and
democracy. In this and other recent research, she
has devoted specific attention to West African
photographic practices and histories.
Dr Matt Fuller, David Gee Reader in Digital
Media, has worked as an artist with a number
of initiatives, including the groups Mongrel
(http://www.mongrel.org.uk/) and I/O/D.
He has extensive experience in experimental
cultural practices in digital media and publishes
internationally in this area. Amongst his books
are: Behind the Blip, essays on the Culture
of Software (Autonomedia 2003) and Media
Ecologies, materialist energies in art and
technoculture (MIT Press, 2005). He is also the
editor of the forthcoming Software Studies, a
lexicon (MIT Press, 2008).
Dr Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, Lecturer in
Postcolonial Studies, has published extensively
on India and is currently working on a book
on vernacular globalisation – The Rumour of
Globalisation: Decentring the Global from the
Vernacular Margins. The other book project is an
archival study of the emergence of the institution
of the economy in East India Company’s Bengal:
The Memory of Economy: An Ethnography of
Political Economy in Early Colonial Bengal. He
has published articles on globalisation, travel,
street-food, urbanism and the institution of
Cultural Studies in various journals: Comparative
Studies in Society and History, TCS, Dialectical
Anthropology, Génèses, Jourrnal of Material
Culture etc. He has edited (along with John
Marriott and Partha Chatterjee) a six-volume
series of historical documents, Britain in India
1765-1905, published by Pickering & Chattoo.
His research interests are: Political Economy,
Commodity and Cultural Thingness; Intellectual
Property Right and Commons; Livelihood and
Survival; New Social/Religious Movements;
Global Flows and Assemblages; Popular Culture;
Travel, Pilgrimage and Tourism; Folk Art,
Indigenous Media and Kitsch; Novel and Genre-
formation in the colonial world; Political Theory;
Photography and Development; Postcolonial
Urbanism and New Media in the Third World;
Vernacular Sexualities.
Dr Luciana Parisi, Lecturer in Interactive
Media, is best known for her research on the
relationship between science, technology,
philosophy, aesthetic and culture. She has
worked on the theory of endosymbiosis,
nonlinear dynamics of transmission in evolution.
She has written extensively on the impact of
cybernetics to an understanding of analog
and digital media culture with the Cybernetic
Culture Research Unit. She has published
various articles in Tekhnema, Parallax, Ctheory,
Social Text, Mute, TCS, and Culture Machine
concerning the relevance of science (molecular
biology, chaos and complexity theories, quantum
physics, endosymbiosis, Darwinism and neo-
Darwinism) and technology (digital technologies,
biotechnologies and nanotechnology) to
materialist ontologies of nature and capitalism.
Her research has also focused on the impact of
biotechnologies on the notions of the body, sex,
femininity and desire. In 2004, she published
Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology
and the Mutations of Desire. Her interest in
interactive media technologies has also led her
research to engage with the synaesthetic relation
between image and sound, theories of virtuality
and perception, memory and affect, and the
generative simulations of space and experience.
Recently, she has been working on the bionic
transformation of the perceptive sensorium
and the advancement of new techno-ecologies
47
of control. Currently she is writing on the Visiting Staff
nanodesign of nature, topological geometries During 2007 Professor Andrew Benjamin
and contagious architectures of the spatio- and Lev Manovich will be Visiting Professors
temporal experience. at the Centre for Cultural Studies. In recent
years Visiting Professors have included Shiv
Dr Françoise Vergès, Reader, is based at the Visvanathan (Ahmadabad, India), Klaus
Municipal Trans-Cultural Centre, Paris and Peter Koepping (Heidelberg, Germany), and
teaches on a part-time basis at the Centre. She Jeffrey Alexander (Yale, US). Recent visiting
taught previously at the University of California, or temporary lecturers have included Hito
Berkeley and Sussex University. Her book Steyerl (Berlin, Germany), Linda Leung
Monsters and Revolutionaries received the (Sydney, Australia), Gregor Claude (UK), Gisela
highest of accolades from such leading cultural Domschke (Brazil). Michael Richardson (Tokyo)
studies figures as Stuart Hall, Ernesto Laclau and was a visiting research fellow.
Paul Gilroy. Her most recent book is La mémoire
enchaînée. Questions sur l’esclavage (Paris:
Albin Mcihel, 2006) for which she was awarded
the prestigious 2006 Françoise Seligmann
Foundation Prize Against Racism. Vergès has
written on colonial psychiatry, slavery and the
politics of brutality, mass crimes and the politics
of reparation in the non-European world, creolité
and processes of creolization, and post-colonial
theory. Her articles appear in influential journals.
She was centrally involved in the making of
Isaac Julien’s film Franz Fanon and was a Project
Advisor for the platform ‘Créolité, Creolization’
for Documenta XI. She recently completed a
research project on south-south diasporas – the
China-Africa’s routes. She has worked on a ‘post-
colonial museography’ for the project Maison
des civilisations et de l’unité réunionnaise, a
museum, research and arts centre scheduled in
Réunion Island.

48
Staff associated with the Centre
Those involved in teaching, supervision, and/or
research activities in the Centre include:

Name Research Interests

Chris Berry Chinese cinema
Howard Caygill History of philosophy,
Vitalism, Levinas, Kant
Josh Cohen Holocaust, literature,
Heidegger, Benjamin,
Michael Dutton China, politics,
postcolonialism
Keith Hart Money, informal economy
Julian Henriques Filmmaking, sonic culture
Janis Jefferies Art practice, cultural theory
Michael Keith Urban sociology,
cosmopolitanism
Sarah Kember Technology and gender
Celia Lury Branding, intellectual property
Angela McRobbie Culture industries
Abdou Maliq Africa, transnational
Simone urbanisation
Bart Moore The novel and postcolonialism
Gilbert
David Morley Media audiences, media
geographies
Irit Rogoff Contemporary art and
critical theory
Sanjay Seth India, politics, history
Eyal Weizman Architecture, geo-politics,
Palestine
Robert Zimmer Computing, digital media/art

49
Contact us
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have read this booklet and the Postgraduate
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Centre for Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW
tel 020 7919 7983
fax 020 7919 7984
e-mail cultural-studies@gold.ac.uk
or
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tel 020 7919 7983
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Image acknowledgement
Special thanks to Hilary Powell for the images
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www.optimisticproductions.co.uk
51
Disclaimer
The information in this booklet was correct
in August 2007. Whilst it is as far as possible
accurate at the date of publication, and the
College will attempt to inform applicants of any
substantial changes in the information contained
in it, the College does not intend by publication
of the booklet to create any contractual or other
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their advisers or any other person. The College
is unable to accept liability for the cancellation
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© August 2007
52
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