MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The course starts with Unit 1: Researching Arts and Cultural Enterprise, in which you are introduced to key concepts of cultural production as well as the research, writing, analysis and evaluation skills essential for postgraduate study. You begin to work together as a group, learning to negotiate, agree ground rules, communicate and share ideas and, importantly, learn how to approach and resolve difficulty and conflict.

Unit 2: Practice, Policy and Markets engages you in the macro analysis of the realm of cultural and artistic production and dissemination. It enables you to develop an understanding of cultural production in both the commercial and the public realms.

Unit 3: Contexts Local and Global Challenges looks at the impact of contemporary values and discourses on the future. It interrogates globalisation as a challenge as well as an opportunity, and facilitates an understanding of enterprise in uncertain contexts.

In Unit 4: Arts Entrepreneurship, you explore the ways in which creativity, innovation, problem solving and entrepreneurship intersect. It employs real-world examples to enable you to think about business model innovation, new markets, new experiences and services, new ways of communication and new organisational models.

Unit 5: Business Models and Planning is the core business unit of the course. It introduces you to the basics of general business processes and developing strategies around short and longer-term challenges. Teaching includes theoretical approaches, and case-study-based learning.

Unit 6: Focus: Social Impact and Innovation engages with the overarching principles of social responsibility, ethical behaviours, social innovation and theories of socially-engaged practices, and challenges you to form an understanding of how cultural events and activities can support engagement with innovation and innovative practices.

Unit 7: Dissertation or live project is the final, Masters-specific 60-credit unit, which enables you to reflect critically on theories and critical skills encountered previously in the course, while proposing new approaches to cultural production, in a self-directed dissertation or major project. The dissertation is an individual academic study, based on models and theories discussed throughout the course; the live project puts strategies of cultural production into practice. This unit culminates in you working together to organise an online intervention.

MA Arts and Cultural Enterprise aims to prepare graduates for the next step in their careers, whether that be a management position or a role within a leading team in the field of arts and cultural production. The entrepreneurial spirit of the course might also encourage some graduates to set up their own company or creative practice, or to work as a consultant.

Other areas of employment that this course might lead to include cultural institutions such as museums, theatre companies, cultural and live events companies and orchestras, broadcasters and publishers. Governance, policy and communication positions are also within the remit of the course. Overall, the course prepares graduates for careers where culture, economy and policy come together.

Specific roles a graduate might fulfil include: festival director; event manager; cultural sector entrepreneur; senior manager within an arts institution or organisation; cultural policy adviser within government; arts and community engagement adviser within a corporate enterprise; consultant to creative sector venture capital funds and angel investors (investors from the not-for-profit and philanthropic sectors).