School Elective Units

A key feature of the MFA Arts and Humanities programme is the set of 5 research specialist areas that you will elect to engage with via a choice of School Elective Units.

The series of electives are designed to support you to extend and develop your practice informed by focused engagement within a cross-disciplinary area of specialism. The SoAH elective units challenge you to locate your practice within a territory of research, work with others to explore the area of specialism and consider how you might contribute to expanding the knowledge and research in that area. Collective and collaborative practice will be a feature of these electives as you will form critically supportive networks of research.

The five areas of research from which you will be asked to select electives are:

Sites and Situations considers the array of ways we engage and interact with the physical environment, and in particular urban space. This area explores how spaces evolve, how place might be imagined and reimagined, the values that impact the nature of the world around us and the forces that forge future understandings of our environment. Sites and Situations acknowledges that our awareness and understanding of space is significantly shaped by the way it is depicted, described and interacted with through art, design, literature and culture more broadly. We seek to provide new insights via methods that explore, respond to and challenge existing modes of the arts and humanities’ engagement with our environment.

If you are interested in this strand of research and practice you will study two or three of following units:

• Art and the Urban
• Spatial Values (post Covid Cities)
• Feeling Public/Feeling Planetary (optional)

Driven by material-led research and practice, Material Engagements examines diverse forms of material (and im-material) culture. The three linked electives investigate cultural, social, and political narratives of materials and materiality, through the theoretical analysis of, and physical experimentation with, a range of materials, artefacts, and assemblages. The circumstances of material provenance and links to social justice and environmental issues are also considered, through an exploration of current material sourcing practice.

If you are interested in this strand of research and practice you will study two or three of the following units:

• Materialities
• Embodied Practice
• Sustainable and Responsible Sourcing

The Curatorial Practice specialism is designed to allow you to develop your practice in the context of public audiences and engagement, to meet the demands and expectations of international curating in the contemporary field, and to help shape and change curating of the future. Approaching curatorial practice as in its most expanded forms, you can work either collaboratively through a live group project with an external UK partner, or individually with a project partner that we help you to identify and work with.

If you are interested in this strand of research and practice you will study two or three of following units:

• Curatorial Approaches
• Emergent Publics
• Making the Case

This area of research considers historical, contemporary and emerging concepts and discourses that reflect upon the importance of health and care in and through contemporary creative practice. We explore the critical effects of creative methods that seek to deconstruct the socio-political complexities and historical forces, which have shaped and defined representations of health and care in a global context. We consider the gendered, racialised, and ecological aspects of care, exploring their tensions and possibilities. Health and Care considers relations of care between and across bodies, networks, and ecosystems. We speculate on worlds and practices of care that will build and sustain communities and species, expanding our understanding of what care is and what it can do in the aesthetic and political reimagination of reparative futures.

In this strand of research and practice you will study two or three of following units:

• Poetics of Care
• Embodiments of Care
• Futures of Care

Synthetic Encounters explores the entangled and emergent impacts of our digital world, from art-making to robotic autonomous systems and the politics of democratic imagining. Situated within and amongst the turbulent frontiers of a newly emergent “5th Industrial Revolution” – where human, non-human and inter-species sentient beings co-evolve with and against ‘the machine’ Synthetic Encounters provides fundamental tools for critically engaging with the mass proliferation of data, the immersive nature of distributed intelligence and its new forms of consciousness, meaning and making. We explore ways of developing art works which utilise methodologies to mirror or subvert digital ‘thinking’, making and materialisation. At its core sits a critical intersection of contemporary art practice, inhabited philosophy, and wild science linked with imaging, poetics, making, and coding.

Synthetic Encounters adopts experimental approaches engaging with new technologies and materials (algorithmic/digital/electronic media, robotics, scanning, 3D print) to enable creative agency in the discovery and invention of human/machine/interspecies modes of coevolution.

If you are interested in this strand of research and practice you will study two or three of the following units:

• Radical Matter - algorithmic skin, sticky-cohesion, aliveness, wild science
• Shapeshifting the Digital - deepfakes, warp-time, GANs (styleGan et al)
• Topologies of Emergence - unknowing, imaginaries, neural sensing/consciousness

In common with the philosophy of the MFA, each area of research is multidisciplinary and you will work alongside others with a range of practices across different media and approaches. However, some specialisms may be more suited to certain areas of practice than others.