Student working
Course Structure
The AGMS MA is a modular degree with core and optional elements totalling to 180 credits. Core and options courses combine to make 120 credits with the remaining 60 credits allocated to the dissertation.
Semester One
All elements in Semester One are compulsory:
- The Museum and its Contexts (30 credit core course)
- Museums, Museology, Museographies (30 credit research methods course)
- SAGE (Skills Awareness for Graduate Education) (research skills training course)
- 20 day Work Placement (work placements start in semester one (November/December) and finish in semester two (June) )
Semester Two
Students choose 2x 30 credit option courses from among the following (not all options may be available every
year):
- Art in the City: Collecting, Curating, Commissioning
- Digital Heritage (not running in 2009-10)
- Learning and Interpretation
- Museums, Anthropology and Material Culture
- Museums and Archaeology
- Museums of Conflict and Conscience (not running in 2009-10)
- Museum Objects and Exhibitions
- Museum Policy and Practice
- Science, Nature, Museums
Students may choose to take an option course in a subject other than the Art Gallery and Museum Studies, say Archaeology, Art History and Visual Studies, History, or Social Anthropology.
Dissertation
On successful completion of the coursework, students proceed to write a dissertation of 12,000-15,000 words on a topic of their choice. Dissertations, like articles (depending on the journal), may be strongly based on original primary source research, they might aim to re-interpret an already well-trawled area of the subject, or they might take up an approach somewhere between these two extremes. In all cases, however, the authors will have chosen and elaborated a body of relevant material which they bring to bear on a clearly defined issue.
Planning the topic and research design commences during the SAGE course and students make a preliminary presentation of their ideas at the end of the first semester; most of the writing is done by full-time students during the summer vacation (by part-time students during their second year).
Examples of past dissertation titles include:
- University museums and social inclusion
- Communicating Cultures: an assessment of the use of artist interventions in non-art museums
- Evaluating the educative potential of textile collections within the museum
- Missing audiences: the relationship between ethnicity and museum visiting in and around Southall
- Restitution in the regions: The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Lewis Chessmen
- Making the penal past relevant: the interpretation of history and execution in prison museums
- Revitalising Musical Instruments: Museum Display, Access and Adaptation
- Histories and Her-stories: narrative and gender in museum display
- The development of Caribbean museums and the formation of national and cultural identities
- Natural history collections: Archiving the natural world
- 'Dead body porn': Anatomical controversy in the exhibition space
- Locating Scotland's Identity within the Museum of Scotland.
- The presentation and interpretation of archaeological heritage in on-site museums.
- Representing the past: archaeology in the museum
- Recognising remains: the displays of Egyptian mummies in museums
- Photography, Community and the E-volving Museum
- Social Media and the Reinterpretation of Digital Heritage
- Museum Audience Development in a Digital Age: Using Social Networking Sites to Engage New Audiences