MA at SMI

The MA programs at SMI engage simultaneously with the fields of arts, humanities, and design, comprising specializations and curricula where:

• Making is the lens for theoretical reflection
• What is made is the subject of critical inquiry

The MA is for:

• Individuals interested in the practices of critical scholarship, creative arts, and media who would like to:
• Advance careers in the arts, technology, and cultural sector;
• Ground current skills in research and public practice and/or pursue further studies in a PhD program.
• At the heart of it, the MA concentrations prepare students to:
• Develop theoretical, historical, philosophical, and material approaches to practice;
• Reflect on fields of practice and one’s relationship to practice (questions of personhood);
• Add criticality to practice, including academia;
• Collaborate with other professionals; and
• Engage distinct communities and the public.

The specificities of MA practice are:

Making use of different media, ways of knowing, and research methodologies that help to:

Re-position skill as a keyword for empirical and theoretical inquiry.

Make tangible the learning and research processes by engaging directly with communities, technologies, primary material sources, and published scholarship.

Define employability as future academics, public practitioners in arts and design organizations, cultural organizers, and researchers in academic and public projects.

• The educational goals of an MA are:
  MA students develop research, critical making, and public scholarship skills via textual, visual, and multi-media forms that:
• Bring out key questions, forms, and methods by scholars and practitioners in the field.
• Study past and contemporary understandings of material phenomena. The history and theory of these fields and practices and their philosophies and methods of knowing and making become significant through such studies.
• Build discourse around specific themes defined by time, geographical focus, social complexity, material medium, and one’s positionality as a researcher, teacher, and/or maker.
• Examine ethics of research scholarship and practice.
• Commit to social justice towards responsible citizen-scholarship.
• Anticipate possible futures by centering the materiality of complex human and non-human conditions.