School of Visual and Material Culture

Kia ora koutou katoa

The School of Visual and Material Culture offers unique opportunities for trans-disciplinary postgraduate research. It is one of three schools that comprise the College of Creative Arts at Massey University’s Wellington campus, and draws together staff that include writers and practitioners whose research is internationally acknowledged in a wide variety of fields. The school provides a centre of teaching and research excellence that seeks to develop new perspectives about the relationships between people and the images, objects and spaces that shape everyday life.

As a meeting place of theory and practice, histories, cultures, and world views, the School is proactively interdisciplinary in its approach to teaching, learning and research. By moving between the traditional disciplines, students will discover untold or previously marginalised stories. For example the School is proud to have recently led the organisation of the international Contained Memory Conference (Wellington 9-11 December 2010) which brought together different cultural and theoretical orientations and multidisciplinary perspectives from around the world in a discourse on contained memory. www.containedmemory.org.nz

The school provides a number of core and elective papers to undergraduate students in the areas of critical studies, worldviews and social histories. The postgraduate qualifications offered by the school include Postgraduate Diploma Arts, Master of Arts, Master of Philosophy and Ph.D (VMC). A postgraduate award from the school provides graduates with appropriate skills to work in areas where critical thinking, trans-disciplinary analysis and critical social research in visual and material culture are of importance. Graduates will therefore be ideally placed to enter a number of professions including gallery and curatorial work, education, tourism, journalism and film librarianship, which have a visual and material culture at their centre.

Associate Professor Tony Whincup
Head of School