Welcome to the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies. For more than 20 years the Centre has provided a focus for postgraduate teaching and research in the culture and media sector. We believe that research and learning should be transformative – changing the way that we and others see the world through a combination of pioneering research and innovative teaching, and challenging our own assumptions and beliefs as educators, students, researchers and practitioners in the creative and media industries.

Our four MA programmes aim to equip students not only with the skills and knowledge to survive in a competitive job market, but to question the values and assumptions which shape the policies and decisions behind their own work and the wider cultural ecology. We care passionately about the student experience and are proud that our students recognise the value of our unique approach in the annual Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey and in their individual testimonials where they describe how the MA has shaped their ongoing careers.

Our research is similarly driven by a desire to engage with current concerns in cultural and media policy, management and practice, and to connect today’s issues and dilemmas in the creative and media industries with a longer history of ideas and with emerging research in other disciplines. We have shaped the research agenda around cultural policy, creativity, digital memories, cultural consumption, cultural value and cultural development. We will continue to engage with practices, policies and institutions beyond the university, and to find new ways of reframing and redirecting ideas to influence both theory and practice.

Our research students share this critical engagement with both theory and practice. Research students are encouraged to challenge received assumptions (including their own) and to develop new ways of understanding the world in which ‘culture’ plays out, broadly defined to include creative and media industries as well as ‘implicit’ cultural policies, creative management and social development. Our PhD students have successfully competed for University scholarships and gone on to secure post-doctoral fellowships at Warwick as well as posts in universities in Mexico, Taiwan and the UK.

You can find out more about the researchers, teachers and students (past and future) who turn these ideas into realities by navigating around the site!