MPhil/PhD Centre for Heritage, Culture and Society

The Centre for Heritage, Culture & Society is an interdisciplinary research centre that addresses people's relationships with past, present and future cultural places and landscapes. Through our distinctive combination of methods drawn from social sciences and creative practice, our research uncovers pluralistic, imaginative and innovative approaches to ensuring that all within society can engage with, and benefit from, cultural heritage.

Heritage is not history, rather, it is the way that current societies make sense of the past in the present and carry it into the future. Heritage is therefore not objective fact, but is linked with its meanings, uses and manifestations in society. So, where there is heritage there are people - creating, interpreting, storytelling, preserving, safeguarding, communicating different aspects of memory, place and identity.

Research shows that engaging with heritage can have tremendously positive effects on sense of place and identity, community cohesion and wellbeing. But heritage can also be linked to divisiveness and exclusion or become fragmented or lost as it is shaped by social or natural forces.

Impactful research can usefully understand the way these processes and effects of heritage work in and on society, with the understanding that heritage can mean different things to different people, and that it does not operate in isolation but is a part of society and imbricated with other aspects of culture.

The Centre for Heritage, Culture & Society works through the lens of social justice and sustainability to explore ways to ensure that the benefits of engaging with cultural heritage can be accessed, experienced, and enjoyed by all.

Some of our recent projects have explored the ethics of participation in intangible cultural heritage across Europe, using ethnographic fieldwork, archival research and creative theatre and sound, working with the cultural sector in Cornwall to produce a Cornish Audio-Visual Archive Charter, and surfacing the plurality of stories within a National Trust coastal landscape to advance inclusion, using critical discourse analysis, walking interviews and experimental film.

The normal minimum entry requirement for a place on the Research Degree at Falmouth University is an upper second class honours (2:1) degree of a British university or recognised institution of higher education, or an equivalent qualification from an institution outside of the UK.

However, a master's degree in an appropriate subject is considered to be a particularly valuable preparation for the academic and intellectual demands of an MPhil or PhD. In some instances, applicants without the minimum academic requirement as outlined above may be considered for a place on the Research Degree if they can demonstrate appropriate alternative qualifications, relevant professional experience, or previous research.

A recent Falmouth-approved English Language Test (ELT) score which meets the University's requirements for the Research Degree: either an IELTS minimum overall test result score of 7.0 with a 7.0 in writing and with no other component score lower than 6.0, or an equivalent test score.