C School

C School explores culture as a vital form of enquiry and expression, developing thinking and practice across art, performance and curation. We recognise culture in the immediate world around us, understanding it as a sense-making activity, rather than occurring only in theatres, galleries and museums.

Staff and students develop cultural production in and across art, performance and curation that not only allows us to understand the present but also to imagine different futures.

The School’s disciplines foster criticality as a form of respect for others, encouraging practitioners to explore their potential, working individually and with others, inside the university and externally.

We are C School

Conscious of CSM’s long history of challenges to the status quo, C School’s mode is active and anticipatory. We work from the premise that culture is a crucial form of enquiry and expression that is porous to the world, working with, and alongside, other fields of knowledge.

We value criticality, collaboration and diversity, developing cultural productions at the cutting edge of our disciplines, that lead our learning and teaching.

Our courses exemplify a research-led, post disciplinary approach, testing ideas and valuing the diversity exchange brings. C School courses equip students for their lives. Graduates develop a questioning, problem-solving, ethically informed approach, enabling them to bring powerful ideas and practices to twenty-first century cultural production.

Curatorial and industry collaborations

We have active partnership with Councils and youth services, including our Better Making social prescribing initiative with Essex County Council. Students have the opportunity to work with national organisations including Tate, Kopell, ACME, London Adventure Playgrounds, Duckie, Cardboard Citizens, NotNowhere, London International Animation Festival, The Children’s Society and AgeUK. Archive partners include The Foundling Museum, the London Archives, Bishopsgate Archives, Camden Council and Swiss Cottage library.

Read about Better Making

Research

Schools are the disciplinary foundation of our research and knowledge exchange culture, with research emerging from our centres and labs and across projects and communities of practice. Academic and technical staff, professoriate members and doctoral students come together as subject leaders, aligning research activity with curriculum development and advancing how we approach our disciplines. C School fosters inquiry grounded in our subject specialisms.

Research at CSM