Dissertation topics

MSc VMMA students have the three months of the summer to research and write a 10,000 word dissertation for submission in September; Those students who stay on for the second year of the MPhil do not write the MSc dissertation but spend the summer conducting preliminary research, and then over the second year of the degree write a 30,000 word dissertation.

Examples of previous dissertation titles by VMMA students:

Museums of Decay: An ecological approach to comparative museology at Old Car City, USA

The Body And The Person: Resisting Representation In Photographic Practice

Women hold up half the sky and screen: The evolving relationship and representation of female sexuality and power in Chinese cinema and society from the 1980s to present day

Building Decoloniality: The contribution of Uncomfortable Oxford walking tours to decolonising Oxford’s cityscape

The Power of Layers - Tracing the Mediated Nature of Museological Representations of 'Islam' in Europe

Beyond the frame: the materiality, social lives and comfort of family photographs 

Digital Gigs: A Visual, Material and Ethnographic Study of Online Jazz Performances During Lockdown

Queering the Ethnographic Museum: Beyond the Binary at the Pitt Rivers Museum

The Nostalgia of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Nostalgia at St. Aloysius Catholic Church, Oxford

Sonic systems of knowledge: an ethnographic study of the use and value of sound in museums

Between a Rock (Oyster) and Hard Place: The Changing and Conflicting Values of the Rock oyster, Crassostrea Gigas, through Conventional and Alternative Supply Chains in the British and Irish Isle

Learning a Skill in Lockdown: An investigation into the development of pottery skills and its affective impact in lockdown Britain

(Web)sites of (Post)memory: when is Facebook a site of memory?

Re-examine the authenticity of photographs in postmodern context, taking tourists photographs as an example