Masters of Arts: Politics

Courses can be taken online and/or in person when we offer a course or courses in a residential context. 

Each course entails ten-day intensives. Each course is built around one triangulation of force, domain, and practice that addresses the relations and structures constitutive of these transformations. The GCAS-Jəhān Teaching Co-op/Collective, in consultation with the Advisory Board, and the GCAS Academic Council, determines these courses.

Once the student completes all 60-credits they move on to write the MA thesis (20,000 words) and take the Masters Comprehensive Examination (MCE). The student will defend their MA thesis in front of a committee in person or online. The MCE is a four-hour written examination on a topic germane to political studies. The student is required to meet with their academic supervisor at least once per week to ensure writing and research targets are accomplished. Students can also meet up with their peers once a week, which is optional.

In sync with Céline Chuang’s invocation of the “diasporic descendents of the displaced,” and Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” and “the open boat,” our method and politics seeks to channel epistemological practices beyond the academy — and a kind of narrow christian liberal secularism which carries its own kind of deathly orientalism — in a space between art, education, and politics. 

We wish to carve a space away from the programmatic ideological policings on the left no less than from the casual fascisms on the right, and to move toward life-affirming and worldmaking knowledge work and practice, away from ideas of “research” and knowledge production that abandon politics and education as vocations in favour of an extractive regime of value within which so many of us still delusionally desire inclusion and justice, often pandering to what Sunaina Maira and Piya Chatterjee call the “imperial university.”

Teaching and Facilities 

Researchers in the MA in Politics programme have access to the entire GCAS ecosystem. This includes all courses offered in the E-School as well as on-site seminars. Furthermore, students will have access to all material recorded and stored in the GCAS library including courses taught by world-leading thinkers in the fields of economics, the natural sciences, sustainability, cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence and others.

Prerequisites for Acceptance

Our collective of faculty and students hails come from some of the best and experimental academic institutions in the world, including the New School for Social Research, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University, Smith College, University of Pennsylvania, University of Oregon, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Jawaharlal Nehru University, University of Leiden, to name a few. Most importantly, they emerge from geographic, academic, and political location–summoning every continent and tackling the history and aftermath of colonialism, fascism, and neoliberalism in each space–very much committed to the entwinement of questions of theory and practice, to together carve a degree in politics from and accountable to these multiple sites and formative realities.

In the tradition of academic institutions that have challenged the status quo of traditional academia, GCAS (and GCAS-Jehan as its node accountable to the global south),  we attract applicants who bring diverse backgrounds, experiences, and fresh perspectives to the conversation and research. If you are passionate about learning new skills and want to help reshape the future of learning, then this is a home for you! Please go ahead and apply! We want your history, experience, practice, and thinking to matter in and shape the unique educational habitat we want to inhabit.  

Our degree programme is rigorous and applicants must possess an accredited Bachelor’s degree (or its equivalent) to be considered for admission. Most applicants hold a first-class or strong upper-second-class undergraduate degree. For applicants with a degree from the USA, most applicants hold a minimum GPA of 3.5 out of 4.0.  If your degree is not from the EU or the USA, contact our admission team for more information.  

Entrance is very competitive and most successful applicants have a first-class degree or the equivalent. Most successful applicants hold degrees in the liberal arts, humanities, and social s sciences widely considered. We are interested more in your approach to knowledge and its production rather than the content or specific discipline of your degree. Applications from all backgrounds are encouraged if sufficient motivation, interest, an appreciation for the politics of knowledge, and a commitment to remaking the university anew from the ruins of betrayed promises and failed institutions, can be demonstrated.

Programme Fees

Tuition Fees for the 2024 intake are EUR 5,000 for national international students. Financial aid for a tuition fee reduction of up to 50% is available to all students upon application. Visit our scholarship page for more information. To help us accomplish our goal of truly accessible education, the application does not have a fee.

In addition to the available financial aid, GCAS offers the opportunity for students to earn GCAS Tokens, the college’s crypto token, by completing certain tasks such as publishing papers or helping out within the GCAS community. The token can be used to purchase products in the GCAS store or used towards tuition payments.

Accreditation

The programme is accredited by the European Union. Once completed, the degree can be used to continue into post-graduate education and apply for corporate or other positions. GCAS also offers a Ph.D. specialization in Politics to which graduates of the MA in Politics are invited to apply. 

*subject to change depending on EU regulations.

Career Opportunities

We anticipate graduates from GCAS’s programmes to go onto a variety of careers and positions. These include working on policy for nonprofits and NGOs, as well as in academia, management consulting, and investment banks. The degree’s emphasis on critical thinking makes it useful for entrance into almost any position.

Ethos | Practices, Pedagogies, Cultures

• Intentional spaces of learning and relational pedagogies at the intersection of the classroom, the laboratory, the workshop, and the studio.

• Courses entail three-week taught intensives, followed by a week of studio, and address the relations and structures constitutive of these transformations, by triangulating forces, domains, and practices to determine the vertex around which each course will be built.

• A commitment to relational reading practices that counter modes of value and subject production in neoliberal academia and politics. Allowing this practice to come in contact with other practices that students bring to the space.

• Unification of study and practice, and centring study on practice such that practice is not seen as a synonym of “empirical data,” and instead enables practice and research to always be intertwined.

• A singular emphasis on methods and practices across disciplines and professions, and conversations among and across them.

• Mutual accountability and collaboration in study and work groups and their facilitators; priority of communicative action (building shared understanding leading to action) and the lifeworlds it builds out of the contact zones, over strategic action (emphasising instrumentality and outcome without regard for the shared understandings or points of departure) and the administrative, logistical, systems they uphold.

• Structured partnerships with friends, subtending less extractive and imperial financial models, sympathetic to this remaking.

• An invitation to those disciplines free from the prejudices of the sciences and social sciences in order to authorise new modes, genres, and accountabilities in the realm of research and knowledge production..

• Normalised transdisciplinarity, comparativism, and transregionalism.

• New bridges and productive detours along conventional academic tracks and their unfoldings over time.

• A challenge to the bureaucratic governmentalities of the academy, the art world, and social enterprise without abandoning their valuable normativities.

• In the spirit of true internationalism, emphasising that using the local to understand the local is a faux pas; it produces both bad knowledge and bad practice.

• An intentional and ongoing relation to the student that allows them to remain embedded in their earlier learning and bring it to the table with others, and actually formulate a project in the process: self-creation and worldmaking remain tied to each other. This embeddedness requires studying both the object but also its production, what is presupposed in its being made into an object of inquiry, and the imperatives of study, vocation, and inquiry, that accompany it.

• Curation, interdependence, design, and reliable configurations of people and spaces (i.e., freedom to) rather than customisation and mere autonomy (i.e., freedom from) that ironically hide inequalities and differences, and also unnecessarily trump up the idea of the student as consumer.