Online, part-time
Global Cultures MATurn cultural insight into better decisions, stronger teams, and fairer policy.
Culture shapes how organisations make decisions, how teams collaborate, and how people experience services, policies, and campaigns. Our online Global Cultures MA gives you the insight to turn cultural understanding into real-world impact.
Drawing on perspectives from language, migration, race, gender, and cultural production, this interdisciplinary degree helps you think beyond traditional boundaries. Designed for professionals across the public, private, and third sectors, it equips you to lead with cultural intelligence, break down barriers, and create meaningful change.
Why choose this online MA?
Turn insight into action
Pull apart real equality, diversity, and inclusion policies to see what works and what only looks good on paper. You’ll also design a solution for a regional social issue.
Develop AI-proof skills
Empathy, judgement, and reading people hold a workplace together. You'll pinpoint where AI falls short, and humans are still needed.
Unlock new career paths
Graduates move into policy, NGOs, education, HR, DEI, and global communications, boosting their own prospects and their organisation's performance.
Learn around your life
You earn the same King's qualification as on-campus students, taught entirely online, so it works alongside your job and your commitments.
Career outcomes
Cultural awareness is no longer a nice-to-have. It's a skill employers actively seek. Organisations across every sector need people who can navigate complexity, understand different perspectives, and drive meaningful change.
This degree prepares you for careers in:
- Government, public affairs, and policy
- NGOs, charities, and social impact
- Education and student support
- HR, organisational development, and DEI
- Communications, campaigns, and cultural strategy
- Research, think tanks, and advocacy
Graduates can go on to roles such as:
- Policy Officer
- Equality and Inclusion Adviser
- Community Engagement Officer
- Cultural Insights Analyst
- Student Experience Manager
- Research Officer
Get your brochure now
Complete the form below to receive a copy of our course brochure. Our adviser team will also be in touch to find out more about your qualifications and funding plans.
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"Part of my role is placing American students in work placements around London, and it’s sometimes a massive culture shock for them. The way we've talked about what shapes culture and how we can better understand cultural differences has helped me to support students."
Joanna Burkhart,
Global Cultures MA graduate
Module overview
You're required to take modules totalling 180 credits. This course also offers a non-credit bearing Study Skills module designed to prepare students who may have been out of education for some time. King’s College London reviews the modules offered on a regular basis to provide up-to-date, innovative and relevant programmes of study. Therefore, modules on offer may change from year to year.
This programme examines how cultures take shape, travel, and come into conflict. It draws on cultural studies, history, sociology, language and migration studies, gender studies, and the study of race and ethnicity, letting you see culture from several angles at once.
You'll trace how people move across borders, how race and gender are contested, and how language carries identity. Most importantly, you'll learn to think across the silos that keep these questions apart.
You'll also test theory against real situations. Why does a gesture read as friendly in one culture and rude in another? Why can the same policy earn trust in one community and suspicion in another?
You'll leave ready to act with care and insight wherever culture shapes trust, decisions, and outcomes.
Required modules
You're required to take the following modules:
- Language and Global Identities (15 credits)
- Reimagining "Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: Bodies, Identities, Norms (15 credits)
- Connecting Cultures: Migration and Immigration (15 credits)
- Research Design and Methods (15 credits)
- Independent Research Project (45 credits)
Optional modules
In addition, you're required to take 75 credits from a range of modules, which may typically include:
- Race and Ethnicity in a Global Context (15 credits)
- Gender and Globalisation: Transhistorical and Transcultural Approaches (15 credits)
- The Politics of Cultural Production (15 credits)
- Creative Leadership for Global Challenges (15 credits)
- Creating Connections: Integrating Knowledge in a Fragmented World (15 credits)
- Transcending Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in the Age of Generative AI (15 credits)
Entry requirements
You’ll need to meet ONE of the following criteria:
- A high 2:1 (65% or above) honours degree (or above) or international equivalent in any subject area.
- A 2:2 honours degree or international equivalent in a relevant subject area (humanities, law or social sciences).
- A master's degree at merit (or above) or international equivalent in any subject area.
If you have a lower degree classification, or a degree in an unrelated subject, your application may be considered if you can demonstrate significant relevant work experience, or offer a related graduate qualification (such as a master's or PGDip).
You’ll need to meet ONE of the following criteria:
- A 2:2 honours degree or international equivalent in a non-relevant subject area. Your application will need to be supported by a CV and a 500-word written statement (see details under ‘Written statement and supporting information’ below).
- An ordinary or third-class honours degree or international equivalent in any subject area. Your application will need to be supported by a CV and a 500-word written statement (see details under ‘Written statement and supporting information’ below).
English language band: B
To study at King's, it is essential that you can communicate in English effectively in an academic environment. You’re usually required to provide certification of your competence in English before starting your studies.
Nationals of majority English speaking countries (as defined by the UKVI) who have permanently resided in this country are not usually required to complete an additional English language test. This is also the case for applicants who have successfully completed:
- An undergraduate degree (at least three years duration) within five years of the course start date.
- A postgraduate taught degree (at least one year) within five years of the course start date.
- A PhD in a majority English-speaking country (as defined by the UKVI) within five years of the course start date.
For information on our English language requirements and whether you need to complete an English language test, please see our English Language requirements page.
Depending on your previous qualifications, you may need to submit a written statement and CV as part of your application.
If you’re required to submit a written statement, you’ll need to address the following two questions: 'In your view, what are the key concepts and/or cultural practices relevant to the study of transnational, global cultures today? How will your professional career or academic trajectory benefit from studying such concepts and/or practices in a rigorous fashion?'
All applicants will need to submit a copy (or copies) of their official academic transcript(s), showing the subjects studied and marks obtained. If you have already completed your degree, copies of your official degree certificate will also be required. Applicants with academic documents issued in a language other than English, will need to submit both the original and official translation of their documents.
Hear from the Programme Director
Discover how the MA in Global Cultures helps students explore global connections, develop critical thinking, and engage with the key issues of our time.
My name is Dr Alice Hazard and I am a Senior Lecturer in medieval French literature and I'm currently the Director of the MA in Global Cultures. The MA in Global Cultures is a fully online MA programme delivered part time over two years.
I think in the context of this programme, we're trying to think about connectiveness. So we're trying to think about not looking at different cultures in their own sort of silos, but we're thinking about how they operate in relation to one another. So we look at, for instance, migration and immigration. So how do those movements of people across barriers and across borders, how does that shape culture and how we think about culture?
You get to meet people from everywhere in the world, and you get to meet people from all sorts of different walks of life with all sorts of different jobs and backgrounds and it's fascinating.
Sometimes in the webinars I have to remember that I'm supposed to be guiding them. I feel like I'm the one who's learning, but I guess, you know, we're all learning and that's a good thing.
So what we want to do is twofold. We want to give students information and knowledge and the resources to further their understanding, but we also want to provide them with the skills with which to approach things that they're going to approach outside of the programme.
So the kind of analytical capacity, critical capacity, reasoning, all those sorts of skills in terms of how you work with information and how you work with things that are presented to you. This is crucial in understanding the key issues of our time, and I firmly believe that the kind of understanding, knowledge and skills that we learn and teach in the humanities are the best way to go about this.
We thought so hard about how we teach things that are making that connection between the stuff that we do in the humanities and the real world, which sometimes is not always made clear enough, I think, but it is such a fundamental connection.
And I think in the Global Cultures MA, we make it really explicit, and it's the real backbone of what we do.